B. Individual Defensive Player Scoring

If you utilize individual defensive players, you can perform a similar exercise.  Consider, for example, these plays (again, all performed on a 3rd and 8 from midfield):

• CB allows catch, misses the tackle, and WR gains 50 yards and a TD.
• CB allows catch, makes tackle after a 10-yard gain.
• CB prevents completion but called for 10-yard pass interference penalty. 
• CB allows catch, assists the safety in making tackle after a 10-yard gain
• CB allows catch for 5-yard gain, forces fumble, but offense recovers further downfield for 1st down.
• CB allows catch but makes tackle after only a 5-yard gain, forcing 4th down.
• CB allows catch but makes assisted tackle after 5-yard gain, forcing 4th down.
• CB allows catch for 5-yard gain, forces fumble, but offense recovers further no gain, forcing 4th down.
• CB blitzes, rushes the QB's throw, but the QB completes the pass anyway.
• CB blitzes, rushes the QB's throw, and forces an incompletion.
• CB blitzes, rushes the throw, forces incompletion and legally hits the QB.
• CB forces the QB to throw to a different receiver due to smothering coverage.
• CB prevents the completion by making contact with the ball (pass defensed).
• CB identifies WR screen, jumps the play, makes the tackle for 1-yard loss.
• CB blitzes, sacks the QB for a 5-yard loss.
• CB intercepts 50 yards downfield, returns the ball 10 yards before tackled.
• CB allows catch for 5-yard gain, forces fumble recovered by teammate.
• CB recovers a fumble forced by teammate 5 yards past the line of scrimmage.
• CB intercepts the ball and returns it for a 50-yard touchdown.

Opposite from the offensive plays above, I have ranked these plays in my order from most detrimental to most valuable to the CB’s team.  If you've gotten this far, you are more than capable of doing your own ranking, and assigning proper relative value, and those values may very well differ from mine.  In this area, the relative value is especially important. The tricky part here is that some plays of lesser value to the team may well demonstrate greater skill or ability by the player.  For example, it takes skill to force a fumble.  But once the ball is on the ground, research has shown that there’s basically a 50/50 chance whether one team falls on it versus the other, i.e. it’s complete chance.  Yet the fumble recovery is much more valuable to the team (a turnover) versus the initial forced fumble (only a potential turnover at that point).  What really pounds this home is the play listed above where the offense recovers the ball further up field and gains the first down.  Yes, it took skill by the CB to force the fumble, yet it would have been better for the team in that instance if the fumble had never happened and the CB had instead just followed through with the tackle, forcing the fourth down.  I suppose in an ideal scoring system, we would give positive points to the CB for forcing the fumble, and the same aggregate level of negative points for failing to recover the fumble, with additional negative points for allowing further yards and a first down to be gained, divided among all 11 defensive teammates.

A lot of these plays involve actions that no one tracks, at least not in a manner that is readily available by fantasy football league hosting websites.  For example, Pro Football Focus may track whether the CB forced a pass attempt elsewhere from his amazing coverage, or gave up 10 yards and a first down on a pass interference penalty, or allowed the WR to get so wide open that someone else had to make the tackle, or missed the tackle, or …  But none of those actions wind up as statistics on MFL, ESPN, or Yahoo.  As such, it is impossible at this point to have a good scoring system for IDPs.  For example, here is how the CB is scored under those plays in my TUFFSCCL league: 0, 1.5, 0, 1, 2, 1.5, 1, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 3, 3.5, 9.5, 8, 3.5, 4, and 18 points.  Obviously we’re rewarding some things the CB does poorly, like tackle the WR only after allowing him a big catch, while failing to reward him for other worthy things, such as forcing a bad throw by the QB on a blitz.  This doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and not even try.  But it does mean that we have to keep revisiting our scoring system each year in order to improve upon it as more trackable statistics become available.

Another problem to be mindful of in scoring IDPs is that a player can accrue stats in multiple statistical categories from the same action.  For example, all interceptions also get a pass defensed.  Similarly, a sack is also a tackle, and a tackle for loss, and a QB hit, and accrues sack yards.  If you’re assigning points for all of those stats, then a player who gets a sack will get points for ALL of those actions, even though they only committed one act, that being tackling the QB behind the line of scrimmage.  It can be quite easy to have a sack accumulate a large point total as a result, perhaps even more than from making an interception (as is the case in TUFFSCCL).  Is that appropriate?  Statistical analysis has shown that a turnover is the single most valuable play on a football field, regarding how it affects the ultimate fact of the team winning or losing.  Because of that, shouldn't a turnover be valued as the most valuable play within our fantasy scoring systems?  And that is for both positive points for defenders AND negative points for the offensive players.