Despite many recent successes, as a site we’re generally quite modest. This has mainly to do with the personalities of the central players. I’m not a fantasy analyst who likes to toot my own horn, as it were. That’s why, unless you were paying close attention, you might not know that I finished second overall in the Scott Fish Bowl last season (SFB14), out of 3,396 teams.
Any time you have a finish like that, there’s a lot of luck involved, but there are also many strategic and tactical elements you have to get right in order to put yourself in a position to benefit from luck. SFB15 settings are different enough that what worked in 2024 is not guaranteed to work in 2025, even before we consider the chaos of an NFL season. Yet it can still be instructive to look back at the strategies that led to success in previous seasons — enough of the settings carry over that some broad strokes takeaways still apply.
The Unique Challenge of the Scott Fish Bowl
SFB scoring is always unique, and understanding the elements of that will impact team performance — and exactly how they will impact team performance — is crucial. Like all SFB contests, SFB14 was a superflex, tight-end premium contest. And like many recent iterations, it awarded points for carries. The resulting system boosts scoring for quarterbacks, running backs, and TEs, while leaving wide receiver scoring largely untouched compared to traditional PPR formats. SFB14 did include points for first downs, but those were standard across positions. It also included a large return yardage component (which proved to be decisive in the final week). While WRs are more likely to benefit from return yardage points, this only impacts a select handful of WRs, and is not a position-wide benefit. Therefore it’s irrelevant from a structural standpoint, and only makes a difference when thinking about intra-positional tactics.
An Example Draft from 2024
Given these settings, it’s no surprise that QBs, elite RBs, and elite TEs were pushed up draft boards. In my individual league, 15 QBs and five TEs went off the board in the first three rounds, meaning more than half the picks were devoted to the so-called onesie positions. Of the remaining 16 picks, eight were RBs and eight were WRs.
Every team in slots 1-4 eschewed WRs in the first three rounds, as did Teams 6, 8, and 10. While in many other formats we were complaining about the WR avalanche, in SFB14 WR was not a priority for most drafters.
