This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
That's true to some extent, but it's not a rule. While dominant defenses hinder their special teams, there are plenty of bad teams that also have bad kick return teams--and that's one reason they aren't any good. Typically there's a nice spread of good/bad teams in a system that rewards you for having an excellent returner.Our system:-jb- said:
I have played in leagues which do both. I find I'd rather have special teams as its own slot than adding return points to individual players.There is some small amount of skill involved in remembering to adjust for/include player return yardage in your projections. Unless you have a high points for it (and 1/15 probably qualifies as high in my opinion for individual players, but not for ST units) it is still seldom a driving force though.But when it is its own position, to do well at it you need to make predictions on teams overall return yardage. That often involves making predictions about how good a team's defense will be, since return yardage is driven by kick returns more often than by punts. I'd much rather see people making that whole new set of rankings than tweaking a few players projections scattered across RB, WR, CB and S. Not saying that's the only way to do it, but you asked why, and I think it adds more chance for skill to rise to the top.For the OP, yes, the worst defenses are normally high in our list of ST units. I'm fine with that, as it is something that lends itself to being predicted. Just like we use punters with gross punting yardage and the best punters are often on the bad teams. But that's not a given it's always the worst teams. Great returners like Hester, Cribbs, Andre Davis, Dante Hall a few years ago, etc, can make a huge difference. Last year the bad defense teams seemed to dominate the ST units, but the year before the Browns were #1 for us, Texans #2, and Bears #4. Those teams ranked 16th, 21st, and 23rd in total points against, so they were average to below average defenses, but not the worst ones in the league despite being 3 of our top 4 ST units. Mainly it was that they had great returners that year who had a lot of long returns and a lot of touchdowns on them.And FWIW, our scoring system for ST units is 1/10 for either type of return yardage and 6 pt TDs. Again, I want a system that lends itself to skill being able to make predictions... just scoring TDs or having TD heavy scoring does the opposite. If I was doing the scoring system and was giving return points to individual players I'd probably have it more like 1/30. In my other league which doesn't use ST units, we have 1/35 yardage.I'll also note, my league has high scoring in general as it has higher PPR and IDP scoring than most leagues, and we start 2 to 3 times as many players as each week (26 starters, 55 man roster)... so 1/10 works for us and doesn't make their game to game variation too much nor is a big game by a ST unit going to dominate a week for anyone. For other league setups I might go with less return yardage points to avoid that happening.
