Untangling a tie of six teams that finished with .500 records in my own league, I am reminded that tiebreakers are tricky. I would guess that many commissioners have unwittingly made errors altering the seeding of their playoff teams.
We run our league on MyFantasyLeague.com (which is a great site – able to handle all of the complexities of our salary-cap format). But it can be argued that even MyFantasyLeague.com made an error in breaking our most-recent ties.
In this most particular situation, we had two separate three-way ties. One in the Yerxa Conference, and one in the Pember Conference. You break those first, settling on the order in each division. Then, when handing out wild-card berths, the next step involves comparing one team from each division. Not too complicated, and the vast majority of commissioners are familiar with such a situation.
The nuance of tiebreaking that often is overlooked involves re-starting the process each time a team is removed. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s huge. And it’s the way the NFL – the league at the top of the pyramid – breaks its ties.
From page 27 of the NFL Record & Fact Book: “Only one club advances to the playoffs in any tie-breaking step. Remaining tied clubs revert to the first step of the applicable division or Wild Card tie-breakers.”
Seems harmless enough, but let’s look at this rule in action.
1995 NFC West Division
St. Louis, Carolina, New Orleans all finished with 7-9 records. Rams (with Chris Miller starting at quarterback) went 3-1 against the other teams. Panthers went 1-3. Saints went 2-2. The NFL did not place them in Rams-Saints-Panthers order using head-to-head records. Instead, Rams capture the first spot (with their 3-1 mark), then the process re-started, with Carolina vs. New Orleans considered as a new, separate tie. Those teams went 1-1 against each other, but Carolina (further down in the process) had a better conference record. So the Panthers beat Saints in the tiebreaker, despite having a lesser record when looking at the head-to-head records of the three-way tie.
This was the situation my league encountered, and it’s a very common scenario in fantasy leagues. And for this league management software, they didn’t follow the NFL’s lead. There was no re-start after the breaking of the initial three-way tie. They instead went with Rams-Saints-Panthers. This, of course, is huge in a situation where two of the three teams land playoff berths.
1990 NFC Central Division
Four teams finished with 6-10 records: Tampa Bay, Detroit, Green Bay and Minnesota. Using head-to-head results as a tiebreaker, Tampa Bay went 5-1 against those teams. Detroit and Minnesota each went 2-4. And Green Bay went 3-3.
It’s the same kind of situation. Many commissioners (and league websites) would put Tampa Bay first and Packers second, using those head-to-head records (Green Bay, after all, had a better head-to-head record than both Detroit and Minnesota in that four-team group). Then an additional tiebreaker would be used on the Lions and Vikings.
But that’s not how it’s done (at least using the NFL’s method). Instead, Tampa Bay won that four-team tie. Then there was a re-start with three remaining teams. Detroit (despite having a lesser win-loss record in the initial four-team tie) ended up ahead of the Packers. And after another re-start, Green Bay came in ahead of Minnesota.
I swapped emails with Mike Hall, the owner at MyFantasyLeague.com. He says he’s aware that their rules for breaking ties is slightly different than the NFL’s, but that they won’t be changing. “To be honest, it’s just a legacy thing,” Hall wrote. “We set it up that way back when our system started 20 years ago, and it has remained that way for the tie breakers ever since.”
There are a bunch of other companies running fantasy leagues. I don’t have the run-down on all of them, but I would guess that most of them probably break ties more like MyFantasyLeague.com rather than like the NFL itself. Most probably aren’t aware of the league’s exact rules, and the NFL system is slightly more complicated – I don’t think most computer programmers (if asked to draw up tie-breaking code) would think up on their own the extra step of re-starting after each time a team was removed.
This can be discussed in your league, but doing so potentially could open a massive can of worms. On the night of the draft, perhaps there was agreement that ties would be broken using head-to-head records. But should ties be broken using the methods of the league website? Or is it better to follow rules that mirror those of the NFL? In our league, we follow the lead of the mother league, but the owners are reminded of this regularly over the years.
Whichever system you use, it’s possible for a team to finish 2nd in a three-way tiebreaker despite beating both of the other teams when compared individually. At least with the way we have our league wired, with points scored as the second tiebreaker. In our league, you can have the highest scoring of three teams having split with the two other teams in the tie. So compared against either of those teams individually, the highest-scoring team would win. But if one of those two lesser teams swept the other in the regular season, it would finish at the top of a three-team tie.
If you want to avoid the murkiness of how to apply a head-to-head tiebreaker, the easy option is to instead go with total points or all-play records as the primary tiebreaker. Both of those metrics are arguably more equitable tiebreakers anyway.