Tie Breakers for playoff seedings

[Jersey35]

Great topic and one I feel pretty strongly about. IMHO the goal of most fantasy leagues is to reward the best team(s) with an opportunity for the cash at the end of the year. This means doing our best to ensure that the best teams make the playoffs.

There's probably no perfect way to completely accurately measure which single team is the best, but I think it's safe to say that any use of head-to-head as a barometer is flawed at best. Head-to-head matchups are wonderful for generating excitement, maintaining weekly interest, and creating the rivalries that every league needs, but they are terrible for determining which fantasy team is actually the best. It is well within the realm of possibility that a team could be by far the most talent laden and consistent in the league, score by far the most points, yet go winless in head to head. They simply have to have the misfortune of always being the 2nd highest scoring team of the week up against the highest scoring team. While this scenario is unlikely, it serves to underscore that head-to-head, while fun, isn't the best way to evaluate team quality.

Generally speaking, most would say that total points or all-play record or "Victory Points" are currently the leaders for team evaluation, and I'd agree. I think if you're playing in a purely head-to-head league - which already allows for a great deal more luck in determining outcomes - and you're seeding your playoffs by record (or win %), you're only reducing the chances that the best teams are rewarded if you then use head-to-head as your first tie-breaker. Head-to-head tiebreakers are now taking an already small sample size for evaluating the quality of a team (13-14 games) and reducing it down to two or maybe even just one game. In fantasy, even more so than the NFL, the "worse" team can beat the "better" team on any given week since fantasy teams can't control how many points their opponents put up, and narrowing your selection criteria down to just one or two games only serves to magnify this problem.

Not that our way is the best, but we actually hand out up to two wins or losses each week in my league. One win (or loss) for head-to-head, and one for scoring in the top half (or bottom half) of the league. Teams are seeded for the playoffs based on record, and our first tie-breaker is total points. Our #1 priority (besides having fun) was making sure that the best teams (to the best of our ability to establish) were the ones that had a chance at the cash. Since 2000, I don't believe we've ever had anyone really question the playoff participants.

Good luck!