Fumbles and Laterals and Trick Plays in the NFL can cause all sorts of confusion for commissioners of fantasy football leagues. To help with that issue, we’ll highlight and document all of the various “strange” or “unusual” plays each week, so you can confirm that your scoring rules have been properly set up in your fantasy football league. Just go to the “Help > Strange Plays” menu item in your league to view the summary list each week. Then come here to read more details as needed in our blog. We’ll discuss various types of unusual plays and how they might impact your league.
This week’s most unusual play for a lot of leagues involved the “fake” field goal that resulted in a Rushing TD for the Redskins by their punter. As noted in our strange plays summary, this is scored by the NFL and shows up in any typical box score as just a regular Rushing TD. Therefore, the stats are scored that way for your league. The NFL does not track “fakes” or other events like this at all, so there isn’t any automatic way to have it scored for your league as a special type of touchdown. The raw stats and the box score for this will be the same as any other rushing play in the game. It does show Hunter Smith (a punter) as the person that ran it for a score, but that is really the only indicator that it was an unusual play, unless you scrutinize the play-by-play listing to see what exactly happened on that scoring play.
If you want this touchdown to be counted as a TD for your Punter position, then be sure to add the “Rushing TD” rule to your Punter position. However, if you want to score this as a touchdown for your Special Teams or Team Defense position, then you will have to manually add the points for this to your league by using the “Setup > Adjust Scores and Standings > Player Score Adjuster” screen. Note that you won’t want to add the “Rushing TD” rule to your Special Teams position, because that would cause all rushing TDs for the entire game to be credited to the Special Teams.
So the bottom line is that “fake” plays, either on a punt or kickoff, are not tracked as a raw stat by the NFL, so therefore they cannot be scored automatically for your fantasy football league. Our recommendation is to treat them like any other rushing or passing TD rather than trying to find them each week and score them as a special teams play. However, if you want to credit them to your Special Teams position, then you can scan the “Help > Strange Plays” listing each week to check for them and then manually add the points to your league as needed.
Also, this report is only intended for standard redraft leagues. It does not really read well for keeper or dynasty leagues with rookie-only drafts, and therefore it does not show up as an option for those types of leagues.