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Quality of the league is. Watching the NFBC and now the NFFC the problem is the draft. If you take two top owners and put them in different leagues it comes down to league strength. We all know that luck is a factor as far as injuries. But if all things being equal one owner can draft a good backup because his league is weak at drafting than that’s not a fair deal. So it has come down to who Tom picked out of a hat to decide the leagues. This is the one true weak link in this format. ESPN does use a system that includes league strength in their overall championship. They may not be a high stakes game but I think they have the right idea.

Originally posted by Walla Walla:
Quality of the league is. I agree.

Originally posted by Walla Walla:
ESPN does use a system that includes league strength in their overall championship. They may not be a high stakes game but I think they have the right idea. league strength can be altered in many ways.

I see your point, but how (going in to the draft) do you assess (or control) "League Strength".

Are you saying that the LV leagues are more competative becuse the venue drew more people to it than Chicago or NY. Even then how do you access or "paradize" the leagues?

I suppose (if you agree that venue has anything to do with it) that next year we can do all the drafts in just one city, but that might cut down on participation due to the cost/accessibility of travel.

Short of the NFFC knowing the experience level of each owner and purposely trying to create parody in each league (something I would NOT want to be part of I don't see how you can do it.

John

It has been said many times before that league strength can not be that drastically altered by one horrible decision or drafted player.

There are 14 teams with 18 players each (252 players). If a bad pick is made at some point in that process you would have to have a lot of other players pass on the player who is slipping in the draft to truly benefit a particular owner by giving them a stronger than average team.

People can complain about league strength at the draft but what about the decisions during the season that also come into play? For instance, my team this week had Rod Gardner (38 points) on the bench but still managed to win by 5 points. If we had lost that game, the problem would not have been with our draft but with deciding who to play. Since those decisions are very subjective based on roster, opponents, etc... I find it hard to believe that someone can call the different leagues un-even based on the draft.

So many things come into play during the course of a full 13-week season and the draft is only a small portion of that. Schedule comes into play, Starting lineups come into play, Injuries come into play, luck comes into play.

No matter what you do to combat 'league strength' you are always going to run into those poor teams that based on schedule, luck, etc... miss out on the playoffs because they happen to bench the wrong people or have the wrong opponent during certain weeks.

To try and lay blame on one particular aspect of this system as the reason one owner has an advantage over the other is ludicrous. It just smacks of trying to make excuses for something that has none.

And finally there are truthfully two sides to the 'weak league argument'. If there are a couple bad owners with very poor teams in a league the positive might be that the other teams will have more points. The negative side to this of course is that more teams in that league will be fighting for the top spot based on record because there are a couple 'lame-duck' easy wins during the season.

This could be debated until we are blue in the face and trying to figure out league strength is a fuzzy concept to begin with. But using that concept as a basis to make excuses or whine that your team is not scoring a lot of points because your league is 'stronger' is crazy.

I agree after the first week when Lumpy and us were 1 and 2 overall everybody was commenting that our league was weaker because for example Culpepper had fallen so far in the draft. We were denigrated to a degree because we had taken Thomas Jones over Culpepper and then took McNabb in the 4th round having used the third on a receiver. I am happy with the McNabb Jones picks after 3 weeks, but can anyone tell me why after 3 weeks Ahman Green made a sound #4 pick. Everything is subjective down to what happens in the particular games....and no I am not regretting the green pick.