Some say its a game of luck, and the players of americas premium sport should certainly thank there lucky stars that their 'job' hands them fame, fortune, power and in Tom Bradys case Gisele Bundchen (pictured above).

Fantasy football however is entirely different. Very few of us are rich, none of us are likely to be famous (well not for a psitive reason anyway) and no-one is likely to be marrying a victorias secret lingerie model anytime soon (..ever! - but we can hope). Despite reading around the thousands of NFL related articles it seems there are no satisfactory or conclusive arguements regarding the amount of luck involved in a successful fantasy football season.

The draft league process (the format of choice is the USA) is designed to bring fantasy as close as possible to the real thing. Owners draft their respective teams at the beginning of the season and play head to head games to determine who will qualify for the playoffs. They then play one off games to determine who will reach there usually imaginatively named 'superbowls' and thus a winner will be crowned. "It's disappointing to me that the world of fantasy football has not latched on to this idea yet: Head to Head is the most ridiculous way to award a winner of fantasy football" says one disgruntled fantasy football owner on the fantasy football sharks forum. 'slimkendall' continues with his rant stressing that "The misconception that head-to-head is the best way to play fantasy football is based on that it's most like "real football". NFL teams "Play" each other to determine a winner. Fantasy teams do not 'Play" each other. No one manages their roster any differently in response to a particular opponent. The points that my players accumulate in a week is completely independent of what my opponent's team does. Therefore, head-to-head match-ups don't exist in fantasy football. It's possibly the worst way to determine which team or manager performed the best in a fantasy football season".

His point is certainly valid. In 2008 my 'MFL Steel Bowl' team accumulated the 4th most points in the league, yet finished 8th out of the 9 teams competing. This degree of bad luck is not common place however in the fantasy league i play in. Reading on further into the discussion thread and one thing is clear, the rest of the posts on this forum are extremely weak. It seems the answer to the 'luck or skill' question depends on how your current fantasy team is performing. We will all suffer bad luck from time to time, however it does seem that a lot of fantasy owners expect, if not demand that there team should always reach the playoffs - and if it doesn't they grasp at any point in the season where bad luck could seemingly have cost them. Half the time they plainly ignore that they missed the playoffs because there team didn't score enough points. On our very own www.thirdandlong.co.uk forum i have to take task with our dear commisioner for the following comment whilst discussing 'optimum scores' (your best score had you selected the best team available - with hindsight) "Now, when my optimum is less than what my opponent actually scored, my example for this is vs Steve in week 11, he scored 106, and my best lineup would of given me 94, then thats just bad luck, no way for me to win that matchup." - to me thats just your team getting beat by what was a better team in that week. The Ragers incidentally made the playoffs, as did the Supermen - the Ragers had a team capable of winning that week - and yes with a little luck he took that victory.

The next defeat blamed on bad luck comes from fantasy football sharks forum once again, "...All Four Duck Teams are in the playoffs this year. One a '3'seed fell to a a '6' seed last week" complains 'DUCKS'. What would be the point of any sport, fantasy or otherwise if a 'lower' seeded team didn't have the ability to beat a higher seed without it being 100% luck. Looking at this quote made me reassess 'slimkendalls' quote from earlier. He suggests that an accumulative league (similar to the hometeam challenge on NFL.com) is the way forward. This has its pitfalls however, as one 'unlucky week' can pretty much end your season in an accumalitive league, whereas in a head to head league it simply just goes down as a loss - so in actual fact both formats of the game are hugely steeped in skill and luck.

People like to throw percentages around - fleaflicker even has a luck rating. The biggest element of luck in fantasy football is the schedule, and there is entirely nothing you can do about it. In one week you could score the second most points in your league but unfortuantely you come up against the top scorer for the week - you would have beaten everyone else, but happened to be playing the strongest team of that week. Again however there is an arguement against that... In week 5 of the MFL Steel Bowl the English Eagles lost against Howards Heroes in what fleaflicker stated was 89% bad luck for the Eagles considering they would have beaten any other team that week. However it all depends on what angle you view it from. In week 5 Richards team was 4 and 0 and the top scorers in the league overall - for the Eagles to expect anything but a high score from them would be ridiculous - it wasn't luck at all, Richards team was the best in the league at that point and proved it- there was very little luck involved with that result. There are of course other scenarios that would effect the amount of 'luck' bad or otherwise in this area. Should the English Eagles have been playing the worst team in the league - yet had lost in a similar fashion you could have a case for suggesting that luck had gone against you.

Now when your team scores the second LEAST amount of points in a week - yet happens to be playing a team that scored the LEAST - well there is no other angle to look at that, you got lucky.

There are of course lots of other elements that can be determined as 'luck', especially when you reach the playoff stages. Over the course of a season, the 4 teams in the playoffs generally deserve to be there - however in a one off game the owner pretty much has no control over the outcome - the matchups may go against you - anybody can beat anyone - for instance in the MFL Steel Bowl Semi Finals just a couple of weeks ago, the English Eagles who topped the whole league in victories and points scored posted the lowest score of the week - meaning they could have played the 10th placed 4-9 Drunken Cowboys, a team who had scored 243 points less over the course of the season (an average of 19 points a week) in the playoffs and they still would have lost. That is just plain bad luck surely? The problem is, thats just the nature of any sport, and any game - luck is always going to be involved. The thing is with luck is that it generally evens itself out over the course of a season - yet it is human nature to remember only the bad luck. Finally, just because you can prove the existance of luck doesn't mean that it replaces the fact that a large amount of skill is needed to play this and indeed any other game.

Pete Butcher 23/12/09

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