Touchdowns: Team Defenses versus Individual Players

Q: Our fantasy football league is through Yahoo. We have an argument where some participants believe that a return touchdown should count for the defense. Others believe a return touchdown should count for the player who returned the touchdown.

If you enter our league and go to League > Settings and look under stat categories, you will find listed that a return touchdown counts for 10 points. However, it does not indicate if the points are awarded to offense, or defense. Some people interpreted it as defense and others interpreted as offense. These interpretations were carried into the draft without being discussed. Therefore, people drafted according to their interpretation of the points and now we have a dispute.

Personally, I do not see how it can be interpereted as offense when you break it down. In the majority of fantasy football leagues that are played special teams points count for the defense, listed as defense/special teams (DST). On the situation of particpants drafting players as returners… you cannot draft many players who do returns i.e. Ed Reed, Terrence McGee, Allen Rossum. So, how can a person assume individual players will recieve points for return touchdowns when you can’t even draft some of them.

Please help us out… We had participants draft defenses, and other participants draft individual players thinking in opposition to where the return TD points would fall. Should return touchdowns count for Defense? Offense? Both? None?

A: Thanks for getting in touch with Fantasy Football Disputes. We have taken some time to evaluate your situation and have some suggestions for you and your league. Looking at the history and evolution of fantasy football, I am sure you can remember the days
when individual players would routinely get credit for not only return touchdowns, but yardage as well. In the past few years we have seen a shift in scoring systems to include return TD’s, and special teams in general, with the defense, hence DST. With that said,
there are still many leagues that operate on older rules and not making the scoring clear before the draft will lead to inevitable problems, such as what your league is experiencing now. While many of us here at Fantasy Football Disputes agree that return TD’s should no longer be credited to offensive or individual players, not specifically and distinctly
declaring that before the draft may put some or all of your owners at competitive disadvantages due to their drafting strategies on their interpretations of the
rules. In this particular case our proposed solution would to not include any return TD’s within your scoring system this year. Going forward, you should have a league vote to determine how you would like to address this in next and all future years. We are
always a proponent of having a written constitution for your league which outlines these issues and hopefully in the future we can avoid problems like this. You can even use our guidelines for creating a constitution on our website. We hope you find our
solution helpful and please feel free to contact us at Fantasyfootballdisputes.com for all of your fantasy sports needs.