I. First Principles and Path Dependency of Fantasy Football

The first thing I want to do is discuss the first principles of fantasy football.  The very basics.  Yes, you may be tempted to skip this section, but please bear with me, because this may end up being the most important part.  When we talk about Fantasy Football, what is the "fantasy"?  It isn't the fantasy of being the player with the ball in his hand.  If that was your fantasy, you'd be playing Madden.  No, we are drafting, trading, signing, and cutting football players for our imaginary teams.  The "fantasy" is running an NFL football team.  And the person who runs an NFL football team in real life is the General Manager ("GM").  Yet, the game of fantasy football only captures a small, small portion of what a GM does.  Part of that is because FF is a game, and one designed to be as accessible as possible to the widest number of people for commercial reasons, and part of that is from technological limitations that were stifling when I began playing 30 years ago and still are far too prevalent today.  

The reason why the game of FF is focused on the offensive skill position players, plus kicker and a team defense, is because those were the only positions that showed up in the USA Today game box score with statistics.  Yes, when I first started, I would have to manually calculate the game scores Monday and Tuesday mornings by looking up the stats in the morning newspaper, type up the reports, print them out on a dot-matrix printer, copy them, and then distribute them in person to all our league members.  Thankfully, technology made the distribution of weekly results MUCH easier very quickly, yet the limitations from that formative era live on in how we play this game.

This game is fueled by statistics; by the things players do on the field that are both countable and actually counted.  But an NFL GM does not just draft and trade offensive skill position players.  And they certainly don't select a block of players for their defense.  I often wonder how our game of FF would be different if today’s variety and availability of statistics were present back in the late '80s when FF first started becoming widely played.  It is quite likely that nothing would be different, as that focus on offensive skill players favors the casual fan that watches games on television, as the cameras track the ball and thus always has a skill position player in the middle of the screen. Yet I also think that the number of people playing in more complex leagues would be significantly higher, that there would be two, nearly equal sized groups, playing FF very differently.

That being said, I always kept the fantasy of being a GM front and center in my playing FF.  After only two years, I changed my home league to a keeper league as a small step closer to the real life GM experience.  Two years after that, we changed to an auction league. Through this period, there was a brand, spanking new invention called "the internet" that suddenly put me into contact with fellow degenerates, no matter where they lived in the world.  Software quickly became available in which statistics could be downloaded from the web, allowing running a complex league to be not just easier, but actually possible.  I joined a dynasty league with individual defensive players (“IDPs”) in 1996.  That league dissolved two years later, for reasons I will discuss in detail below, but it prompted me to start my own league with IDPs when it folded. I decided to see just how close I could get to the fantasy of being a GM. 

The NFL's salary cap era was still pretty new and for the first time free agency was turning the NFL into a Hot Stove league much like baseball.  This was causing all kinds of new challenges to the NFL GM, and I wanted to capture that.  At the same time, the people at Sideline Software, who had created (in my opinion) the best desktop-based fantasy league management program (literally called, Fantasy Football League Manager) were then making it web-based, and they renamed it MyFantasyLeague.com ("MFL").  I sometimes think that half the features that currently exist on MFL are because of the requests I submitted while setting up my first complex league. 

There have always been myriad different types of leagues, with variations in roster sizes, scoring systems, positions, and on, and on.  But the game of fantasy football, as most people play it on the major sites like ESPN, or Yahoo, has not changed much over the decades.  The move from Standard Scoring to Points Per Reception ("PPR") becoming the dominant scoring system was the most momentous change in the game's history.  Most adopted innovations address major problems.  PPR was necessary to break up the trend at the time where 20 of the first 25 picks in every draft were running backs.  That problem was sucking strategy out of the game.  The depressed value of quarterbacks relative to other positions is also a problem that Superflex (allowing a second quarterback to be started in a flex spot in starting lineups) leagues are primarily addressing.  Other leagues are trying to address that problem differently through scoring rule changes.  I think there has been a recent fracturing in how people play FF, or perhaps a better way of saying is that there is an increasing number of FF players choosing to explore and play in more complicated leagues, as there are enough people playing dynasty leagues, or Superflex leagues, or salary cap leagues, or IDP leagues, to support commercial enterprises dedicated to those niches.  Once again, technology has been a major driver in how we, the community who plays this game, addresses issues. 

The amount of information regarding the actions that take place out on the field during games has exploded.  The types of things players do on the field that are tracked in some form or fashion is much higher now thanks to, well, many reasons, from video tracking, to the expansion of scouting services and techniques, to private company grading of players, to "advanced analytics."  This is expanding the universe of possible rules that leagues can incorporate.  That means that we are now at a very exciting point in time for the game of fantasy football.  We are almost at a point where if we can think it, we can incorporate it into our leagues. 

That brings me back to the initial "fantasy."  My personal goal is to create and run a league that comes the closest possible to recreating the NFL GM experience, while still making allowances for the fact that this is a game.  Therefore, I am trying to figure out how best to have a league with 53-man rosters including individual defensive players, a salary cap equal to that of an NFL team, with multi-year contracts, cap hits when cutting and/or trading players, and as many other aspects of the NFL managerial experience as I can exercise.

I am attempting to balance three directives: a) to accurately recreate the NFL general manager experience, b) to accurately value the things NFL players do on the field in helping their team win games, as measured in readily available football statistics, and c) to maximize the enjoyment of fantasy football as a game.  Those three directives do not always complement each other, and when they conflict I try to lean towards game enjoyment.  Let’s begin with the two most important aspects of league design, which are scoring rules, and your roster/position requirements.