GWJ Fantasy Football League Update #4 (w/Poll)

With the draft less than a week away I thought it would be a good time to bring up an issue that Certis recently brought to my attention.

Originally I had it to where we picked actual defensive players instead of teams. Certis brought it to my attention that alot of casual players might not like having to keep track of defensive players and having team defensive would be alot easier. This is a valid point but since we have 20 teams it would be impossible for us to have more than one team defense since there are only 32 NFL teams in the league. 20*2=40 which is 8 more than the NFL.

This means that every team will be without a defense once during the season which kind of sucks but is acceptable since everyone will be on equal ground at least one week. So my question is do you guys want to keep it at team defense or go back and draft individual defensive players?

The good thing about team defense is that its easy to keep up with and you don't have to think about drafting any individual people. But there is the bye week issue.

The good thing about drafting individual players is I think it makes it more fun to follow defensive players as well as your regular offensive ones. The downside is there is a little more micromanagement and you would have to draft an extra defensive player or two to deal with the bye week so casual players might not be interested in it. However if you wanted to have defensive players but not have to worry about drafting them you could just let the computer do it for you towards the end of the draft.

I'm putting a poll up so whatever the poll shows as winning by Monday I will make it official.

Weee! First vote! 100% agree with me!

I like the extra strategy of having Defensive players and it is not that much extra work, but I will not be heartbroken if we just use teams.

As someone who is both easily confused and afraid of players losing interest due to the extra maintenance of managing more players I vote teams.

I''m going with team defense, as well.

As much as I''d love to draft Takeo Spikes, I have a hard enough time keeping up with Running Backs and Wide Receivers

Team defense...it''s a lot of work to keep up with players.

Plus only a couple of teams get a lot of points anyway, so I usually only have one defense the entire season...

Here are my problems with drafting individual defensive players:

1) Interceptions from one player basically come down to luck. The best defensive back in the league rarely leads the league in interceptions or even comes close. So in my opinion the interception total of any player you picked would amount to luck.

2) It''s a lot of extra work to go through and rate all of the defensive players. In fact last time I looked Yahoo didn''t even have any information on individual defensive players.

3) I asked about this before and didn''t get an answer but why did we change forced fumbles and fumble recoveries to be zero points? This just limits further the possible points a good defensive player could get.

4) It''s going to make the draft take a lot longer than it has to.

Couldn''t twelve teams carry two team defenses on their roster if they wanted? Wouldn''t this be an interesting way to create reasons for trades? For instance if I have two pretty good defenses on my roster and someone else has a bad defense and there are very limited options available on the waiver wire wouldn''t that stir up some trade talk? Further it would make an interesting strategy element. Do you want to subject your starting defense to possible pick up by another team to get a substitute defense for one week, or just go with no defense for that week?

We have a Winner, 11-4 Teams.

Depending on the software you''re using, you could put a one-team-D limit on your roster...

...though if you really have a 20-team league, I''d seriously consider splitting it. You could even go 15 weeks instead of the traditional 16 and have the winner of each league ""play"" each other in week 16.

Team Defense it is then!