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Jonathan Stewart thinks this 9 yard run is valuable. Why doesn't your fantasy scoring?

I am a fantasy sports addict.  Certain times of the year my wife can legitimately be called a fantasy widow, like during the August run for the baseball playoffs when I’m also doing my fourteen football drafts and working 80+ hours per week on getting fantasy football software ready for the season.

Playing in all these leagues every year not only tests her somehow infinite patience, but also gives me a good perspective of what I think works and what doesn’t.  Fantasy sports is not only a beautifully imperfect game, but also has the great privilege of being endlessly configured to personal tastes.  But sometimes rules that don’t make sense linger because of some warped sense of tradition or something.

Non-fractional scoring sucks in a points league.

Yet it’s one of the most common of the crappy rules whenever I join a new fantasy football league.  Chris Johnson breaks off a 9 yard run to ice the clock at the end of the game and you get 0 points for it.  If he had stretched for one more yard it would have resulted in 1 fantasy point.  The obvious question is:  Why was that meaningless extra yard so meaningful?

Valuing that last yard at one fantasy point and the previous 9 yards at zero fantasy points just seems flat out retarded.  In my somehow warped mind nine is 90% as good as ten.  That 25th yard passing is only .04 points better than the 24 yards before it instead of a full point.  I know the math is hard.

The only reason I see for non-fractional scoring is that the whoever created the rules thinks that you are too stupid to be able to follow the final score of 89.8 – 103.5 and need it dumbed down to 86 – 101.  Don’t patronize me.  I can look at decimal points without breaking down in frustration.

What this rule does is force the fantasy sports players to pay attention to pretty meaningless milestones instead of the total of statistical effort.  Why do I need to care about making sure that Miles Austin gets yard stats where the number ends in 0 instead of 9?  It detracts, whatever minuscule amount, from the overall enjoyment of following your team when you need to pay attention to these abstract milestones for your base stats.  If you need this order in your life, I suggest looking into performance based scoring where you get points for your yards plus a BONUS when reaching milestones.  But keep that junk out of the base stats.

Every fantasy football league from here on out needs to use fractional scoring.  I’d include the other sports but football seems to be kind of unique in waiting until a certain threshold of stats before giving any points.  Most baseball and basketball points leagues have the good sense to reward each incremental value of a stat equally.  At some point in the past fantasy football made it common place not to and for no logical reason it stuck.  Stop it.

Reward .1 points for 1 yard instead of waiting until 10 yards for 1 point.  Please help rid the world of dumb fantasy football rules.