Let’s Add Punters

*THIS RULE HAS PASSED*

It has come to my attention that MFL now has scoring stats for punters. It will track the following categories: Punts, Yards, Average, Inside the 20, and Punts Had Blocked.

If you know me, then you know that I want to track points for every little thing that happens on the football field. And punting is a thing that happens. Pretty regularly, in fact!

Now, imagine this. You’ve got Carlos Hyde on your team. On third and two he fails to convert the first down and any scoring you had hoped for on the series goes out the window. BUT WAIT. You have the Browns’ punter! You’re at least going to get some points for the punt play. Maybe a fair amount if he pins them inside the 20! Hooray!

Or better yet, imagine this: You’ve got Ben Roethlisberger at QB. He hands off to LeVeon Bell on first down. Then he throws an incomplete pass in the general direction of Antonio Brown, who is triple covered and was being held on the play. So far you have zero points. Then on third down they pull the surprise punt play, and Roethlisberger pins them at the 5! So instead of zero points, the big fat idiot scores a couple of points.

And don’t even get me started on fake punt plays. Those will be glorious instead of stupidly meaningless in our scoring system!

Naysayers, who love nothing more than saying their nay, will say, “But Josh, I hate rostering kickers as it is, and now you’re going to make me roster a punter?” And to them I say, “Yes, it will be awesome.”

Other naysayers will say, “Punting is stupid.” To them I say, “Nuh unh.”

Still others, who are perhaps more well-meaning than those who would dismiss it out of hand, will say, “I know nothing about punters and Unrestricted Free Agency starts in a few weeks. How will I even prepare?” And to those people I say, “Take a look at this spreadsheet based on last year’s punting stats.”

In order to make punter scoring similar to kicker scoring, given the stats that are currently available, I propose the following scoring system:

Punts: 0.5 points

Yards: 0.005 pts/yd

IN20: 1 point

Blocked punts: -3 points

Generally, you’re going to want to draft guys that punt a lot, so it kind of awards offensive futility. Personally, I don’t have a problem with rooting for a team to punt the ball 10 times in a game for fantasy purposes. It will kind of resemble our fantasy aversion to lockdown corners – it’s just better to draft corners to get picked on a lot and therefore rack up a lot of tackles. In the future, if they add stats like return yards and touchdowns allowed, then we can adjust the system to better reward the actual best punters (though if you look at the spreadsheet, Brad Wing had a shitload of punts, but since he sucked at punting he still finished 17th among punters. Wing was outscored by Chris Jones, despite punting the ball 29 more times than Jones, because Jones was a master at pinning opponents inside the 20.)

I would also love to see a future where they add touchbacks, so you could go after punters that also handle kickoff duty.

I think it might be fun to throw a dollar at a punter and see what he can do. If you agree, please vote yes below. And as always, please chime in with your comments and ideas.

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