Strange Plays

The scoring rules are perhaps one of the most important parts of any league.  Even with thousands of fantasy football leagues on MyFantasyLeague.com, there probably aren’t any two leagues that are exactly identical as far as the scoring rules.  This makes each league unique, but it can also cause confusion and controversies about how a stat should be scored, or how a scoring play should be interpreted.

To help with that issue, we highlight and document every strange or unusual play each week, so you con confirm that your rules have been properly set up in your league.  Just go to the “Help > Strange Plays” menu item in your league to view the summary each week.

This week’s “controversy” for a lot of leagues involved the “fake” field goal that resulted in a Passing TD for the Bills.  As noted in our strange plays summary, this is scored by the NFL and shows up in any typical box score as just a regular passing TD.  Therefore, the stats are scored that way for your league.  The NFL does not track “fakes” or other events like this at all, so there isn’t any automatic way to have it scored for your league as a special type of touchdown.  The raw stats and the box score for this will always just show it as a passing TD play.   It does show Brian Moorman (punter) as the person that threw the pass, but that is really the only indicator that it was an unusual play, unless you scrutinize the play-by-play listing to see what exactly happeend on that touchdown.

If you want this touchdown to be counted as a TD for your Punter position, then be sure to add “Passing TDs” as an option for your Punters.  However if you want to score this as a TD for your Special Teams or Team Defense position, then you will have to manually track this type of “fake” play and add it using the “Setup > Adjust Scores and Standings > Player Score Adjuster” screen in your league.  You don’t want to add the Passing TD rule to your Special Teams position, because otherwise it will count all Passing TDs for the entire team.

So the bottom line is that “fake” plays, either on a punt or kickoff, are not tracked as a raw stat by the NFL, so therefore they cannot be scored automatically for your fantasy football league.  Our recommendation is to treat them like any other passing TD rather than trying to find them each week and score them as a special teams play.

Tags: special plays