D. How to Value Positions / Positional Differentiation

Hopefully you have gone through the exercise of developing a scoring system by assigning points to various stats to determine relative value of the players’ actions, as described above.  But doing that, blind to position, will inherently cause enormous value differentiation among positions.  No matter what scoring system you ended up with above, when you apply it to actual NFL statistics you will almost certainly find that TEs score significantly fewer points than the other offensive positions, and LBs scoring much greater fantasy points than other defensive positions.  But improving the strategic options to team owners requires the positions to be valued relatively evenly.

2016 standard scoring points by position

This is the most difficult aspect of designing a league.  To improve the game’s strategy, we need to favor the scoring stats of certain positions over others in order to create relatively equal value.  But each time we do, we create a distortion over the play’s value towards what he’s doing for the benefit of his NFL team.  For example, in order to promote equal relative value of TEs versus RBs and WRs, a lot of leagues assign a greater number of points for each TE reception than WRs and RBs.  Does an NFL team get better value, i.e. are they more likely to eventually put points on the scoreboard, by throwing a 10-yard pass to a TE rather than a WR or RB? Similarly, does a team get better value by having a defensive tackle make a tackle after a 2-yard game than if it was done by a linebacker or safety?  Obviously not in either case.  Yet, these distortions are necessary for the sake of our game.  The fact is that certain positions do not do as many countable things on a football field even though their overall contributions may be just as important as those who do, such as blocking, acting as a decoy on a misdirection play, providing blanket coverage on the opponent’s top receiver, etc.

One way to counteract this is to have a method of valuing players other than counting statistics.  For example, Pro Football Focus (“PFF”) assigns grades to every player on every play based on gametape analysis.  There would be very strong arguments in favor of using these grades as the only points in a fantasy football league, and would allow us to have true 22 man starting lineups.  The biggest detriment, of course, would be in having no clue as to whether your team was winning or losing until the PFF analysts completed their gametape review on Monday.  I can only assume the reason why PFF has not set up their own fantasy games is because they believe there is greater profitability in maintaining the proprietary nature of those grades and selling access to those able and willing to pay for it, such as NFL teams themselves and high dollar daily fantasy players.  This is unfortunate, as I would love to participate in such a league.

In our world of using only countable statistics, if we want to value positions similarly, then we have to boost positions that do not produce as much stats, and lessen the point values of plays to positions that do produce a larger number of stats, i.e. different positions score different points for the same plays.  But, knowing that each change distorts our scoring system, we want to equalize position points with the fewest distortions possible.