Playing weekly matchup against your league's average- does anyone do this? (1 Viewer)

I have a league that I've ran for 21 years. Our members last year voted to institute a schedule where we played 2 head-to-head matchups per week, and it was received with enthusiasm. This has prompted some discussion about modifying the schedule going forward so that we can play 2 matchups per week, with 1 matchup being a head-to-head vs a team in the league, and the 2nd matchup being against the league average for that week. They seem to like this option for the mitigating factor of "bad beats", or one team always seeming to play the league's high scorer every week. Our league is set up so that I don't actually make all the rules, I just run it. We have a rules committee that sets the rules, scoring, etc. So I am asking on behalf of them.

My question is, has anyone ever done this, and if so, how did you set it up? Are there certain websites that facilitate that better than others? 

Yes, it's often called victory points (VP). You get 1 VP if you win your head-to-head matchup and 1 VP if you finish in the top half of teams in scoring that week. (There are also other variations, like giving 2 VP for being in the top third of teams in scoring and 1 VP for finishing in the middle third.) MFL definitely has this option. Probably some other sites do too but I don't know.

I’m in a doubleheader league on MFL that does exactly this, without using VPs

Shrek said:

I have a league that I've ran for 21 years. Our members last year voted to institute a schedule where we played 2 head-to-head matchups per week, and it was received with enthusiasm. This has prompted some discussion about modifying the schedule going forward so that we can play 2 matchups per week, with 1 matchup being a head-to-head vs a team in the league, and the 2nd matchup being against the league average for that week. They seem to like this option for the mitigating factor of "bad beats", or one team always seeming to play the league's high scorer every week. Our league is set up so that I don't actually make all the rules, I just run it. We have a rules committee that sets the rules, scoring, etc. So I am asking on behalf of them.

My question is, has anyone ever done this, and if so, how did you set it up? Are there certain websites that facilitate that better than others? 

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The bolded....yeah, that happens in every single league, every single week (couldn’t resist  ). But I get what you’re saying. 
 

I commish a 10+ year dynasty league and we're starting fresh and moving from MFL to Sleeper (free!) and they have a feature in their settings, "extra game against league median", and we're turning that on for the first time this year for the same reasons you mention in your post. I’m digging sleeper as they’re free and they have all of the features that we’re interested in for our league's setup, so don’t need all the fancy MFL a stuff. And, honestly, I don’t miss MFL's crazy calendar even setups for waivers, etc that I felt like had a new wrinkle each year and I had to relearn and re-setup the basics of our blind bid waiver system. But, IMO, I set it up in a way that is a single button setup in other hosting sites. [/rant]

I think you’d have to use the median instead of the average. That way you would ensure the same number of wins each week. Agains the average it would vary.

kutta said:

I think you’d have to use the median instead of the average. That way you would ensure the same number of wins each week. Agains the average it would vary.

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Yes. That’s what Sleeper’s setting is: median, not average