A lot of fantasy football leagues use some pretty weird scoring rules. Bonuses for long touchdowns aren't particularly "weird" — many leagues award them — but they're still inane.

Long-TD bonuses are a relic from a simpler era of fantasy football, before it became common to reward yardage. In leagues that rewarded only touchdowns, it was reasonable to award extra points for longer scores. A 60-yard TD catch by Flipper Anderson could be considered a greater accomplishment than a one-yard TD plunge by Cleveland Gary. So, fine, make the Flipper TD worth nine points instead of the standard six.

Then came the Age of Enlightenment. The wise men of fantasy football beheld yardage and decreed that it was good, and thus it became common to award a point for every 10 or 20 or 25 yards gained. With this advancement, bonuses for long touchdowns should have gone the way of the dinosaur, yet in many leagues they remained, and remain to this day.

Think about it: You're already rewarding all the yardage gained on a long touchdown, and you're rewarding the touchdown itself. Why would you pile more points on top of that? It's like rewarding a child with dessert for eating all of his or her dinner, then rewarding the child with a second dessert for eating all of the first. It's nonsensical.

Luck is a major element of fantasy football. Injuries, scheduling, bad calls and assorted weirdness all factor into results. Assuming that the goal is to reward skillful owners and minimize the element of luck as much as possible, it is counterintuitive to award long-TD bonuses. Because really, what steps can you take in the construction of your roster to enhance the odds of accruing long-TD bonuses? You can rank a small handful of players with a propensity for long-distance scores — Chris Johnson, DeSean Jackson, Randy Moss and a few others — slightly higher on your draft board than they would rank in the absence of long-TD bonuses, but that's about it.

For that matter, individual speed often has no correlation with long touchdowns. "Fast" Willie Parker hasn't had a TD run of more than 40 yards since December 2006. And a few weeks ago, I read a chapter of a book during an 86-yard TD by Zach Miller, glancing at the TV occasionally to check on the tight end's progress as he plodded toward the endzone.

If you play in a league that still uses bonuses for long touchdowns, petition your commissioner to get rid of them. The evolution of yardage leagues was the fantasy football equivalent of the invention of the wheel. Participating in a yardage league that uses long-TD bonuses is the equivalent of a caveman using his wheel as a pillow.

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