I have officially joined a fantasy football league for the 2025 season; the last time I participated in fantasy football was 2011, which was a letdown year (I placed 8th out of 12, but had the 3rd most points which suggests I was unlucky with matchups) following my big win in 2010 largely due to being the only member of my league who had heard of Arian Foster going into the draft. Times have changed, so I am going to document my step back into the water and my impressions of this new era.
It’s impossible to discuss my fantasy football history without explaining the scoring and roster format I was conscripted to. It was goofy as hell, to say the least. To start, the rosters:
QB
RB
RB
WR
WR
TE
W/T flex (no RB!?)
K
D (IDP, not D/ST)
DB (??)
DL (???)
6x Bench
I’m going to go ahead and declare this non-standard. In fact, I’ve never heard of a league with a roster setup remotely close to this one. I don’t know how these guys developed these roster slots, and I’m not about to go track them down and ask about it. It’s all pretty normal until it reaches the flex spot, where it goes off the rails. A WR/TE flex spot may as well just be a third WR, right? The only TE starting in a flex spot by the end of the year was… Aaron Hernandez. Yikes! Their other TE? Kellen Winslow, Jr. Double yikes! You’ll never guess who the QB was. Actually, I’m sure you’ll guess who it was—Roethlisberger, because of course. The owner of that team was my aunt’s ex-husband, a police officer. Clearly, keeping people accountable for their crimes was more of a job than a passion.
Anyway, back to roster construction, which gets even wilder than that TE room. Kicker, which is a breath of normal, fresh air before the descent into madness. IDP leagues aren’t common, but they aren’t unheard of. Triple IDP leagues, however, may as well have been uncharted territory we were sent to explore. Only one slot could be a linebacker, because they were OP (almost as OP as QBs, more on that later). We were also allowed (forced into) a DL and a DB, which was mostly about who could luck into a sack leader or ballhawk. In a 17 round draft, at least three picks were going toward defensive players, and one was going to a kicker.
The scoring system was equally, if not more, incredible. It almost feels like we have to go position-by-position on this one, so let’s start with QB. Normally, even though QBs score a lot of points, they aren’t super valuable because a rushing/receiving yard is worth 2.5x a passing yard, with a rate of 10 yards per point as opposed to 25 for passing. In this league? Not so! Passing yards were 30 per point, while rushing/receiving were 15, so the relative value of passing was higher than usual. If that were all, QBs would be stronger than usual but not overwhelmingly so. Of course, that was not all: in standard scoring leagues, passing touchdowns are worth 4 points, while rushing/receiving touchdowns are worth 6. In our league? Naturally, passing touchdowns were worth 6 as well. Peyton Manning went first overall! (Peyton Manning also missed that entire season with a neck injury, but that guy had set his lineup and autodraft grabbed Manning. He placed 11th, which is one spot better than you’d expect the guy who wasted the first overall pick to go). There were also little bonuses thrown in for reaching certain yardage breakpoints: one for 300, one for 350, and two for 400. These stacked, so a 400 yard, 3 TD game was worth 35 points. (We also didn’t use fractional scoring, so 400 yards and 419 were worth the exact same). Interceptions were -3 instead of -1, but that wasn’t much of a deterrent: 8 QBs went in the first 3 rounds and 11 went by round 5.
There were, of course, bonuses for rushing and receiving yard breakpoints in addition to passing ones. A point for reaching 100 yards, and two more points for 150. A 150-yard game, then, was worth 13 points (exactly the same as a 164-point game, because, of course, no fractional scoring). Since there was only one flex slot, and RBs weren’t allowed to participate in the flexing, there were exactly 24 RBs starting in a given week. The 24th-leading rusher in 2011 was LeGarrette Blount, who would normally be nowhere near the worst starting fantasy RB in a league. We had no PPR, which was maybe the most normal part of our scoring structure at the time, but took a little more shine off RB/WR in favor of QB as far as positional value was concerned. There was, naturally, an extra wrinkle that mostly applied here: return yards were worth a point per 30 yards (the same as passing), return TDs were worth six (like any TD), and there were yardage breakpoints valued at three for 100 return yards, three more for 200, and three more for 300 yards, which has only been done 5 times in NFL history. Anyone who played actual snaps on offense and was a primary kick/punt returner was kind of like having two players in one!
There weren’t any wrinkles for tight ends that didn’t apply to WR, so we can skip them. Kickers were actually pretty standard for the time as well, I believe, with a FG up to 39 yards worth 3 points, 40-49 worth 4 points, and 50+ worth 5 points, with PATs worth 1. Kickers on offenses good enough to kind of move the ball but bad enough to stall out before the red zone were the sweet spot, especially with coaches in 2011 being terrified of going for it on fourth down.
The IDP slots were where things got extra weird. IDP slots are weird in general, of course. Tackles were worth an entire point, which, for those keeping track, means they were worth the same amount as 15 rushing yards or 30 passing yards. Ray Lewis went in the 6th round, and no one blinked! Half tackles were worth half a point, which was the only way to score fractional points in the entire scoring system. Sacks, interceptions, forced fumbles, and fumble recoveries were worth 3 points each. A sack/fumble with the sacker recovering the ball was worth nine points, the equivalent of a 120-yard rushing day (don’t forget the critical 100-yard bonus point!). After linebackers went off the board in the mid-rounds, there was a run on pass-rushers. As for DBs, a pass defensed was only worth a single point, so safeties were the main targets to try to rack up tackles. Without much reason to hold good rushers (only two starting RBs), it made more sense to roster a bunch of high-upside IDPs, which might be a brand new sentence.
It took over a thousand words to describe the inanity of my old fantasy league, which may not have been exactly representative of the game in 2011, but is representative of my experience with the (fake) sport. Tomorrow, I’ll go over my new league’s roster and scoring setup and how I think that will influence my drafting plans for our draft next Tuesday. Until then, have fun Remembering Some guys, Courtesy of my last fantasy team, which was called “Winning All Day” because I drafted Peterson:
Vincent Jackson (RIP)
Philip Rivers (I did not believe in the concept of the emotional hedge and drafted Rivers every year)
Jermichael Finley
Brandon Marshall
Hakeem Nicks
Brandon Jacobs
Mario Manningham (I was apparently really high on the Giants. They did win the Super Bowl, but it only led to an 8/12 finish in fantasy)
Sidney Rice
Lance Moore
Kam Chancellor
D’Qwell Jackson
I drafted Eric Weddle and Julius Peppers early, but they didn’t make it to my final week’s roster. Peterson tore his ACL, but after my season ended.