* THIS RULE HAS PASSED *
Rule Change: Get rid of the ~5 points teams are awarded for being “at home”
Rationale: As Hammond has pointed out, this was an idea that I was in on from the start. It seemed like a cool concept, awarding points for home field and then adjusting the number of points awarded the following season based on win percentage “at home” the previous season.
I admit it, I’ve reversed course completely on this one for two main reasons:
1) Basically, our home field rule just adds another level of chance to a game that already has plenty. There’s no actual relationship between our fantasy teams being at home and our players being at home. In fact, all of our players could be on the road when we’re being awarded home points (or vice versa). Unless we want to come up with some sort of mechanism wherein each of your players gets points for being at home and those point are combined into an overall “home field advantage” for each game (which would probably be super time consuming), I say we cleanly drop the rule.
2) The rule unnecessarily penalizes already bad teams. Your team had a crappy year? Guess what, it’s goingto be even harder next year! Woo hoo!
Mechanism: Just stop doing it. It’s much easier to not have home field than it is to have it and adjust the points from year to year.
© 2012, Adam Franssen. All rights reserved.
I’m okay with this.
But what about playoffs, where earning a top (or just higher) seed warrants an advantage? Do we just leave that as the standard 5 points? And the Championship Game would still be, of course, on neutral ground.
I could get behind keeping the bonus points for higher seeds in the playoffs since it is a reward for regular season performance.
See, if we are going to get rid of it, I say we just get rid of it. How obnoxious is it going to be to lose by home field advantage in the playoffs after not having HFA all season? I think it will be very obnoxious.
I’m okay with ditching home field advantage because it will mean far less work for me every week (I have to go in and manually modify the home field advantage for each game each week.) However, if people like it, I’m fine with that too.