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Have You Every Played In A League That Counts Kick Return Yardage? (1 Viewer)

Anarchy99

Footballguy
Pretty self explanatory. I've been playing fantasy football since the 80's and never was in such a league. I only bring it up because I was a late second add to a league and was told it was a standard PPR league without any odd scoring or special wrinkles. As it turns out, the league awards 0.1 points per kick return yard (which I was unaware). I doubt I would have changed who I drafted based on that, but I thought it was odd that they considered return yardage as part of a standard league format. Maybe I live under a rock, but I haven't seen any leagues that score return yardage (return TD yes, but return yardage no).
 
my dynasty league has had kick return yardage for many years. i've never paid that much attention to it. the main way that i find it coming into play is when needing a waiver wire flex and being able to use like a ray ray mcloud or xavier gipson who are otherwise flying under the radar and sometimes a guy like that will get up to 100 return yards in a week. I really have no idea how to predict kickoff return yards at this point.
 
Yes, years ago it was a 14 team league that separated Defense & Special Teams into 2 starting positions.
KR & PR yards were key. Players like Devon Hester & Brian Mitchell were valuable ... Sometimes Late 2nd/Early 3rd Round value
 
Yes. Probably about 12-14 years ago. Only played for 2 seasons. Wild scoring and it was 2QB. Scores of games would usually be like 1972.5-1686.8 with the way it was set up.

Kick returns are definitely not standard in anyway. This league also made it so the Defense was separate from special teams. So a KR or PR TD went to the player not the DST.
 
I use kick and punt return yardage in a couple of my leagues, but it doesn’t amount to much. .03 per kick return yard and .05 per punt return yard, plus small threshold bonuses at 100+ yards. Stand-alone kick returners really have little value unless they run one back, but it does enhance the Ray-Ray McCloud types just a little to make them more flex worthy. More or less a supplement to general scoring for those who do both (i.e. play offense and special teams). Makes some sense to add ways to accumulate a few extra points because if your player returns kicks, he takes on liability to lose points if he fumbles a return. Since actual kick return TDs are few and far between.

Where it comes into a little significance is if a guy returns a kick 90 yards and is tackled at the 1, he still gets a few points for the great return (2-3 in the case of a kick return). If you only get points for TDs, he gets nothing.
 
it helps boost a few decent players who return kicks and punts into good players but that's about it. Sometimes can find a bit of a value with these guys.
 
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I've found unless the scoring is large, it doesn't have a lot of effect unless the player is a special exception like Hester was, and even then it's more of a bye week filler level. Where it become a factor sometimes was if you have separate defensive players, it would elevate some CB's to more stable value. But the kickoff change rules even years ago (when they moved touchbacks forward) killed off a lot of that value. I wouldn't use that for anything more than an absolute tiebreaker unless your scoring is high (0.1 per is not).
 
Several leagues yes over the last 15 years or so. This was after guys like Mitchell and Hester were fantasy relevant.

Initially, I overvalued these players. I remember my first time in one of these leagues I drafted (I forget the player, but let's say like a Cordarelle Patterson type player) was too early as by WR2 and it put me way behind. However, over time, and once I got better at customizing the draft dominator, I think I got good at finding the margins within this rule.

Rashid Shaheed is a great example this year. I was able to get him in these leagues because I had him slightly more valued than my league mates (who seem to mostly ignore this scoring rule) and it's paid dividends as Shaheed is a reliable WR2 in those leagues.
 
My dynasty IDP league does this. It's a nice little boost for some players but our scoring does it make it critical. It mostly helps some of the DB's as a lot of them return kicks. I never really take it into consideration with respect to draft/acquisitions unless there is a tie and one of the guys returns kicks and the other doesn't.
 
Been in a couple IDP dynasties for over 20 years, and they have always had return stats count. I would imagine it's pretty much standard for IDP leagues.
 
Scott Fish Bowl added this as a Scoring System tweak for this Season.

I drafted KaVontae Turpin in the last (22nd) round of my draft, as a flyer, just to see what he might do within those parameters.

Six weeks in, he's WR#4, #15 Player, overall.

Production has been a bit of a roller coaster, however. I didn't start him in Week 1 when he scored 36 points (#5 overall). I started him the following 2 weeks (9.85, 15.45 - meh), back to the bench for weeks 4, 5 (0.00, 16.75)...had too many players who I felt could reasonably score 20+ points in Week 6 (and thankfully, my 229.13 score was tops in my League, so it worked out), but Turpin and his 47.05 points staring at me from my bench...that 47.05 points was good for #3 overall in Week 6. #1 was Sean Tucker. #2...Laviska Shenault (47.80).

Pretty sure SFB will be adjusting that for 2025.
 
I've played in an IDP keeper league for 20-ish years that adds a point for every 15 return yards. It has some other unusual scoring settings as well... 1.5PPR, and .25 per completion for QB's (not to mention 6 pts for all TD's). So, offensive scoring can get pretty high. Meanwhile, defensive players are the opposite (1 pts per tackle, 0.5 per assist), so the average defender in any given week might score 5-8 points.

As mentioned above, guys like Hester can definitely have a lot of value, especially in leagues like mine where 75 return yards in a game can essentially double their typical points. Of course, the problem is that finding guys who play regularly AND return kicks is pretty uncommon. And, with rule changes over the years, there are just less and less returns than there were 10-15 years ago.

I remember winning that league maybe 10-15 years ago with Josh Wilson as one of my DB's. He was one of the rare starting CB's who also returned most of Seattle's kicks. I wouldn't say he was a league winner (because, again, DB scoring was relatively low), but having a guy who scores 10-12 PPG when everyone else at his position is scoring half of that did make a difference.

On offense, it's even more rare... Even guys like Dante Hall (one of the best return guys in the past 30 years) barely scored enough to make himself fantasy-relevant. He had games where he made an impact outside of kick returns, but not consistently enough. That said, if you can find the occasional starting WR who also returns kicks, it can be a game-changer. Of course, those situations are usually short-term because teams typically don't put starters on special teams for long, unless they're super talented at returning kicks.
 
1 KR yard = 0.01 points for DST

Added this a few years back, and I haven’t had a single tie since. I only added it for this exact reason and it works beautifully
 
I don't remember the exact settings, but many years ago I played in a league where kickoff return yardage was so valuable that Dante Hall was in the mix for #1 overall WR. Nobody else in the league really grasped this, so I'd load up on RB early, get a stud QB and TE, then draft Dante in like the 6th round and a few other return guys late.

One of my Dante Hall teams went 14-0, but all my other stars got hurt during the last few weeks of the fantasy regular season and I lost in the opening round of the playoffs to a 5-9 team. I think that's when I decided I liked roto baseball better than FF.
 
Did it in our home league about a decade ago. Went 1 point/20 return yards and 6 pt TD, also dropped Team DST and went IDP. It added a nice boost to a guy like Shaheed this past weekend, when he did very little offensively but returned a punt for a TD. We like it.

This was inspired a few years earlier in another league where I had Antonio Brown and he scored AGAINST me and cost me a game. Brown returned a punt for a TD for my opponent's Steelers DST, and I got nothing. I really didn't like that at all.
 
My 14 team IDP redraft league does return yardage - that's fumble returns, interception returns, and punt/kick returns (0.1 pt per yeard). It gives the DB's who get picks and the DL guys who might scoop a QB fumble a boost, to help level them out with the LB's who rack up tackles.

Usually for kick return yardage it's too often where guys like Turpin or some teams' backup RB does the returning, and unless they house one it's not enough to make them viable. But for guys like Shaheed (or Lockett a few years ago) who were already WR2 on their own team, it vaulted them to borderline WR1 territory for fantasy.
 
16 team Idp dynasty and we also use kick return yards. Generally I'll grab an end if roster flex for guys who have the floor of return yards.
 
My 14 team IDP redraft league does return yardage - that's fumble returns, interception returns, and punt/kick returns (0.1 pt per yeard).

IDP league in it's 23rd season does this but it's a pt per 20 yards (fractional) not 10 yards. I like it either way.
I always wondered if I could catch lightning in a bottle with a DB who also returned kicks. I tried it with Marcus Jones once, but the lack of tackles was more of a hindrance than anything. Might have been more advantageous if we were able to have separate slots for CB and S instead of just a generic DB.
 
I always wondered if I could catch lightning in a bottle with a DB who also returned kicks. I tried it with Marcus Jones once, but the lack of tackles was more of a hindrance than anything. Might have been more advantageous if we were able to have separate slots for CB and S instead of just a generic DB.

We start 11 idps, 2s and 2cbs, so squoring preseason reports for starting cb kick/punt returners is always a thing. Deion would have been fun.
 

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