Your Fantasy Football League Needs a Playoff Selection Committee.
Fantasy football is a cold game of numbers, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s why your league should adopt a completely arbitrary fantasy football playoff committee for no reason other than chaos.
As fantasy football’s particularly tumultuous year draws to a close, you or someone you love might feel a bit, uh, short-shrifted by the “numbers” and “data” that knocked you out of a bye week or plopped your slightly above-average team into a loser’s bracket, and made your whole postseason miserable. And, despite your league’s best efforts to remedy this with wild card weekends or unique tiebreakers, even then, you can’t solve every issue. For some, it might even be actively frustrating to see your fake football team subjected to the harsh, cold realities that should only be reserved for the real world.
There’s only one way to truly remedy the fantasy football playoffs, and that is, to make it more chaotic. How, you ask? Look no further than arbiters of fairness and justice, the NCAA: create your own playoff committee.
Hear me out. Fantasy football lacks context, and, quite frankly, the humanity (and chaos!) that comes from a team playing as a cohesive unit. The only teamwork present in fantasy football isn’t teamwork so much as it is guesswork. All you really need to do is have the collection of individual players you’ve drafted or acquired score more points than your opponent. You get no consideration for commanding victories or decisive style. There’s no reward for beating the best team in your league when they’ve had a bad week, and no punishment when your team scrapes through the regular season because you lucked out and caught too many teams on bad weeks. Injuries are only a consideration for the waiver wire and bench space, and won’t be factored into how well your team as a whole can weather the playoff (or loser’s bracket) storm. Just because your team was 8-3 going into the playoffs doesn’t mean your team is actually good.
Sound familiar to you? This is the eye test — essentially, the key difference between college football and the NFL/Fantasy in determining playoff eligibility. A completely arbitrary evaluation of a team based partially on analysis and mostly on vibes. The eye test is obviously not absent from the NFL, especially within sports media and analysis, but Analytics Twitter doesn’t get to pick who’s in; division championships, wins, and tiebreakers are what dictate playoff spots, not a team’s overall It Factor.
College football, however, takes this extremely subjective thing and gives it meaning. The eye test is what put Ohio State in the playoff ahead of undefeateds like Cincinnati. It’s why Notre Dame, inexplicably, is in, despite getting routed by Clemson in the ACC championship the day before the committee made their decision. And in fantasy football, the eye test could be the reason you avoid a 6-team tiebreaker and get into the playoffs when you’d otherwise be a loser.
Now, you may also be wondering how to create said context within your league, if everything is as numbers-driven and robotic as I claim. The simple answer: derive context yourself. For example, a few weeks before your playoff, determine your equivalent for strength of schedule (did a bad team keep winning out of sheer luck? Did an objectively good team just get unlucky week to week?). You could also simulate a “home/away” environment by saying that teams won in hostile environments, or say that, after a certain number of weeks after teams have been tested, a margin of victory over X points is a quality win, and a margin of defeat under Y points is a quality loss. If you want to get really stupid, as my league does, pull some supplemental data -- one of our managers runs numbers each week to see how every team would perform across the entire league, a dataset he calls All-Random Season Evaluation (ARSE for short).
Then, you establish the committee. Your league commissioner can collect ballots from every manager, provided you don’t all vote like trolls to get your buddy’s injury-rattled 1-9 team into the playoffs. Additionally, I’d say to tier your playoffs; though the CFP model has only been a joke in my own league, I’ve suggested a 4-team playoff, a 4-team loser’s bracket, and 2 “bowl” matchups. At that point, let everyone vote based on the context you’ve established. Perhaps one of you votes based on strength of schedule, one of you votes based on team health, one of you votes based on consistency… and so on. You won’t really know how it shakes out until the Fantasy Football Playoff is announced, and when it is, you and your fellow managers can fully melt down over the respective justifications for your choices.
At the end of the day, fantasy football is just a combination of probability and addition, and it would probably feel droll without your fellow managers. It’s the human element that makes joining your league every year worth it. Think water cooler chitchat, shit-talking among friends, the hundred bucks you get for winning, the league punishment if you lose. So, if you’re going to be frustrated by playoff seeding, don’t let it be due to technicalities and decimals; let it be due to your fellow managers, your fellow humans, screwing you over.
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