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By Rathan Haran, November 30, 2009 4:09 pm

I’ve been playing in a fantasy football league with the same group of guys for about ten years now, and like many others of you out there, I just can’t win.  It seems like everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, from a missed extra point to the NFL reviewing game tape to change the marking of a fumble which causes enough yardage difference to drop you 1 point loss in a game against the other team going for the last playoff spot (didn’t happen to me, but did to another manager whose opponent called up the NFL offices posing as a reporter to question a Jonathan Stewart fumble last year … priceless).

Now if you are an astute fantasy football player, you know exactly what it takes for you to win a game.  Even in the waning seconds of a game, I can come up with the most ridiculous real life football play that would pull my team out from the jaws of defeat and on to capturing an elusive Small Show* championship and the prestigious Portis Belt (and eventually making it rain like Pacman Jones).

My White Elephant

After years of perfecting this ability, I started to think about what would be the most desperate of desperation plays that would be needed by a single player on your team to overcome a seemingly insurmountable lead.  At first I thought it was obvious, the 99 yard rushing/receiving touchdown from a running back/wide receiver/tight end.  The field is only 100 yards and a touchdown is the most amount of points you can score on a single play.  It’s the max on yardage and points on a single possible offensive play.  Defenses usually aren’t rewarded for return yards, so the best you can hope for there is a sack, fumble recovery, touchdown.

Actually there is a way to top the 99 yard, 1 TD effort, and this play is one of the rarest you’ll ever see.  It is a legitimate football play for the quarterback to throw a pass, have it deflected by a defender,  and then catch the deflection and run with it (Brett Farve’s first completion was to himself).  This counts as both passing AND receiving stats making it possible for a quarterback to throw and receive a 99 yard touchdown pass on the same play for 26.2 points of fantasy legacy.  Here’s a breakdown of the most possible points by position for a typical points-per-reception fantasy football league:

Theoretically, any offensive player can do this (i.e., Ronnie Brown Ricky Williams in the Wildcat), but for practical purposes, we’ll expect the quarterback to be handling the ball at the end of the game.  So if your QB is backed up to his 1-yard line with 4 seconds left in the game and you are down 26, keep the faith, you still have a shot!

Here’s that Brett Favre completion to himself:

*The Small Show is the fantasy league that I play in.  I’m currently 4 and 7 and up by 5 points this week with Pierre Thomas (my guy) going against Tom Brady and John Carney (his guys) tonight.  If I win this week and next week I have an outside chance of getting into the play-offs provided another team loses and I can outscore him in Total Points.  What do you think my chances are in both tonight’s game and the playoffs?