...I think the best thing that you can do to help competative balance is to have close to a standard scoring system as possible so that anyone who joins would be able to seemlessly evaluate the playing field instead of trying to view whatever scoring rules you arbitrarily punch in to try and 'try' and level the playing field thru that prism.
I have really mixed feelings about this advice. Yes, owners who don't know what they are doing are hurt more when they can't go download a cheatsheet off the net and have it apply perfectly to their league.But that also doesn't deal at all with the competitive balance part the OP seemed to me to want to deal with, which is the the top 1-3 RBs being so overvalued vs other positions that having one of them is a huge advantage.
Having a more standard scoring system helps owners who know how to evaluate players because no loophole is ripe for the plucking in a standard scoring league or people would be taking advantage of it. RBs should be valued more if they score more points. A few years ago Peyton Manning and Daunte Culpepper dominated scoring as they should have because they produced more. Last year LdT had a record breaking season and dominated and he should have. Looking from a longer time span RBs produce more than WRs/TEs annually but they have shorter NFL lives on average. So over the course of the NFL life of the player RBs should be able to score more over a shorter time span to reflect their impact. If they produce more they should be rewarded more. Its that simple. As far as being able to deal with the fact that some teams will have top RBs and others won't, well some teams will have injuries and others won't, some will have top QBs and others won't, some teams will be perrenially snake bitten and others won't. I don't think anyone who advocates using close to standard scoring is advocating anything unfair. In starting up a league everyone should be as even as possible especially in their ability to judge players on an equal footing and everyone should be versed in standard league scoring.
I guess I wouldn't recommend what you're suggesting, of dumbing down a league to the lowest common denominator. If you want a competitive league without the uber-stud RBs, you balance the value across positions and either get good owners in your league, or educate the existing owners as to how to determine value.
I want uber stud RBs and QBs and WRs and TEs and LBs, etc, et el... I know if everyone is able to judge talent on an equal footing that I'm not going to have an all uber stud team but I like my chances over time of being able to assemble an uber stud team. If I get shut out on the initial draft, I would not panick or feel the teams who were able to pick at the top of the draft and who had gotten the top RBs held an advantage over my ability to compete. I'd judge what was available to me and if I felt I needed to think longer term then I'd switch my strategy to longer term. Landing an uber stud RB from an initial draft if no guarantee of automatic success, I've seen that blow up in people's faces many a'time.
Tweaking of standard rules is fine but major changes cause havoc. If all participants know how to properly evaluate players then it negates the biggest advantage a shark has going into a league which is knowing how to use rules meant to balance out the playing field as a fulcrum to gain an advantage. Their is always luck so how teams get slotted to select in the initial draft could be an advantage but if all players knew how to value players properly then less poor choices would take place and no shark advantage would happen from the get-go.
And I didn't agree there. If the problem is players not knowing how to value players, then teach them how to value them. What you're advocating isn't making them better owners, it's letting them get by without knowing what they are doing by catering to the content they can find for free on the web.
LOL, I guess I don't base my draft decisions on what I can find on the web for free and I highly doubt any shark here does. Standard scoring is a better way to start rather than to assume the playing field is going to be skewed so a league should try to put in pre-emptive fixes where they don't need to be.
The only scoring rule tweaks that we have is:- 4pts per passing TD for QBs so that QBs are not overvalued (this has actually become standard scoring for QBs)
One of my pet peeves here... 4 pt TDs USED to be standard scoring, but statistics from sites like MFL have shown that 6 pt passing TDs have become the standard by a good margin. In fact there's been some pretty big threads here about it urging FBG's to go to 6 pt TDs in their standard scoring as a result.
a few leagues that I know of allow 0-2 RBs and 3-5 WRs to start. RBs are still very important, but WRs are pretty much equal in this format.Almost no matter what you do, LT, SJax and perhaps LJ are going to be the most valuable players, but I like it when the 2nd tier and lower RBs aren't more valuable than stud WRs. Starting requirements are the best way to do this.
