In the 2014 season through 21 regular season weeks, the 16 teams scored a total of 93,091.5 points.
In the 2015 season through 21 regular season weeks, the 16 teams scored a total of 67,709.5 points.
This is a reduction of 27.3%. What caused this decrease in scoring?
A brief history of our league:
2013 was our inaugural year. Adam was the league manager and created it out of curiosity more than anything else, as most of us had never played fantasy before. We used mostly default settings: 12 teams, default scoring, but Adam didn't really know what he was doing and tweaked the rosters a bit. Looking back, things were a bit funny. We had no DL slots. The lasting impression we had after that first year was that streaming pitchers was too strong. About halfway through the year I caught on to this, and my streaming strategy catapulted me from a 3-6 start to a 12-9 finish and first place in my division.
In 2014, hella took over as league manager and we expanded to 16 teams. At this point I was neck deep into fantasy theory and I recommended we shrink our roster sizes to accommodate the new teams (a change which has worked well). We also changed scoring a bit and lowered the weekly acquisition limit so as to discourage streaming. Points for IP was cut in half, as part of the reason SP was so strong in 2013 was because you could add just about anyone off the free agent list who could pitch a bunch of innings and they'd be good. To compensate for the loss in points to pitchers, we increased points for K from 1 to 2. Unfortunately this was a very bad change, and it was evident only a few weeks into the year. Teams with top pitchers were nigh unstoppable and anyone who didn't have an ace was dead in the water.
In 2015, our first order of business was fixing that. We reduced K to its original value, and increased IP from 1.5 (0.5 per out) to 2.25 (0.75 per out), but still below its default value of 3 (1 per out). One element of scoring that a lot of us wanted was to attempt to balance the points generated between batters and pitchers. The changes to IP and K looked good on paper, but it seemed that batters might be too strong. So we cut the points for RBI from 1 to 0.5.
So between 2014 and 2015, we reduced points for both pitchers and batters. Instead of an average team scoring perhaps 290 points per week, our average this year was 211.