John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports
With all due respect to my fellow traditional standard scoring Fantasy Football league participants, I will never drink your mundane boring and bland flavored Kool-Aid.
Listen, I know my easily-distracted attention span when boredom sinks in. I need action I need numbers to roll. I need to see changes on Sunday morning stat tracking software.
I need PPR.
First, if you haven’t tried a PPR league, it is my recommendation that you shed the rock you’ve been hiding under and simply join the dark side. PPR took a game that one would think couldn’t possibly be better and made it better – I would even declare it exponentially better.
Instead of occasional updates when touchdowns are scored, your team and the team you’re playing against updates each time someone touches the ball. It’s pure genius.
Sure, I loved fantasy football back in the days of simple standard scoring formats. I also thought the Atari was a sweet gaming device at one time. But times change, technology evolves and there are perks to said evolution, and attempts to justify to standard scoring over PPR formats in today’s high-speed instant data access world are just wasted efforts.
It is my contention that the history of fantasy football dictated the early necessity of standard scoring. Technology was not yet in place to facilitate automatic live updates of scores outside of touchdowns, and no one in their right mind wanted to scour through Monday morning box scores to manually calculate totals.
The technology is there now. Use it, take advantage of it – become one with it. It will transcend your fantasy football experience to a whole new level.
Plus, much like a sacrifice bunt in baseball having no negative impact on a batting average, PPR is just and fair. During one of my personal favorite old-school matchups last season, Knowshon Moreno rushed 22 times and caught five balls for a combined 127 yards for the Denver Broncos versus the Cleveland Browns.
It was a solid effort, yet Moreno was outscored in standard scoring leagues by Jacob Hester, who carried the rock three times for a mere six yards but scored a touchdown. In PPR formats, Moreno scored more than Hester with the exact same stat line as listed above. Just seems like common sense to me: 27 touches vs. three – advantage 27 touches.
To this day, I continue to participate in standard scoring formats. The reason is that it continues to be the standard. Why, you may ask, is it still the standard if PPR is so great? That answer is easy: PPR requires new draft strategy and a complete realignment of positional rankings. That is change – and traditionalists fear change.
That said, it is my contention that the time for a revolution is now. Think about it, we live on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook because we can’t wait three seconds for the news to hit websites and television. Yet we’re okay with slow-rolling stats during fantasy match-ups on Sundays? C’mon, man.
The pendulum needs to gain momentum and PPR needs to be seen for what it is — the future of Fantasy Football.
Jim Heath is a Fantasy Football writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @jim_heath, “Like” him on Facebook or add him to your network on Google
