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Canadianfan

Three things we learned from week 1

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hahaha...remember that guy "the postman" that said like two weeks ago that kamara isnt special cause he watched him in college? LOL

Yeah, I remember him. Guess he wasn't watching closely enough. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

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Now you sound like Weepaws.

 

He always tries claiming that FF is 'mostly' luck or 'all' luck or some other similar claim. I try to suggest every year that he really rely mostly on luck for a team and see what happens. Draft randomly, pickup free agents randomly, make trades randomly, start your players randomly. See how you do. He never seems to take me up on that one :)

 

FF has luck. But even if a player goes down, you need to use skill to do research to pick a new player, to determine who to start (which broadly speaking is predictable, even if not always precise--how a player will match up against a defense is a bit of research that really does track the eventual stats--look at Hopkins vs NE as a good example). It's some of both luck and skill. But it's not 'mostly' luck by any means.

Its luck. Picking randomly has nothing to do with it. Anyone can print off a cheatsheet. If you play with other good owners then it boils down to most all luck.

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I learned:

 

1) The name of Lindsey Phillips. Apparently he's the Broncos running back that those of invested in Royce Freeman should have been concerned about, not Devon Booker.

 

2) Andy Reid wants Mahomes to break the all time touchdown passes record. Lets see how many more 1 yard "passes" Mahomes can throw.

 

3) The Bills coaching staff has nfi what they're doing. If Allen can't beat out Peterman in training camp why bring him in to an already decided game when your offensive line is truly offensive, your WR are right down there with the Cowboys, and the Ravens defense is coming for him?

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Its luck. Picking randomly has nothing to do with it. Anyone can print off a cheatsheet. If you play with other good owners then it boils down to most all luck.

 

Using a ranking of players is, by definition, not luck.

 

So let's just list the parts of the game that are skill, and the parts that are luck. See how many each list has.

 

Skill:

  1. Drafting players based on past performance and current situation
  2. Starting players each week based on those same statistics
  3. Picking up free agents off waivers D
  4. Dropping under-performing players
  5. Making trades based on those same stats
  6. Making sit-start decisions based on defensive matchup
  7. Making sit-start decisions based on weather
  8. Making sit-start decisions based on injury, both type and severity

Each of those things does have real predictive power. The predictions are not absolute, but they are predictive. The performance of WRs for example each week is not completely random. Known and predictable factors like skill, skill of the D, skill of the QB, game-plan, and etc all can and do give us good (but not perfect) ideas of how these guys will perform. Julio Jones reliably outscores Kelvin Benjamin, even if he doesn't do it every week. And we can even make predictions with some level of accuracy involving the decisions coaches will make. Those predictions as well won't be perfect, but they do have predictive power. We can trust the Jacksonville coaches to use their RB more than we can trust Kansas City. That's a fact.

 

So, all of those things are where skill and knowledge are involved. Now let's see where luck is involved, where we have absolutely no predictive power at all.

 

Luck

  1. Player injuries.

 

Done. End of list. Are injuries significant? Sure. But hardly 'most' of the game.

 

Even among a group of 'good' players, there will be players who consistently--not randomly--do better than others. Happens all the time, everywhere I've ever played. If it was mostly luck, there wouldn't be those trends. Everyone would win an even amount of times over the years. Just not the case.

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Using a ranking of players is, by definition, not luck.

 

So let's just list the parts of the game that are skill, and the parts that are luck. See how many each list has.

 

Skill:

  1. Drafting players based on past performance and current situation
  2. Starting players each week based on those same statistics
  3. Picking up free agents off waivers D
  4. Dropping under-performing players
  5. Making trades based on those same stats
  6. Making sit-start decisions based on defensive matchup
  7. Making sit-start decisions based on weather
  8. Making sit-start decisions based on injury, both type and severity

Each of those things does have real predictive power. The predictions are not absolute, but they are predictive. The performance of WRs for example each week is not completely random. Known and predictable factors like skill, skill of the D, skill of the QB, game-plan, and etc all can and do give us good (but not perfect) ideas of how these guys will perform. Julio Jones reliably outscores Kelvin Benjamin, even if he doesn't do it every week. And we can even make predictions with some level of accuracy involving the decisions coaches will make. Those predictions as well won't be perfect, but they do have predictive power. We can trust the Jacksonville coaches to use their RB more than we can trust Kansas City. That's a fact.

 

So, all of those things are where skill and knowledge are involved. Now let's see where luck is involved, where we have absolutely no predictive power at all.

 

Luck

  1. Player injuries.

 

Done. End of list. Are injuries significant? Sure. But hardly 'most' of the game.

 

Even among a group of 'good' players, there will be players who consistently--not randomly--do better than others. Happens all the time, everywhere I've ever played. If it was mostly luck, there wouldn't be those trends. Everyone would win an even amount of times over the years. Just not the case.

 

This luck vs. skill debate is so tired! I love what you said here. :thumbsup:

 

As you outlined if FF is 90% luck after drafting, why is it consistently the same owners almost always get in the playoffs in my leagues? How do some owners have 4 or 5 championships and some have zero or 1 after 15 years? If it's mostly luck the winners should be far more random than they are. There are 3-4 owners in every league who are consistently in the running, year after year after year.

 

Some guys know how to draft, and they flag players, they have DND lists, they subscribe to certain theories (Don't draft over 30 RB or RB with 400+ touches will never replicate the previous season). They don't overreach in the draft, or they draft talent that other owners let drop way down in the draft. Some guys know how to spot talent before the rest of the league has caught on from watching games and hitting them on the WW before they breakout.

 

Some guys are better at negotiating win-win trades because they scrutinize other teams and see where they could help another owner and vice versa and they don't overvalue their own bench.

 

Entirely luck my a$$.

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This luck vs. skill debate is so tired! I love what you said here. :thumbsup:

 

As you outlined if FF is 90% luck after drafting, why is it consistently the same owners almost always get in the playoffs in my leagues? How do some owners have 4 or 5 championships and some have zero or 1 after 15 years? If it's mostly luck the winners should be far more random than they are. There are 3-4 owners in every league who are consistently in the running, year after year after year.

 

Some guys know how to draft, and they flag players, they have DND lists, they subscribe to certain theories (Don't draft over 30 RB or RB with 400+ touches will never replicate the previous season). They don't overreach in the draft, or they draft talent that other owners let drop way down in the draft. Some guys know how to spot talent before the rest of the league has caught on from watching games and hitting them on the WW before they breakout.

 

Some guys are better at negotiating win-win trades because they scrutinize other teams and see where they could help another owner and vice versa and they don't overvalue their own bench.

 

Entirely luck my a$$.

 

Solid points, I should have included them. Some owners are great drafters and not great at WW. They have the best teams for the first 5 weeks, and then tail off. Other guys the opposite. And you see it year after year. The very existence of repeated events like that is evidence that it's not luck.

 

Now, the Colts passing game success? Yeah, like 90% luck. ;)

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See, that's how you look at things. If you don't agree, you just say I'm in a non-competative league. It's a 12 team auction league with high dues and not only yearly payout but % of shares in investment dollars that we have been contributing to for over 10 years at stake. A few people fly in from out of state yearly to take part in the draft because of the competition and great league setup.

 

You are willing to throw any crap out there to try to win a point.

Im thinking this listen2me guy just has nothing else to do. Notice he has been posting opinions about fantasy football for a while, but yet, now it's just luck and nothing else.

 

But that's probably how he explains losing so much to the winners in his league. If he even plays that is.

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This luck vs. skill debate is so tired! I love what you said here. :thumbsup:

 

As you outlined if FF is 90% luck after drafting, why is it consistently the same owners almost always get in the playoffs in my leagues? How do some owners have 4 or 5 championships and some have zero or 1 after 15 years? If it's mostly luck the winners should be far more random than they are. There are 3-4 owners in every league who are consistently in the running, year after year after year.

 

Some guys know how to draft, and they flag players, they have DND lists, they subscribe to certain theories (Don't draft over 30 RB or RB with 400+ touches will never replicate the previous season). They don't overreach in the draft, or they draft talent that other owners let drop way down in the draft. Some guys know how to spot talent before the rest of the league has caught on from watching games and hitting them on the WW before they breakout.

 

Some guys are better at negotiating win-win trades because they scrutinize other teams and see where they could help another owner and vice versa and they don't overvalue their own bench.

 

Entirely luck my a$$.

 

yes, injuries are luck (or lack of it)

outside of that I believe that playoffs are also mostly luck.. because a bad team can have a crazy good score one week and beat a much better overall team that happens to have a bad week.

To avoid this the pot should be weighted towards most wins or highest points for the season, since those are the teams that have been consistently good all year.

 

The funny part is that while lots of people that FF is all luck.. luck is also a big part of real NFL

1. Injuries to key players often have significant impact on a teams chance to make the playoffs and great GMs that can work the waivers well are able to recover at times, bad gms will not.

2. Bad teams, will sometime beat much better teams due to weather/ game plan/ injuries/ coaching/ etc. But good teams as whole will do better over the course of the year.

3. Smart GMs will bring in FAs that are a great fit for the scheme and have shown ability to stay healthy over time. Bad GMs will overpay for players with big names and will get very little out of them.

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yes, injuries are luck (or lack of it)

outside of that I believe that playoffs are also mostly luck.. because a bad team can have a crazy good score one week and beat a much better overall team that happen to have a bad week.

To avoid this the pot should be weighted towards most wins or highest points for the season, since those are the teams that have been consistently good all year.

 

I have mixed feelings about this. One year we had a team go undefeated all year only to get a bad beat in the finals. The following year the previous champ was in the finals and got a bad beat from a far lesser team and lost by less than a point. That said, HTH and the chance to win a pot keeps some of the bubble teams in the race until the end, where if you do total points/wins only then people will check out as soon as they know they can't catch up.

 

HTH sometimes involves bad beats in the playoffs, that's the way it goes. Most of the time it seems to me the better overall team wins though.

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I have mixed feelings about this. One year we had a team go undefeated all year only to get a bad beat in the finals. The following year the previous champ was in the finals and got a bad beat from a far lesser team and lost by less than a point. That said, HTH and the chance to win a pot keeps some of the bubble teams in the race until the end, where if you do total points/wins only then people will check out as soon as they know they can't catch up.

 

HTH sometimes involves bad beats in the playoffs, that's the way it goes. Most of the time it seems to me the better overall team wins though.

thats also true.. in my league i pay out most points and most wins 30% of pot.. but still have the playoffs where top 3 spots get paid the other 70%

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Pat mahomes to Tyreek hill is going to be like cullpepper to moss.

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Luck

 

  • Player injuries.

Done. End of list. Are injuries significant? Sure. But hardly 'most' of the game.

.

You are leaving out about a mountain of variables in addition to injuries. Penalties, ball bounces, wind, drops, slips. Winning a head to head FF game is almost entirely based on luck. The reason for this is you have no control over what your opponent scores.You cannot interact with your opponents score. If you had played Eddie youd have won, but you didnt, you played Bob and Bob beat you. Bob would have lost to Timmy.

 

You can manage yourself to a good season and make the playoffs more often than dummies can. But in the playoffs, in the championship game, you have almost zero control and if your opponent outscores you, you lose. You are simply hoping you score more than your opponent. Ive won championship games 80-79 and lost them 144-150.

 

Just be a good smart owner and you will often put yourself in position to make a run. But make no mistake, winning titles is completely up to chance. For this reason I never call a team a winning team, Id rather call them a playoff team.

 

Also injuries play an enormous role and shouldnt be understated at all. My draft last year was Obj and Cook. Still had top 3 in scoring and made a playoff run that fell short. Oh and that list of predictive things under skill are also wrong half the time anyway.

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I thought fantasy football was all about skill.

 

Then I turned 12. Literally.

 

I have played since I was 9 or 10 in some fashion. I have seen guys who dont know football get hot and win leagues.

 

It isnt all luck. In most leavues ive been in the very best guys do compete more often than others. But overall it is luck. Majority luck. And pretty much paying attention/trying. Hardly any skill involved in simple ppr leagues. If you have 12 or 14 owners who all pay attention and try then it boils down to luck.

 

GMs who get paid a lot of money make picking players look like a crapshoot. Fantasy with part time know it all GMs is certainly no different.

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I thought fantasy football was all about skill.

 

Then I turned 12. Literally.

 

I have played since I was 9 or 10 in some fashion. I have seen guys who dont know football get hot and win leagues.

 

It isnt all luck. In most leavues ive been in the very best guys do compete more often than others. But overall it is luck. Majority luck. And pretty much paying attention/trying. Hardly any skill involved in simple ppr leagues. If you have 12 or 14 owners who all pay attention and try then it boils down to luck.

 

GMs who get paid a lot of money make picking players look like a crapshoot. Fantasy with part time know it all GMs is certainly no different.

This whole thread is about you justifying your always losing. Hahahaaa.

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This whole thread is about you justifying your always losing. Hahahaaa.

You seem a little spastic.

 

Ive won plenty over the 20 years I have played. Rarely does anyone win 2 in a row in my leagues because they are 14 teams with deep IDP and good owners.

 

Not sure why you are so angry.

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You are leaving out about a mountain of variables in addition to injuries. Penalties, ball bounces, wind, drops, slips. Winning a head to head FF game is almost entirely based on luck. The reason for this is you have no control over what your opponent scores.You cannot interact with your opponents score. If you had played Eddie youd have won, but you didnt, you played Bob and Bob beat you. Bob would have lost to Timmy.

 

You can manage yourself to a good season and make the playoffs more often than dummies can. But in the playoffs, in the championship game, you have almost zero control and if your opponent outscores you, you lose. You are simply hoping you score more than your opponent. Ive won championship games 80-79 and lost them 144-150.

 

Just be a good smart owner and you will often put yourself in position to make a run. But make no mistake, winning titles is completely up to chance. For this reason I never call a team a winning team, Id rather call them a playoff team.

 

Also injuries play an enormous role and shouldnt be understated at all. My draft last year was Obj and Cook. Still had top 3 in scoring and made a playoff run that fell short. Oh and that list of predictive things under skill are also wrong half the time anyway.

 

You have no control over what cards your opponent has in poker, and yet that's considered to be a game of skill. Wind is part of weather, which you do have some predictive power over (using a kicker in a dome vs in a snowstorm). Penalties you have some predictive power over as well--some teams get penalized more than others, which affects their games. To have some predictive power does not mean you have perfect predictive power.

 

Playoff games are no different in how you put up points than regular season games. No different at all. You make start-sit decisions the same, the players performance translates to your points the same. Zero difference in the control you have or don't have over how well you do. The only difference is that a playoff loss means more than a regular season loss. That doesn't mean you have 'less control'. That's just not true. If you and I enter a chess league where there's a regular season and a playoffs, and you beat me in the playoffs and I'm suddenly out in one game, that has no impact on whether or not chess is a game of skill or luck. So playoffs/regular season is simply not part of the discussion.

 

Winning titles depends in large part on who you've put on your team. If you've done research (not random) and have better players on your team (not random) than the other guy, and you consider the things you can consider to make better start-sit calls (not random) then, barring injury (random) you will win. So there's one random factor there, and a bunch of non-random factors.

 

And your conclusion is that it's totally random. Yeah. Just doesn't follow.

 

The simple fact you're missing is that a game that's largely skill certainly can have one or more random elements. Doesn't mean it's not still a game largely of skill. Basketball is a game of skill--the better players and team will generally win. But sometimes the ball bounces randomly off the rim, which affects who gets the rebound. OH NO! Basketball is a game of pure luck! :D No, it's not. But there are random elements.

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You seem a little spastic.

 

Ive won plenty over the 20 years I have played. Rarely does anyone win 2 in a row in my leagues because they are 14 teams with deep IDP and good owners.

 

Not sure why you are so angry.

I have no anger. I just stated you are trying to justify your losing all the time. And you still are trying. ☺ Keep going though.

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You are leaving out about a mountain of variables in addition to injuries. Penalties, ball bounces, wind, drops, slips. Winning a head to head FF game is almost entirely based on luck. The reason for this is you have no control over what your opponent scores.You cannot interact with your opponents score. If you had played Eddie youd have won, but you didnt, you played Bob and Bob beat you. Bob would have lost to Timmy.

 

You can manage yourself to a good season and make the playoffs more often than dummies can. But in the playoffs, in the championship game, you have almost zero control and if your opponent outscores you, you lose. You are simply hoping you score more than your opponent. Ive won championship games 80-79 and lost them 144-150.

 

Just be a good smart owner and you will often put yourself in position to make a run. But make no mistake, winning titles is completely up to chance. For this reason I never call a team a winning team, Id rather call them a playoff team.

 

Also injuries play an enormous role and shouldnt be understated at all. My draft last year was Obj and Cook. Still had top 3 in scoring and made a playoff run that fell short. Oh and that list of predictive things under skill are also wrong half the time anyway.

Add in things like you could have a stud back whos team randomly blows out their opponent by halftime and they yank many of their good starters. As seen with Baltimore week 1.

 

No control over that.

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Add in things like you could have a stud back whos team randomly blows out their opponent by halftime and they yank many of their good starters. As seen with Baltimore week 1.

 

No control over that.

 

That's entirely something that we have some predictive power over. If you don't know that a really great team may blow out a bad team, and you don't use that as part of your deliberating process, that's your fault. I've seen any number of start-sit recommendation lists including notes about exactly that--"Such and such is a stud, but he may be on the bench by the 4th quarter.." Once more, we can't perfectly predict, but it's a data point we can use to some effect in evaluation. Not 'just luck' at all.

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I think some people need to learn the definition of "skill" and how it does not equal "common sense" or "general knowledge".

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I think some people need to learn the definition of "skill" and how it does not equal "common sense" or "general knowledge".

Those two things are what FF has become in its entirety. Your edge now comes from simply not being a total moron now. Back in the day there was a bigger divide between the knowledgeable people and the less knowledgeable.

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Those two things are what FF has become in its entirety. Your edge now comes from simply not being a total moron now. Back in the day there was a bigger divide between the knowledgeable people and the less knowledgeable.

 

Everyone has a book on FF at the draft now at least for sure. There are guys who reach in the draft and make dumb picks, but most owners at least draft semi-competently.

 

Week to week team management and finding gems off the WW is something that requires a little more diligence. Not everyone puts in the time. Start/sit decisions sometimes involve more than just looking at predicted points.

 

You're right, the total morons get washed out of leagues pretty quickly.

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Those two things are what FF has become in its entirety. Your edge now comes from simply not being a total moron now. Back in the day there was a bigger divide between the knowledgeable people and the less knowledgeable.

 

Bigger divide, yes. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a divide now, one that can be created by research, data collection, etc.

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Bigger divide, yes. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a divide now, one that can be created by research, data collection, etc.

I never said it was 100% all luck.

 

I said majority/mostly luck.

 

Which is very reasonable. I dont see how anyone can argue this.

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I never said it was 100% all luck.

 

I said majority/mostly luck.

 

Which is very reasonable. I dont see how anyone can argue this.

This is why you don't win. You bring in a magazine's top 200 to the draft, and you follow that for 15 rounds. You said this earlier and are now justifying your losing by calling it all luck. Jeez..

.😭

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I dont see how anyone can argue this.

 

 

I don't see how someone can read someone arguing against their position and come to the conclusion that they don't see how anyone can argue against their position.

 

I'll show you how someone can argue against your position. ^^^^ It's up there.

 

Or do you think for some reason that your opinion here is the only possibly reasonable opinion that anyone could hold? No one could possibly disagree with you and have any kind of argument or evidence? Really?

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I learned:

 

1) The name of Lindsey Phillips.

lol!

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1. It's week 1...relax. Don't get overly excited, don't panic.

 

2. The 'FF Luck v Skill' debate, year after year, just doesn't go away.

 

3. Apparently Aaron Rodgers is dating Danica Patrick...at least that's what I gather from the excessive times cutting from action on field to her in suite.

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At the threat of derailing, I’ll have some fun and do 3 things we learned after week 1 last year.

 

1. Tarik Cohen is going to be special and he’s the RB to own on the Bears.

 

2. Austin Hooper is a top 5 te.

 

3. Kamara isn’t anything special and is just a 3rd down guy.

 

 

Cohen is special after week one showing???

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Cohen is special after week one showing???

My post was about last year. People were going crazy for him after the first couple weeks last year.
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Using a ranking of players is, by definition, not luck.

 

So let's just list the parts of the game that are skill, and the parts that are luck. See how many each list has.

 

Skill:

  1. Drafting players based on past performance and current situation
  2. Starting players each week based on those same statistics
  3. Picking up free agents off waivers D
  4. Dropping under-performing players
  5. Making trades based on those same stats
  6. Making sit-start decisions based on defensive matchup
  7. Making sit-start decisions based on weather
  8. Making sit-start decisions based on injury, both type and severity

Each of those things does have real predictive power. The predictions are not absolute, but they are predictive. The performance of WRs for example each week is not completely random. Known and predictable factors like skill, skill of the D, skill of the QB, game-plan, and etc all can and do give us good (but not perfect) ideas of how these guys will perform. Julio Jones reliably outscores Kelvin Benjamin, even if he doesn't do it every week. And we can even make predictions with some level of accuracy involving the decisions coaches will make. Those predictions as well won't be perfect, but they do have predictive power. We can trust the Jacksonville coaches to use their RB more than we can trust Kansas City. That's a fact.

 

So, all of those things are where skill and knowledge are involved. Now let's see where luck is involved, where we have absolutely no predictive power at all.

 

Luck

  1. Player injuries.

 

Done. End of list. Are injuries significant? Sure. But hardly 'most' of the game.

 

Even among a group of 'good' players, there will be players who consistently--not randomly--do better than others. Happens all the time, everywhere I've ever played. If it was mostly luck, there wouldn't be those trends. Everyone would win an even amount of times over the years. Just not the case.

 

I generally agree with this but I would at least add these things to the luck column: weekly TD variability and head to head scoring systems

 

TDs in general are heavily weighted in nearly every scoring system (though at least watered down a bit in PPR), they swing games more than any other stat. so when your WR gets tackled at the 1 after a long catch and your opponents RB gets the plunge that feels unlucky. or when your RB does the heavy lifting most of the day but coach brings in the vulture RB at the GL, that feels unlucky too. defensive tds often feel random, even the best defenses in the league might only get 1 or 2 tds (minn def last year had 1 for instance, yet tampa had 4). yes, over a 13+ week reg season the best players will have the most TDs and thats where we can win with predictions in the long term...but week to week variability feels like luck. which leads directly into H2H scoring systems feeling luck based to a certain degree as well (the old "I faced the top scoring team every week" thing). you have no control over who you face week to week, and schedule absolutely can decide who makes the playoffs and who doesn't.

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"It is amazing how luck follows those people that are more prepared and outwork everybody else". - Browns DC Gregg Williams on facing Drew Brees. I think it fits nicely in the FF discussion.

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