After tonight, there’s a good chance that I scored the second most points of the week in my 12-team league during three out of the past four weeks and lost every single time. Read that again.

I know you got screwed this year yourself, but the tribulations of my main team are the stuff of legend, I kid you not. I had Tomlinson (R1), Peterson (5), Roethlisberger (7) and a ton of other pieces I traded for during the season, including Braylon, Gates…..even Ryan Grant. In our format, exactly three teams averaged 100 ppg this season. Most were at 90 or less.

I scored below 90 points exactly once in 13 weeks. Once. I scored over 1420 on the season, shattering our league’s single-season scoring record by nearly 100 points (this goes back three years). In short, I had a wonderful campaign, the finest season ever turned in by a club in our format.

I also went 7-6 and missed the playoffs by 1/2 game (to a team which will not crack 1100 on the season), due to fluke occurrences, such as, say, Favre hitting Jennings on a 80-something yard bomb in OVERTIME ON THE MONDAY NIGHT GAME to bring my opponent back from a 17-pt loss to a 2-pt win, or losing to the worst team in the league (the only autodrafted one) when they had a miraculous 120 point day, by far their best of the season (I had like 115, 2nd most in the league that week). I LOST more games in which I scored over 100 points than 3/4s of the teams managed to pass that mark, W or L.

That was nothing but luck. I struggle to think of analogies, but maybe this is like an MIT grad losing out on a nice job to a newly-minted DeVry grad. Or maybe a Ferrari losing a race to a Fiat, because a friggin’ meteor fell out of the heavens and hit the Ferrari mid-race. FFL is supposed to be a “tournament of skill”, which is the whole reason we can put money on it and escape the prohibition on gambling. I am now convinced that H2H format in football is nothing but gambling, that there is very little skill involved at all. At least with baseball and basketball there is a tendency towards the norm; that’s not present in football b/c of the tiny slate of games.

I missed the playoffs last year (again, by a 1/2 game) despite having the 3rd most points in the league, but that was no biggie to me, it still seemed fair. This year was so much worse. I don’t know what your thoughts are on the subject, but I have proposed to my league (and they have accepted) that next year’s pot will be split, with halfish going to the playoff winners, and the other halfish (there are small weekly payouts for the high scorer as well) going to the 1-2-3 finishers on points over the entire 17-week season on a roughly similar split.

This might not be perfect, but at least it eliminates the apparent problem of superpower teams getting jack squat b/c of totally arbitrary scheduling. I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.