If I were to ask you why you play fantasy football, my best guess is your response would fall into three overarching, intersectional categories.

You play for entertainment — it’s an opportunity to infuse personalized, strategy-oriented excitement into your Thursdays, Sundays, Mondays . . . and this year, Tuesdays. You play for camaraderie — after all, the overwhelming majority of fantasy football participants play in leagues with people they know. Or, of course, you play for the competition. You want to win. And winning in a league filled with family or friends? Well, that’s all the more sweeter. 

By the way, the research backs up the above list (perhaps you’d be surprised to know, but yes, fantasy football participation and engagement is studied in academia). Entertainment. Camaraderie. Competition. These are, more or less, the prime motivators of fantasy football participation. These are the reasons we put all of this time and energy into trying to win a game that only seven, nine, or eleven other people will ever know — or care — about. 

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And that’s important because it explains why some decisions are made — and why others are not — when we’re setting up our leagues. For instance, most leagues aren’t high-stakes: we don’t stand to gain (or lose) life-altering amounts of money pending our seasons’ outcomes. Many leagues have good-natured, socially-oriented prizes (or punishments) for season and weekly outcomes. We keep tabs on who has won and who hasn’t. We usually schedule our fantasy drafts on nights or weekends to ensure that there’s ample time for fanfare, banter, and socialization. These are all examples of how we don’t just play to win, or just for fun, or just to keep in touch with friends or family spread across the country. It’s an elixir of these three motivators that predicts our engagement (and ongoing interest) with every fantasy league we agree to join. 

I say all this because I want to make sure we’re all on the same page here. I say all this because . . . if it was truly just about competition, if it was truly just about ensuring that the “best” fantasy football team in each league will be crowned as champion every season . . . we all know that win/loss records wouldn’t exist … right? 

Win/loss records are attributes of entertainment. They simulate a tenet that is embedded into the bedrock of sport consumption — that in every episode of competition, there is a winner and a loser. That each altercation is a zero-sum game. But in fact, win/loss records in fantasy football are arbitrary, capricious, and predictive of precisely nothing. You have no control of what happens on the other side of your screen. You can’t “play defense.” It’s a random bit of noise, a groundless system that could just as easily pit the two teams with the lowest point totals together in a week where it pits the two highest as well. A team that scored the second-highest point total of the week has no business “losing” that week. But because most of us see fantasy football through a prism adjacent to real football, we don’t have an issue with it. We’ll usually dish out pre-canned derivatives of coach-speak when challenged about it. You play to win the game.

OK … but what’s the game? 

Suppose I invited twelve applicants in to interview for a job. I’ll measure their past experience, their references, and their responses to standard interview questions. From there, I’ll filter my list down to six candidates — the six people who I believe are best suited for the job. 

But, instead of measuring them holistically, what if I arbitrarily pitted the candidates “against” each other based purely on the order of their interviews? So, once I complete my interview with Candidate A and Candidate B, I force myself to select one to advance to the next round. It doesn’t matter if they both were ill-suited for the job, my boss says — that’s the system. At the end of the interviews, I may find that neither Candidate A nor Candidate B should have made the final cut (and, perhaps both Candidate C and Candidate D should have). But . . . that’s the system. 

Ridiculous, right? Well, fantasy football has more in common with the scenario I just described than it does NFL football. And that’s how most of our leagues are selecting their playoff teams. 

Here’s the list of attributes that most accurately defines your fantasy team’s performance: total points. That’s it. That’s the list. Which is why I advocate for all leagues to have at least one playoff spot purely decided by total points. In my twelve-team league, the first four clubs are selected by record, and the final two spots are selected by points. It’s the perfect mix of competition and entertainment — because, look, at the end of the day, we all enjoy the week-to-week matchups, the rivalries, and the “Monday night miracles.” Nobody wants to see win/loss records completely abolished. Remember, we play this game for a host of reasons, and just because rotisserie leagues might be “fairest,” that doesn’t mean they’ll be the most entertaining — and that’s important, too. 

And, ultimately, calibrating our leagues to weight for total points also reframes our perspectives. Before my league converted two of our playoff spots, I paid little attention to which teams were scoring the most points because it wasn’t important. That 2-3 squad that happened to be leading the league in total points? That was barely a footnote; they were just 2-3 to me. They weren’t getting the respect or recognition they deserved. But now? Total points are constantly tracked, so our league has an acute sense of which teams are good, bad, lucky, and unlucky. It’s an equalizer that keeps the 4-1 club that ranks tenth in total points from getting an undue feeling of accomplishment, and it ensures that the 0-5 team that’s third in total points still has a reason to keep playing. 

Win/loss records are entertaining. 

Total points more accurately award competitors. 

And in concocting the rules for the perfect league, like fantasy football itself, this shouldn’t be a zero-sum game.

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Whether you’re new to fantasy football or a seasoned pro, our Fantasy Football 101: Strategy Tips & Advice page is for you. You can get started with How to Manage Early-Season Injury Problems or head to more advanced strategy – like How to Effectively Assess the Quality of Your Team – to learn more.

David Giardino is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from David, check out his archive and follow him @davidgiardino.