In the kickers portion of our Experts Poll, Michael Nease of Big Guy Fantasy Sports started his top 20 with the worst pick of anyone: Ka’imi Fairbairn. Fairbairn was very good a year ago but ranked only 20th in 2019. But Nease rallied with enough good other picks to win the position anyway.
That may sound weird (because it is weird). But this isn’t a regular fantasy league, where you draft one kicker and he’s your guy. Instead, we’re scoring every pick. We’ve got 20 experts picking 20 players at each position; the higher each player is ranked, the more he counts in the scoring. In this style of competition, less important than whether you ranked Fairbairn 1st, 3rd or 5th is whether other players on your top 15 got benched, injured or waived.
Nease did a better job than the others at avoiding the car-crash players. Stephen Gostkowski missed most of the season. Most experts had Gostkowski in their top 4, but Nease had him down at 11th. Similarly, he was the only contestant who didn’t have Michael Badgley on his list, and one of the few who didn’t rank Giorgio Tavecchio or Aldrick Rosas. Badgley got hurt, Tavecchio didn’t play at all, and Rosas had a low-scoring season. When those guys struggled, it hurt the other 19 experts a lot more than Nease.
Nease also benefitted by ranking Josh Lambo 10th – way higher than everyone else. Lambo scored 118 points, ranking 7th at the position.
Our scoring system for this competition is notoriously complex. Basically, we’re taking a player’s production and multiplying it against the position where he was ranked. Fairbairn, for example, scored 100 points. Nease ranked him first, so said pick was worth 2,500 points (100 x 25). Had he ranked him 2nd, he would have received 2,400 points (100 x 24). He had ranked him 3rd, it would have gone for 2,300 points (100 x 23) and so on.
Rather than using a descending scale of 20 to 1 (as the multiplier numbers) we use 25 to 6. With the 20-1 scale, players ranked 18th, 19th and 20th simply don’t matter much at all. With the 25-6 scale, the 20th-ranked players are worth almost a quarter as much as the top-ranked players.
| EXPERTS POLL, KICKERS | |
|---|---|
| Analyst | Points |
| Michael Nease | 32,269 |
| Lenny Pappano | 31,373 |
| Sam Hendricks | 30,745 |
| Scott Pianowski | 30,527 |
| Paul Charchian | 30,523 |
| Michael Nazarek | 30,278 |
| Cory Bonini | 30,073 |
| Jody Smith | 29,910 |
| Jeff Ratcliffe | 29,836 |
| Jesse Pantuosco | 29,795 |
| Chris Liss | 29,483 |
| Brack Varnon | 29,448 |
| Tony Holm | 29,267 |
| Mike Clay | 29,081 |
| Bryan Teegardin | 28,876 |
| Alan Satterlee | 28,593 |
| John Hansen | 28,523 |
| David Dorey | 28,312 |
| Bob Henry | 28,283 |
| Aaron Bland | 28,027 |
That’s just one way to score it, of course. You can change some of the parameters, and some shuffling occurs within the list. I have used 20-1, 25-6 and 30-11 scoring scales over the years, and they all result in changes in the ordering of the 20 experts. It can be debated which of those systems is best.
Probably the No. 1 flaw in this kind of competition is the issue of how to stop the injured and released players – Gostkowski, Tavecchio, Badgley – from playing too large of a role. So at the suggestion of Chris Liss of Rotowire.com a few years back, I’ve also developed a scoring system with a floor at each position.
Using this grading system, we operate under the assumption that if you misfired on a pick, you would use the waiver wire to pick up an adequate replacement along the way. It seems reasonable to figure that such a team probably wouldn’t get a starter, but would get a good backup. So for our baseline-type guys, we use the 13th kicker, quarterback, tight end or defense. Teams tend to start two running backs and wide receivers, so we use the 25th-best player at those positions.
With kickers, Jason Myers was the 13th-best scorer, with 109 points. So when grading using this alternate scoring method, we’re looking only at the 12 kickers who scored more than 109 points – you’re getting credit for only those points above 109. When you look at the kickers ranked outside the top 12 – Fairbairn, Tavecchio, Rosas, Daniel Carlson, Austin Seibert – we don’t care what order you have them in. It just doesn’t matter.
If we use this alternate scoring method, Scott Pianowski of Yahoo Sports moves up into the top spot. He’s followed by Lenny Pappano (Draft Sharks) and Sam Hendricks (Extra Point Press).
Interestingly, the three who finish in the top 3 in this scoring system all ranked in the top 4 in the traditional format. Nease, meanwhile, dropped from 2nd all the way down to 17th (he gets more penalized for missing on Fairbairn, and also for being lower than most on Harrison Butker and Wil Lutz).
| EXPERTS POLL, KICKERS (alternate) | |
|---|---|
| Analyst | Points |
| Scott Pianowski | 2,889 |
| Lenny Pappano | 2,863 |
| Sam Hendricks | 2,857 |
| Jody Smith | 2,851 |
| Bryan Teegardin | 2,831 |
| Bob Henry | 2,795 |
| Michael Nazarek | 2,788 |
| Paul Charchian | 2,746 |
| Cory Bonini | 2,739 |
| Brack Varnon | 2,722 |
| Jeff Ratcliffe | 2,684 |
| David Dorey | 2,679 |
| John Hansen | 2,664 |
| Mike Clay | 2,653 |
| Tony Holm | 2,651 |
| Jesse Pantuosco | 2,634 |
| Michael Nease | 2,633 |
| Chris Liss | 2,594 |
| Aaron Bland | 2,558 |
| Alan Satterlee | 2,534 |
I’ll grade all of the positions in the coming days (using both scoring systems) and then we’ll crown an overall champion at the end.
Similarly, we are working on tabulating the final scores for the sister competition, the Fantasy Index Open. That’s the same competition, but it’s open to readers (and has a later deadline). Scores on that competition will be announced soon, with the overall winner capturing a gigantic trophy from the team at Affordable-Trophies.com.
The top 2 finishers in the Fantasy Index Open earn spots in the regular Experts Poll. The two qualifiers from 2018 are the in the charts above – Brack Varnon of Houston, and Bryan Teegardin of Rochester, N.Y.
—Ian Allan