League Rules

Our leagues are a little different from traditional fantasy leagues, so a little bit of info can help frame any discussion that we have here. All of this is sort of mundane, so I wouldn't advise reading this. Instead, just refer back, in case you see a strange argument down the road.

One thing that we tried to do w/ the UPL leagues from the start was to make the game more balanced, trying to minimize luck as a factor. Obviously, you can't eliminate luck completely, but you can change things around so that luck is reduced.

For baseball, we originally started with a cumulative points league for the season. Baseball is the one sport where statistics are relatively well understood, and we wanted a game that reflected the long haul. A few of us had played on the old SmallWorld fantasy site (I'm not sure if they even exist anymore), so we were familiar with this method of accumulating points. The problem is that teams that fell behind would just quit on the league, which didn't make things fun at all. We also tried this for basketball, as well. Eventually, we went to a rotisserie-style league for both basketball and baseball. This let you take advantage of the long-haul mentality that characterize both sports, but still have a format where small differences matter, and no one's completely out of it until pretty far in the season.

Right off the bat, we used a 6x6 system in baseball, using a mix of traditional stats and the rate stats available on the Yahoo! site that we used. The result was that we used R, HR, RBI, SB, OBP, and SLG for our offensive categories, and W, L, K, SV, ERA, and WHIP for our pitching categories. We also went with deep rosters, going with 10 starting offensive positions (2 UTIL slots), 7 starting pitching positions (1 SP, 1 RP, and 5 P), and 22-man rosters, w/ 2 DL slots. We go the full 162 games on offense, and allow 1400 innings pitched. This league isn't built for casual play, since we tend to have at least 10 teams (12 this year), so managers are looking at 3rd and 4th starters, and maybe even set-up men for their pitching staff, and trying to round out rosters with guys who you normally don't see in shallower fantasy leagues.

Similarly, in basketball, we went more categories than you normally see: FG%, FT%, 3FG, PTS, OReb, Reb, AST, STL, BLK, A/TO. Essentially, you have steals and blocks standing along, and then you see overlaps between DReb and Reb, AST and A/TO, and in the scoring categories. So, you can see the give and take that often comes up. We also run deep rosters here, going to 14 man rosters (since the NBA did away with the Injured List a couple years ago), and starting 10 players (PG, SG, G, SF, PF, F, C, C, UTIL, UTIL). Again, you see managers having to make a number of pick-ups that you often don't see in shallower leagues.

With football, it's hard to completely remove luck, since you're going head-to-head. But, even there, we've tried to make things a little more balanced. First of all, we use fractional scoring. It mystifies me why some online leagues still don't use fractional scoring. Why should 19 yards be scored the same as 11 yards? Maybe you can make the case that it's easier to calculate scores, but when the computer is doing the calculation for you, that's just dumb. We also use bigger lineups. We start QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, TE, RB/WR, WR/TE, K, DEF, D, D, and have 16 man rosters.

We also play around with the scoring. You can't get around assigning 6 points for a TD, so we did that for all TD, including passing TD's. This increased the value of QB's in our league, for sure. But more importantly, what we did early on was to increase the value of yardage. Back in the day, the standard scoring used to be 20 rushing/receiving yards per point and 50 passing yards per point. We add on special teams stats, by rewarding kickoff and punt returns at 20yds/point. And started off with 10 yds/point for rushing/receiving and 25 yds/point for passing. Most leagues have changed to this method the last couple years (though we've had zero influence on this). Where we do change things around is by giving points for carries, receptions, and completions (and penalize for incomplete passes). We give 0.2 points per carry, 0.75 points per catch, and 1 point for each completion (and -0.75 for each incomplete pass). What this does is try to reflect the value of what happens between the red zones in a real game. We also penalize turnovers pretty heavily. Each turnover is worth 4 points, so an interception or a fumble lost can be costly. We've also added 2 individual defensive players the last couple years, which has been pretty interesting, actually. In this league, defense and special teams matter. The net result is that in our football leagues, we have a number of ways to win. Not everyone just goes RB, RB early. And WR is a huge factor, since giving points for receptions can really balance things out. That said it's still a football league, so luck matters.

Anyway, if you have survived reading to this point, you should probably ask yourself why.

-Chairman, aka O.N. Thugs