In fantasy football, PF and PA are the best ways to measure two very important aspects of your team — your overall skill and overall luck.
Commonly listed somewhere near the end of your fantasy football league’s standings, PF stands for “points for” and PA stands for “points against.” These are generally cumulative numbers and will grow over the course of the season to show just how many total points the starters on your team have scored and how many points your opponent’s starting players have scored against you.
“Points For” is the best measure of a team
There have long been debates over whether fantasy football is primarily a game of skill or a game of luck. Managers can put hours of effort into drafting teams only to be hit by unforeseen injuries. Your players can put up huge stats only to lose to an opponent who has an otherworldly performance.
The modern variations of fantasy football have some ways to account for the luck factor. Many commissioners will allot some of their final award money to the team with the highest point total or weekly payouts to the highest-scoring losing team.
But to whatever extent a fantasy football season’s outcome is determined by luck, the “Points For” total is seen as the most accurate way to determine which team is truly the best. The team with the best record is usually determined by how lucky they were from week to week, but the team with the highest “Points For” during the season is usually the one with the best roster.
“Points Against” is truly a crapshoot
“Points against” is truly the cruelest line in the fantasy football standings. It represents how well your opponent’s team fared in a given week, one of the only elements of the entire endeavor where you have absolutely zero control. Even if you make all the right plays, you can still end up 0-1 if just one or two players on your opponent’s team have a monster week.
It’s an inevitability that there will be at least one team at the top of the “points for” bracket that manages to miss the playoffs because they caught only the best weeks out of their opponents.
Here’s one particularly beat from a user on the FootballGuys forum.
“As the last game is ending I’m finishing as the top scorer for the season, with a 6-8 record, and out of the playoffs. I had more points scored against me than everyone else, by a large margin. I’ve been playing this game 20+ years and this is the worst victim to schedule variance outcome I’ve ever seen. I’m not even mad about it, I’m honestly laughing about how crazy it is.”
While not everyone who falls victim to a crazy variation between PF and PA in a fantasy football season may keep such a balanced perspective, it’s good to remember that all you can do is draft and choose starters to the best of your abilities. After that, it’s all up to luck.
