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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?

Comments (1)

By Rathan Haran, September 24, 2009 3:00 pm

First off, Eli Manning is a great quarterback whose number will probably never reflect how good he really is.  I’m not interested in the big arm of Jay Cutler, and the accuracy of Drew Brees, or the double threat QB nightmare in Philadelphia (McNabb and Vick).  Eli Manning flat out just knows how to win games (without the ego and attitude), and he’s getting better at it.

Aside from this, there were two things I took away from the Giants Cowboys game on Sunday night, played at the eighth and ninth modern wonders of the world (Jerry Jones words, not mine), the new Cowboys Stadium.  The first thing is that the Giant receivers are pretty good and I’ll specifically note the circus TD catch by Super Mario Manningham and the incredible juke Steve Smith put on before scoring.  In basketball,  the term is “broken ankles” and in competitive urban street dance, I believe it’s “you got served Orlando Scandrick.”

The second thing was how ridiculously popular it’s become to attempt to freeze the kicker by calling a time-out at the last possible half second so that the first attempt at a field goal doesn’t count.  My buddy Jeff brought up how silly the pay-off matrix looks like when coaches try to do this.  Essentially if the kicker makes the first attempt, then there’s no reason for the kicker to believe that he can’t make it again, since kicking FGs is a highly repeatable and high probability of success event (NFL average FGs made percentage was 84.5% last year).  If he misses, then he essentially has taken a practice shot, and now can adjust to better his outcome since the physical conditions of the kick hasn’t change.  Your hoping that the best case scenario happens twice, which if kicking FGs were independent, it would be something like a 2% probability of missing twice.

There is a mental element to missing a field goal, much like their is one to making one, but I don’t think that there is a strong relationship between kicking events.  In math world, it’s call the autocorrelation, which is the cross-correlation of a signal with itself.  In field goal kicking/inane time-out  world, the signal is the made/miss on a FG attempt.  It’s saying that if a kicker produces higher than average  success rate (made FG = 100% which is greater than NFL average 84.5%), then if the autocorrelation is high he’s more likely to make the next, and if he misses (made FG = 0%), then he’s more likely to miss the next attempt.  While I can see the autocorrelation being high on made FG attempts, I just don’t think it’s true on missed attempts (how many times have you seen a kicker miss even two in a row in the NFL from the exact same spot?)

If you really want to play a mental game with an opposing kicker, giving him a practice kick is hardly the answer.  I’d call time-out once the kicker got comfortable, but not where he could complete his routine by taking the kick.  Or try something like this legendary inbound play in a high-school basketball game, because it’s all about the element of surprise, and the last-second freeze play isn’t a surprise anymore.