Fantasy Football: Is tanking for a better playoff matchup ethical?

Maybe dropping a game in the final weeks of your fantasy football season for a better playoff matchup is a good thing? The Fantasy Footballers discuss this.

We’re getting into the home stretch here, regarding fantasy football playoffs. It’s Week 12 of the 2019 NFL season and fantasy playoffs either begin in two or three weeks, depending on if your league has two or three rounds in it. Of course, you’ll want to win as much as possible until then, but let’s just say that you don’t. Is tanking in fantasy football ethical?

First off, nobody should want to lose to your friends on purpose. They’re never going to let you hear the end of it. Tanking might work in professional sports, but doing so in fantasy sports is very risky and a tad controversial. The Fantasy Footballers got right to it today.

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Tanking in fantasy football to help you with playoff seeding does compromise the integrity of a league. Let’s say you intentionally drop a game so that a team that is easier for you to beat in the playoffs makes it in over a team that slaughtered you a few weeks back. That’ll help your team win for sure, but you did knock a team that was worthy of getting in all the way out.

Another tactic would be dropping good players that you don’t need so that a team you can beat ends up grabbing those players to beat another team you can’t. Nobody in the NFL drops players that can help them win on Sundays so that another team can pick them up to beat a team you can’t, so you shouldn’t either!

The truth in it all is that it is so hard to effectively tank in fantasy sports. You might drop a game intentionally, but then every other team in the league that you didn’t want to win did and now you’re not playing in your fantasy playoffs. It’s just an insanely tricky proposition to navigate, so you’re best not to tank.

But if you are going to tank, go with players that have high variance over more consistent guys. That way, you can say you were shooting for the stars and got burned, rather than take the sure thing and beat your opponent the good, old-fashioned honest way. Okay, so probably don’t tank because you won’t want your friends to hate you.