Fantasy News
Over the next couple of days, I’ll be scoring Experts Poll selections that were made for the magazine. I just finished grading the choices at the kicker position.
Christopher Harris of ESPN is the winner in this category, followed by Scott Pianowski (Yahoo! Sports) and Chris Liss (Rotowire.com).
Scoring for this competition is far more complex than in a typical fantasy league. Every expert is graded on every pick – the higher you rank a player, the more heavily he affects your score.
Nate Kaeding, for example, was the highest scoring kicker with 146 points. If you ranked him as your No. 1 kicker, that choice would have been worth 2,920 points (20 x 146). If you ranked him 2nd, he would be worth 2,774 (19 x 146). Ranking him 3rd would be worth 2,628 (18 x 146) and so on.
Using that system for all 20 kickers named by each of the 20 experts, Harris was the highest-scoring guy, with 23,302 points. For now, Pianowski is 240 points back, and Liss is 402 points behind.
Harris’ key choices, it seems, were ranking David Akers and Ryan Longwell higher than the vast majority of experts. He also didn’t include Adam Vinatieri on his draft board, which gave him a big boost (since Vinatieri didn’t even play for most of the season). Attrition is huge in this scoring format – there are no roster moves or fill-in players allowed.
When the scoring is done for all six positions, the top 11 finishers will win spots in our Mock Draft league (with the No. 1 finisher getting to choose where he would like to select). That field should be set in a few days.
The Fantasy Index picks aren’t included in these results. Out of fairness to the competition, we stay in the administrator role. (Most notably, our picks aren’t locked into the same deadline, which usually is around May 20.) But if you plug in our magazine picks, which are printed in early June, we would have come in after four experts in this category, with 22,692 points. We did well with Kaeding (3rd) and Jeff Reed (4th), but two of our top 10 kickers didn’t make it through the season – Jason Elam and Vinatieri – which is a big no-no in this format.
For kickers, fantasy points are extremely basic – no bonuses for longer field goals, and no negative points for misses. The only out-of-the-ordinary points in this category went to Josh Brown, who received 4 points for throwing a touchdown pass on a gadget plays.
RESULTS OF EXPERTS POLL: KICKERS
Points
23302 Christopher Harris
23062 Scott Pianowski
22900 Chris Liss
22836 James Serra
22692 Rick Hawes
22593 David Dorey
22435 Michael Nazarek
22415 Pretzel May
22205 Nathan Zegura
22133 Bob Henry
22086 Jeffrey Kamys
22065 Alan Satterlee
21773 Sam Hendricks
21509 Scott Endsley
21409 Kevin Marshall
21338 Colin Darlington
21205 Louis Tranquilli
21174 Lenny Pappano
21143 Cory Bonini
21115 Bo Mitchell
—Ian Allan
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