Tinkering with Fantasy Football

Filed in Uncategorized by on June 26, 2011

Confession time – I have played the AFL Dream Team competition every year for around a decade now. Up to 2005, I cared quite a deal about it. Since a Friday afternoon in early March 2006, however, it has been consigned to a secondary role, as a new (and far superior) form of fantasy football was about to enter my life.

To be fair, my gripes with the current structure of fantasy football competitions run by the AFL, NRL, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and Fox Sports are limited. In fact, I really only have one major issue with these competitions, which can be demonstrated with some basic statistics.

Here are the percentages of AFL Dream Team squads with the following players after Round 13:

Brendan Goddard (61%), Bryce Gibbs (53%), Dane Swan (50%), Dyson Heppell (50%), Andrew Krakouer (49%), Dean Cox (46%), Lance Franklin (46%).

That is my problem – under a ‘salary cap’ style format, there is a strong bias towards certain players appearing within the squads of many managers.

If you play AFL’s Dream Team competition yourself, there is a good chance that a few of the aforementioned players appear in your squad, as well as the squad of your opponent this weekend, not to mention last weekend’s opponent. In a 22-versus-22 competition, how is it fun for both teams to have seven or eight common players? The short answer is that it is not fun, or at least not as much fun as it should be.

This was the conundrum that long-time friend (and Making the Nut founder) Nick Tedeschi and I were discussing in March 2006. We wanted a fantasy rugby league competition, but one run on our terms. A competition based on the principle behind most American fantasy sports – 10 or 12 team competitions where once a player is selected, no other team can draft him. A ‘one player, one team’ concept – just like in real sports.

With only one week left between that discussion and the 2006 NRL season opener, we quickly cobbled together player lists and some basic rules/ scoring structures and held our inaugural draft the night before the NRL season kicked off. Now in its sixth season, our Fantasy Football League (FFL) has become a more refined competition, albeit that rule changes and tinkering will keep happening for many a year.

Allowing the ‘one player, one team’ process to occur in publicly available Australian fantasy sports competitions would be the single biggest step forward that such competitions could take. That may seem like an outlandish statement in isolation, so let’s start with an example of how much strategy this adds to selecting your side.

I’ve used the AFL Dream Team average per game scores after Round 13 (removing the three guys – Matthew Kreuzer, Michael Barlow and Scott Stevens – who had played less than eight games) to give you a sense of how the early rounds of such a draft might play out. This mock draft assumes a ‘snake’ drafting order i.e. a process where the order reverses for every second round, such that the teams picking later are not disadvantaged in every round.  

Team 1: Scott Pendlebury (pick 1), Tom Rockliff (20), Matt Priddis (21), Brett Stanton (40).

Team 2: Marc Murphy (2), Chris Judd (19), Andrew Swallow (22), Andrew Carazzo (39).

Team 3: Matthew Boyd (3), Andrew Embley (18), Bryce Gibbs (23), Ryan O’Keefe (38).

Team 4: Dane Swan (4), Lance Franklin (17), Ryan Griffen (24), Tom Scully (37).

Team 5: Dean Cox (5), Aaron Sandilands (16), Paul Chapman (25), Luke Ball (36).

Team 6: Gary Ablett (6), Michael Rischitelli (15), Nathan Fyfe (26), James Kelly (35).

Team 7: Sam Mitchell (7), Jobe Watson (14), Todd Goldstein (27), Daniel Wells (34).

Team 8: Scott Thompson (8), Jack Redden (13), Heath Scotland (28), Matt Suckling (33).

Team 9: Steve Johnson (9), Dale Thomas (12), Jude Bolton (29), Nick Dal Santo (32).

Team 10: Liam Shiels (10), Joel Selwood (11), Dustin Martin (30), David Mundy (31).

Clearly, Team 5 would not take Sandilands in the second round if they had taken Cox with their opening pick. This would leave open some tantalising decisions about which team (and when) rolls the dice on Sandilands and which team(s) are sitting there six rounds later with no ruckmen, self-loathing starting to envelope them as they regret not snapping up the big Docker when they had the chance.

Suppose you are in charge of Team 9 from above and it comes around to pick number 12 (your second pick) of the draft. Sandilands is still available, but he will almost certainly be gone by the time your third pick (pick 29 overall) comes around. You either take him now or watch him run around for a rival all season. This type of draft is full of such decisions – take a player now, gamble that you can still get him with your next pick, or acknowledge that he will play for someone else. It is like current fantasy football – without the safety net of switching quality players around whenever it suits you.

Every draft carries some sleeper picks. For example, Liam Shiels would never have gone in first round of a pre-season draft. Imagine snapping up him in say the sixth round (or even better, the eighth round), watching him turn into a Dream Team superstar and lauding it over your mates all year.

How much more enjoyable would that be than simply buying and selling players from one week to the next? You took a chance on him on draft day and it has paid off in a massive way. You may even be getting trade offers along the lines of ‘Watson for Shiels’ or ‘Judd and Swallow for Shiels and Martin’ from your rivals – trade offers that would have been unfathomable pre-season.

Conversely, every draft carries a few disappointments (beyond those related to long-term injuries, which are as cruel in this form of fantasy football as they are for actual football clubs). Prior to the season, Paul Chapman would be a first round selection in many a draft, but the team in question is only getting third-round calibre output from him thus far. The manager of his fantasy team is probably feeling a little disappointed at this stage of the season.

Having stepped through the basics of how such a competition can add a whole new dimension to fantasy football, the next question becomes how many teams can be sustained within one such ‘private league’ and how big the squads should be? 

Well, our FFL competition involves ten teams with 26 players per squad, or 260 players in total. Given that a full NRL round involves 16 x 17 = 272 players being in action, this seems like a decent balance. Along similar lines, a full AFL round involves 16 x 22 = 352 players being in action, something in the terrain of 33-man to 36-man squads would be suitable. 

Competitions could involve less than ten teams if desired (with each squad having greater depth), but the number of players in each sport would make it difficult to sustain a 12-team competition. Competitions involving eight or ten teams are the best bet.

So, you’ve got your ten teams together and drafted hundreds of players into your sides…. what happens between rounds?

Squads can be amended from one week to the next by trading players from your squad to another side, as per the examples noted earlier. This can take some serious negotiation skills – you need to find a trade offer that makes your side better afterwards than it was before, whilst also convincing your trading partner that from their perspective, the other half of the deal will work out in their favour as well. Mutually beneficial trades are hard to find – they usually scenarios like one side having too many backs and not enough forwards while their trade partner has the opposite problem, so a trade becomes logical. Nonetheless, it is nice to be a part of one and irritating as hell when one happens that doesn’t involve your side.

Squads can also change via releasing players into ‘free agency’ and acquiring a different player who not yet assigned to another team in your competition. Because of the sheer volume of players drafted at the beginning, generally the ‘free agent’ market is comprised of fringe senior players, young/ unproven kids (occasionally you can hit a gold mine here) and injured players. Generally it is best to hold on to your high-quality injured players, lest they come back to haunt you playing for another team. Mediocre injured players are an entirely different story.

Those are the key components of my proposition – one tinker to the existing fantasy football concept that has been a raging success in the US for years and has the potential to flourish here.

To anyone associated with Dream Team, Supercoach, etc. who reads this, I can promise you that the first website to offer such a competition for the AFL will get my custom. Judging by the number of friends who have taken an interest in similar competitions to our FFL over the past few years, I/ we will not be alone. 

There is one other intangible (though extremely important) factor of note. This factor makes such a harmless and nerdy competition more special over time.

Since 2006, our humble little FFL competition has evolved into something bigger than fantasy football. As friends move cities, have kids, etc., it gets significantly harder to find excuses to get the old gang back together in the same place at the same time for anything that doesn’t involve the word ‘wedding’. Our FFL draft day fulfils this role, albeit that we usually only get eight or nine out of the full group of ten to the event, with the others phoning in their picks and being heckled relentlessly by the quorum in attendance.

This year we had the draft in Sydney and lapsed into our old schtick seamlessly for the next couple of hours.  As we retired to the bar afterwards to debate our teams, rugby league and life in general, one of our group chose that moment to announce that he would be a father for the first time before the year was out. The competition and its ability to keep our friendship bonds strong and contact regular has become one of the few constants in otherwise ever-evolving lives. That is why, without any sense of hyperbole, our annual draft day has become one of my five favourite days of the year.

Let’s suppose for a moment that such a competition is publicly offered for the 2012 season.

If you are young and these days of major life changes are in your future, grab nine (or seven) of the people you definitely want to keep in touch with in the years to come together and form a competition, with an undertaking to keep the competition going every year, with a draft day that everyone attends in person.

If you are older and those days have already scattered your closest friends across the country, use this as an excuse to ‘get the old band back together’ once a year, reminisce about the old days and chew the fat about the days ahead – and of course, bust the chops of anyone who makes a dumb pick. It might only be fantasy football, but it is capable of providing so much more than that.

As for the FFL, we will keep going for as long as the spirit is willing – hopefully decades. Of all the tipping/ fantasy sports competitions I’ve entered, it is my favourite by so far it doesn’t warrant mentioning.

I look forward to the day where the first son of a manager tags along, questions his dad about a dubious selection and gets raucous laughter and high-fives from the other nine of us while his poor dad looks decidedly sheepish. And I look forward to the day where a similar scenario plays itself out for both the AFL and NRL via a publicly available website – this is simply too much fun to keep a secret.

Thanks to Ryan Pierse/Getty Images AsiaPac for use of the photo

Image:

Comments are closed.