Fantasy Football Guide Part 3: Non-Standard Scoring

Reprinted from www.SCFantasyFootball.com.  Make sure to check out the whole guide!

Every league is different. And not just in the “well, there are lots of different players that play in different ways!” kind of way. There are lots of seemingly minor tweaks to the ways that players are scored that can completely rock not only the way a league plays out, but the quality of any given team. There are a whole lot of stats outside the standard yards-and-touchdown mix that can make or break your team, and plenty of tweaks in the yards-and-touchdowns mix that can be even more important. Here are a few common changes made between leagues.

Note: If you are in a standard-scoring league, you don’t have to worry about any of this.

Points Per Reception (PPR)

This is one of the most important and most common tweaks around in fantasy football leagues. As the name suggests, players get some points for receptions (catches) they make. This can completely shift the draft landscape and the value of any given player in a league. Running backs that are mixed into the passing game become more valuable than otherwise equivalent counterparts (guys like Steven Jackson and Brian Westbrook have gotten a big boost in recent years).

Wide receivers who don’t get touchdowns can remain potent fantasy forces, when normal scoring would make them mediocre options, at best (Wes Welker went from good to elite in 2007 and from decent to good in 2008 in PPR leagues).

Return Yards/Touchdowns

Very rarely do you see leagues that have return yards as a scoring category. Mostly, you’ll see it in leagues with people who really don’t know how to play fantasy football, or leagues that are really big (sixteen or more teams) to compensate for the fact that there aren’t enough quality players to go around. Not that this really matters much, as there are very few great players that get work returning kicks.

A couple notable exceptions in recent years are Wes Welker and, sporadically, Carolina Panther Steve Smith. Returning a kickoff or punt for touchdowns…well, those can be tricky. Almost every fantasy football provider (Yahoo!, ESPN, etc.) counts them somewhere…it’s just a matter of where. ESPN lumps together a team’s defensive unit, and its special teams unit (and re-labels “DEF” as “D/ST”).

This makes it so that if, say, I am playing the Chicago Bears defense back in 2006, and Devin Hester runs back a punt for a TD, the Chicago D/ST gets six points. On the other hand, they may only be attributed to the actual player that gets the return TD.

So, if Wes Welker brings a punt back to the end zone, Welker will get six points notched onto his score, but the Patriots defense will not.

Some leagues have both. And some leagues have neither. Because return touchdowns are so rare, it’s usually not a big deal. This is something you’ll just have to find out for your own leagues, though. Keep in mind that you can theoretically add a TD or two to some guys.

Bonuses

Bonuses serve no real purpose other than giving a few quick points to boost the value of an already huge play (or to help ease the pain of watching your player get shoestring-tackled at the three yard line). The idea is simple. If a player makes a play for X yards, they get a point or two added to their total for the day (for example, one bonus point for a fifty yard pass). These also don’t make a huge difference, because a huge play is already a huge play.

A sixty yard TD run is already worth twelve points…so having that twelve become thirteen doesn’t usually make or break a season (though I may have just jinxed myself).

These bonuses, though almost always arbitrary, are very common. But don’t really consider them when you’re drafting.

Points Per Completion (PPC)

Same thing as points per reception, but it’s points for every pass completed (and therefore, basically only applies to QBs). This is actually quite rare and shores up the values of QBs in pass-happy offenses while pulling down the value of QBs in run-centered offenses.

Various Boosts to Passing Stats

More often than the goofy PPC, people will change the way QBs are scored by just tweaking the stats they already get points for.

Be it making twenty passing yards per point (rather than twenty-five, a 20% boost) or six points per passing touchdown (rather than the normal four). These are the one things that really end up skewing drafts in favor of QB-lovers, if there are no similar boosts to the other positions.

Multiplied Points

Some leagues will multiply the points for certain stats or players. Double points for tight ends gets floated around sometimes. There are also certain sites that boost things like rushing yards for QBs and receiving yards for RBs.

Any sort of multiplier is rare (and some sites don’t let you do it), but if you encounter one of them, it puts a serious premium on the applicable players and can completely change the game.