Well that escalated quickly.
King Thrym, Head Coach of the Jotunheim Giants one day, Commissioner of the league the next.
And what is the first task bequeathed to me? I need to sort out our IDP scoring as Leonard is predicted to top the fantasy point scoring charts, ahead of our point boosted Mahomes, with 508 pts. And Corey Littleton is in third. Not good, sorry Corey.
But! After one, long, evening spent doing battle with balancing the sacks of Donald, the tackles of Leonard and the floor of Joyner, I think Dommy and I may have stumbled upon IDP fantasy point Nirvana (or at least the Norse equivalent, Valhalla I suppose.. although as King of the Giants.. bugger it, Nirvana will do).
So let’s start from the top. What were we trying to accomplish? What did we want our scoring system to do?
First off, it needed to make sense from a fan perspective. Fan perspective?
PATRICK MAHOMES THREW FOR 5000 YARDS AND 50 TDS!! HE’S A BEAST! HE HAS TO BE #1!!
Yes Scotty I agree, Mahomes had a sensational season and should certainly top the charts with last season’s performance.
AARON DONALD WAS VOTED THE #1 PLAYER IN THE NFL BY HIS PEERS AND IS CLEARLY THE BADDEST MAN ON THE PLANET! BOOM!
I hadn’t forgotten him Dom, and I know you’d like your 1st round pick to be relevant, Donald needs to top the defensive players.
Andrew Luck seems like such a nice guy and I’m disappointed he retired.
Erm, yeah, sorry about that Al.
Anyway, the aim of the scoring system is for it to just make sense from a fan perspective. Excellent players at the top, good players in the middle, meh players at the bottom. You should be able to just pick players that you like, whack them in a team, and be competitive.
But the main idea is that you should also be able to cheer for things that make sense.
Your player get a sack? Woo! 3 points*!
Hit the QB? Woo! 3 points!
Forced a fumble? Woo! 3 points!
Made a big play and caused a tackle for loss? Woo! 3.5 points**!
Your guy made an interception? A tackle? Recovered a fumble? All woo’s!
*why only 3 points for a sack? I’ll get to that in a minute
**why 3.5 points for a tfl when everything else is 3? Dammit, that’s meant to be 3 😦 Someone remind me to change that.
Well that seems like a reasonable task. Just put all the points up and hey presto – everything sort of fits with the IDP’s… but then you compare them to the offensive players and suddenly Cory Littleton becomes the overall third most valuable player of 2018…
So second point, it needs to make sense compared to the offensive players. Excellent week? About 20 pts. Good week? Somewhere around 14pts. Lamarcus Joyner? 6pts.
But how to do that? What are the issues and why is it so difficult? And of course, what was the eventual compromise?
Let’s jump to our answer and then I’ll explain why we settled on this.
Tackles.
Tackles are the bane of IDP scoring. Everyone gets ton(nes) of them which then causes Corey Littleton to become a generational talent and Lamarcus Joyner to become relevant.
They also prevent upping the points of all the fun ‘big play’ moments that make the NFL fun to watch therefore 1.25/1.00 was where we settled. This didn’t overly push the tackles and left room to chuck more points about.
Sacks.
Sacks are fun. Defenses love them, commentator’s love them, we love them – but they only tell some of the tale. Annoyingly, Sleeper doesn’t have a points for pressures and so we tried to stagger the sack points across the various aspects which helped bump the top players up without dragging everyone with them.
Fumbles.
Fumbles are huge, exciting moments in games that cause chaos and therefore demand points. Without trying to pump fumbles too much (our pass rushers really don’t need any more help) we settled on 3pts making the forced fumble itself a big play anywhere on the field – I’d like to get this higher as it’s a massive play when a cornerback or safety does it but hey, what can you do? Getting the ball back is also useful and so the recovery is worth some points to.
Interception.
Massive play. 5pts. Hopefully the guy that caused the interception to occur catches the ball and gets the points but not much I can do there other than draft Ogletree.
Pass Defended.
Something else for the corners and safeties to get excited about. Feel free to join in the running around making chopping motions and flexing when they occur. 5pts.
Excellent! That’s the scoring taken care of… wait, you want to know what effect this had? Fine.
And here are some player breakdowns so you can see the final results based on 2018.
So Donald highlights the compromise. If you reward big plays, and then someone makes a bajillion big plays, they score a lot of points. I’m ok with this. He does make mortal level points on other weeks so pretty happy with how that looks – 22 players scoring points calms the ‘big points’ jitters a little!
Leonard I’m also happy with as he has an exceptional floor and occasionally went off – looks like I think it should look.
Ogletree also seems to work. Good linebacker on a busy defense. Had a massive week when he made 2 INTs and scored a TD – it’s an outlier where there should be an outlier.
Jamal Adams is a beast and his stats reflect that. Averaged 18pts a game which is Mike Evans territory. Also like his ppg numbers which don’t appear to show anything ridiculous.
Lamarcus Joyner played football last year. His 2018 stats reflect this. He has since moved to the raiders. I expect his 2019 stats to reflect this.
Overall, it appears pass rushers go big or go home, as do corners/free safeties, and linebackers/strong safeties bring a good floor. Job done.
So! That brings an end to this post, partially because I’ve run out of things to say and partially because I’ve forgotten what I was talking about.
At least I avoided the battle with the Jormungandr draft.
King Thrym, Commish.
We Have It In Writing 
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