Rules Committee Underway: Welcome Haydn, Analysis of 2007

We are officially into the off-season at FLOF. In past years I've noted Rules Committee reports on the Forum, but I'll use the home page blog this year cause you can also comment here and it seems like a better place to do this.

First order of business was to welcome Haydn to the star chamber. Oops. I guess its not really a star chamber if you know who's in it. Anyhow, he asked and we could not think up a good reason to keep him out. So we are up to four now: myself, Darin, Roger, and Haydn.

Next we reviewed some of the big changes from 2007: revised free agency schedule, negative yards adjustment, bonus points for yardage and tackles, and points for return yards.

The free agency schedule adjustment (moving back the day when original bids are due) and the negative yards adjustment (starting to pick up negative points at -1) were deemed non-controversial and we quickly moved on.

I then crunched some numbers from 2006 and 2007 to see what affect the return yards and bonus points for yards and tackles had on the universe. The bottom line is that those two years (only years in a 12 team league) do not provide enough information to make a major change yet so we will see what happens in 2008.

That said, I produced some great data I will share. First, fun charts:

These charts chart all scores from that year. The left most score was the lowest of the year, the right most was the highest.

As you can see, scores went up last year, almost completely due to an offensive increase. I believe the affect of bonus points can be seen where the gap between 2006 and 2007 gets bigger at higher scores. To a lesser degree you can see this in the defensive scores where 2006 defense was actually better until the top 16% of scores although this could have other causes.

When you get into the weeds of the bonus scoring (outside return yards) we see that it didn’t all work out as planned. We targeted the bonuses to kick-in 35% of the time. We then based the levels that the bonuses would kick-in based on 2006 data. However, rushing yardage went down and passing yardage went up while receiving yardage and tackles remained pretty consistent.

For rushing yards the bonus was achieved only 25% of the time. Passing yardage bonus was achieved 45% of the time. Receiving bonus occurred 40% of the time and tackle bonuses kick-in 33% of the time.

My sense is that much of this was NFL based. Seemed like there were more pass happy offenses and a lot of big name RBs had horrible years.

Certainly the passing and rushing yards were the farthest off. Looking at 2006 numbers, the thresholds we set would have been triggered 33% of the time for rushing and 32% of the time for passing.

If we tried to re-calibrate the passing and rushing thresholds for 2007 numbers, 2006 numbers would have produced very off results.

Looking at return yards specifically, we see that fewer then 35% of all team box scores included any return yards last year and less then 25% of team scores got any points out of that at all. No one got enough return yards to get any bonus pts out of it. Net result was that return yards accounted for 0.67 pts per team per game in 2007.

In the end, this is a long post to announce that the Rules Committee does not see any need to make changes here at this time.

Next we will tackle a hold-over concept from last year: the long term contract.