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Points Per Reception: The Cadillac of Fantasy Football

by John Gustafson

In 1996, when I was in the sixth grade, I was bit by the fantasy bug. It all started on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night sleepover. That morning after some pancakes my friend Clint and I headed into the living room to catch some NFL action on the tube. This was a pretty normal activity as Clint was a big Dolphins fan, and me, of course a Niners fan. About 30 minutes later, Clint’s dad came into the room going apeshit because Dan Marino had already thrown 2 TD passes and his team had 12 points. Wait a second? Why was Clint’s dad so excited? Unlike Clint, he wasn’t a Dolphins fan, he was a 49ers fan. And 12 points? We all know TDs are worth 14 points. What the hell was going on here? Well once Clint and his dad calmed down, they introduced me to the greatest hobby known to all man-kind; fantasy football.

Since that day, I have been hooked. The next 2 years I followed Clint and his dad’s team as closely as I could. That was fine, but one of the greatest days of my fantasy career came when I convinced my parents to let me sign up for an email account so I could own my own team. I know what most of you are thinking, “geez, how sheltered is this guy?” Now I was a little sheltered, I mean, hell, I wasn’t even allowed to watch the Simpsons, so getting an email account was a big deal. But let’s also not forget, this was 1998 and the great internet discovered by Al Gore had barely been gaining popularity.

Anyways, your first time playing fantasy football is like the first time you got your first 8-bit Nintendo… life changing. That year I ran the table on my free Yahoo! league behind Steve Young, Barry Sanders, and Terrance Mathis. One year, one championship, I was the shit, the next greatest thing, the Jimmy the Greek of fantasy football… or so I thought.

That was until the next year when I played in my first money league. Yes, that’s right, I was 15 and already spending $100 of my hard earned money from my summer job to play in the company fantasy football league. Now this league was about as archaic as they come. It didn’t reward points for TDs, just yardage. No problem, the fantasy football prodigy (I thought I was) was going to take this sucker down anyways especially since I had the #1 pick. Then reality hit. My first overall pick of Terrell Davis tore his knee a few games into the season. My WRs were crap and I was left in shambles as Drew Bledsoe and Jerome Bettis didn’t live up to expectations and while the owner who won the league was led by a guy I had never heard of (Kurt Warner) and an old RB who resurrected his career (Curtis Martin).

After the pitfall of 1999, I vowed to get obsessively better at fantasy football. Never again would I let a sleeper like Warner get past me. If something was going down, I was going to know about it weeks before anyone else. The next 2 years, I dominated that league. Everything I learned that offseason helped shape me into the experienced fantasy player I am today.

After the 2001 season, I had 3 titles in 4 years under my belt, I was ready for another challenge, time to “up the ante” as they say. I wasn’t looking for much. After dominating the yardage league, I was looking for a league with points for TDs or as I put it to my yardage league mates, “a real league”. In 2002, I discovered a little known site called Antsports.com. The site is still hosting leagues, but is pretty damn obsolete. I’ll never play in a league on there again after some bad experiences, but I will give it some credit.

The Antsports league not only awarded points for TDs, but also had PPR. PPR? WTF was that?! I had to investigate! I came to find out that PPR stood for points per reception meaning that every time an offensive player caught a pass, they would get an additional point. This blew my mind. It was like the scene in Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy first encounters the gold head thingy. I was shocked… appalled at a rule so bold, but enthralled and had to have more.

I spent that whole summer reading about PPR and how leagues with PPR make WRs more valuable and give the worthless TEs value. Wait a second! A league where you didn’t have to build your team around RBs? Unheard of! TEs with value? No freaking way! I had to be in a league like this! Now I thought this was probably a fluke type thing, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot! So I convinced my buddies Nick and Geoff to sign up for 2 Antsports leagues. I’d split the teams with each of them and co-own 2 teams in a big time PPR real league.

Nick and I gambled on Ricky Williams in the first round of our draft. Up until that point Ricky had been a disappointment for most of his career and would be playing his first year in Miami. We rode Ricky and his 2,200+ total yards and 37 catches all the way until the semi-finals. Our downfall was our WRs.

Geoff and I on the other hand rolled. That year we cruised with a WR corps of Terrell Owens (100 catches, #2 overall WR), Hines Ward (112 catches, #3 overall WR), Joe Horn (88 catches, #8 overall WR), and Koren Robinson (78 catches, #15 overall WR), yes he had fantasy value at one point. Not to mention this league only required one starting RB so we only started one. Our guy, Charlie Garner, led all backs that year with a cool 91 catches and finished 4th overall at RB in fantasy points. A team built on WRs and 1 RB? This league didn’t know what him them. What’s funny is each week Geoff and I thought we would lose when we compared our roster to the other team because that guy had better RBs. Boy were we wrong! We lost 2 games all year, one was early in the season and the other was in the fantasy championship in one of the worst fantasy nightmares ever… but that’s a story for a future Pyro article.

At some point in our friendship, Geoff, told me that No Limit Texas Hold Em was nicknamed the Cadillac of poker. I always liked that. After that near glorious season of 2002, I christened PPR the Cadillac of Fantasy Football. I now consider non-PPR leagues the devil, archaic, bush league; the list goes on and on baby.

If you’re not playing in a PPR league, you are missing out on one of the purest, most fun ways to play fantasy football. It may sound like more work and research, but it’s really not. All it’s really doing is giving more balance to the scoring and making leagues more fair and competitive in a day age where NFL backfields are riddled with committees.

If you’re playing in a non-PPR league and you don’t get one of the top 5 RBs, then you might as well kiss your fantasy season goodbye or have an extremely lucky rabbit’s foot because the odds are stacked up against you pal. And come on, where’s the skill in picking one of the top 5 RBs? My grandma who thinks Joe Montana still plays QB for the 49ers could do that if I gave her a list with a big circle around the top 5 and instructions to pick one of these guys at all costs.

Once worried about PPR balanced scoring being a fluke, it’s not. It’s the real deal. Every year there are about the same number of QBs, RBs, and WRs, that finish in the top 30 with a few TEs sprinkled in. There are even some PPR leagues that award 1.25 points for the TEs, now making the scoring that much more balanced.

So heap your pile of junk hoopty of a league and hop into a Cadillac. This is the 2010s. Our president is black so your fantasy league shouldn’t be whack. Not to get political, but this will be a change you want. You’ll thank me later. My name is John Gustafson and I approve this message.

2009 Non-PPR Top 20 Scorers (QBs Exempt)

1. Chris Johnson 2. Adrian Peterson 3. Maurice Jones-Drew  4. Ray Rice 5. Thomas Jones 6. Frank Gore 7. Ricky Wiliams 8. Andre Johnson 9. Ryan Grant 10. Randy Moss 11. Miles Austin 12. Steven Jackson 13. Joseph Addai 14. Jonathan Stewart 15. DeSean Jackson 16. Larry Fitzgerald 17. Jamaal Charles 18. Reggie Wayne 19. Rashard Mendenhall 20. Roddy White   Totals: Top 10- 8 RBs, 2 WRs, 0 TEs. Top 20- 13 RBs, 7 WRs, 0 TEs
  2009 PPR Top 20 Scorers (QBs Exempt)
1. Chris Johnson 2. Adrian Peterson 3. Ray Rice 4. Maurice Jones-Drew  5. Andre Johnson  6. Randy Moss  7. Reggie Wayne  8. Wes Welker 9. Larry Fitzgerald 10. Frank Gore 11. Miles Austin 12. Brandon Marshall 13. Dallas Clark 14. Steve Smith, NYG 15. Roddy White 16. Sidney Rice 17. DeSean Jackson 18. Vernon Davis 19. Ricky Williams 20. Steven Jackson   Totals: Top 10- 5 RBs, 5 WRs, 0 TEs. Top 20- 7 RBs, 11 WRs, 2 TEs