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By John Siskos
Last week, I started off with who could play, how important rules are, what scoring system you can use, how many starters and how many roster spots to have.
Going forward, we are going to have to elaborate on the rules. Specifically, finding out which problems could occur and how to solve them ahead of time.
Now, there is really no right or wrong sets of rules. The only thing you have to do is just make sure that they are clearly set out.
If you have a waiver system, who gets first crack? When can you drop and add players? What about trading? Are there limitations? When can we start and stop?
These are just some of the questions you will need to have answered in your rules.
First things first though. You need to determine how long your season will last and make a schedule to fit it. Start backwards. When do you want your championship game? If it's Week 17, then you will have a longer season, but you will also have all the studs on playoff bound NFL teams resting if their final game doesn't mean anything. Nothing sucks more than riding Donovan McNabb to the playoffs and then having him sit during your biggest game. For this reason, most choose Week 16 to have their final fantasy game. That doesn't mean those studs are immune from sitting then either, but you definitely lessen the risk of that happening. So, let's say you went with a Week 16 Final, which means your Semi-Finals are Week 15.
Oh, and before I move on further, I am talking about a head-to-head league here. This is where everyone in the league has one opponent and your starters go up against their starters. Luck does play a bigger role here, but it certainly adds more fun to the whole league. The other option would be a Total Points league, but after a certain amount of time, most teams are obviously not in contention and it comes down to a race between two or three teams, which lessens the fun for most of the league. Going head to head and having a playoff series where anything can happen is much more exciting.
But I digress. Now, whether Week 14 is your final regular season game or the first round of your fantasy playoffs depends on really only one factor. How many teams make the playoffs? If it is four teams, you only need Week 15 for two fantasy games, and you could have the winners face off in Week 16. If you are going to have 6 or 8 playoff teams, you will need to start your playoffs in Week 14 so you have enough Rounds to finish off your playoff bracket.
Now that you have determined the length of your season, you can make a schedule. Divide up the teams however you see fit, and figure out how many games every team is going to play against each other. For example, in my rather typical 10 team league (before we added two more teams), we had two 5-team divisions that played 8 inter-division games and 5 out of division games. That made a 13 game schedule with the #2 and #3 teams in each division playing each other in Week 14 (Round 1 of the playoffs) and the #1 seed of each division getting a Round 1 Bye and automatically advancing to the semi-finals. Now with 12 teams, we have an imbalanced schedule with 10 inter-division games and only 3 out of division games. We also added a playoff spot in each division, eliminating the first round BYE for the #1 seed, who now has to play the #4 seed in Round 1.
Okay, so you have a schedule and a scoring system to go with your starters and bench players. Now you need to set some rules that will keep things interesting but clear cut to avoid problems.
You should set a trade deadline so that the trade season is long enough to keep things fun, but short enough so that no one is really out of the playoff picture and ready to do a fire sale that could dramatically affect the outcome of your league.
Further to this, you need to set up a way for trades to be approved. And you will need to watch out for the "C" word…collusion.
col·lu·sion
"A secret agreement between two or more parties for a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose."
Probably the most contentious issue in every league I have been in involved shady trading practices. "Lending" players, "fire sales" and the like are all big no-no's. That's one of the reasons a Week 7 or maybe a Week 8 trading deadline is so important, especially in a redraft league where you "redraft” all the players every year. That is because if Last place "Team A" trades a stud or two to the second place "Team B" for a basket of nothing, then1st place "Team A" is going to have a conniption. "Team A" loses nothing except maybe helping his buddy win, or hey even a portion of the cash if the owners are paying to play. He can trade away his players for nothing since he feels he can't win anyways. This sort of behaviour is very detrimental to the league, taking away from both the fun and competitive nature of it all. Either assign one trustworthy person the power to approve trades, or have and odd numbered committee approve trades. Also be sure to have substitutes in case those voting on trades are in fact involved in the trades.
Another area that should be clearly spelled out is the waiver or free agent acquisitions. You need to clearly spell out WHEN and HOW each team can drop a roster player for a new one. Specify how the order of priority should go, and when the requests for making these moves are eligible.
The rules also need to make sure that a tiebreaker system, both for the individual games, as well as for the standings is set out correctly. If you are not including decimal scoring, the odds of a head-to-head game ending in a tie are not as high as you might think. Make the decision to either set a tie-breaker (one assigned bench player or the highest scoring bench player) OR to just have ties, and stick with it. Also determine how a tie in the standings will affect your playoff picture. The biggest headaches are three way ties, but even two way ties can cause you grief. This year, I finally did away with my convoluted tiebreaker system and just listed Wins and then Total Points Scored. This way it works for a two or three way tie the same.
Roster submissions, seemingly an easy task, often cause a number of problems as well. There's always that one guy (I hate him) who "forgets" to put in his lineup every so often. Or some guys who give you a partial lineup. Easiest thing to do in ANY case is to use the previous week's lineup. The person running a league has enough work to do, to not have to worry about Joe Blow being too foolish to not properly submit a list of 8 or so of his own players in a proper and timely fashion. Don't beat around the bush on this one, or people will be crying bloody murder. I started out "the nice guy" but I kept getting burned and now I am "big stick will crush" kind of guy. I make no sob story exceptions. One guy, who was one of "those" people, didn't submit a lineup last second like he usually did because his ol' lady was giving birth to his kid.
Tough nuts I said. He knew the delivery date for about NINE MONTHS. It was his fault for waiting last minute. Heck, I have some guys who submit lineups on Tuesday morning for the coming weekend, "just in case". Also be aware of e-mails that get delayed or "lost online", or even when owners call and were unable to leave a message. This happens too, but don't worry about it. Just make a simple rule that it is the OWNER'S responsibility to get their lineups in, not yours, so if they don't get it in on time, too bad. This was always the hardest part for me to deal with, especially because everyone in the league was a friend of mine. In retrospect, it also led to some high turnover, because my style of ruling was always a bit too fluid.
I have since learned the error of my ways, I now rule with an iron fist, and the peasants are rejoicing for it. I mean it. This year we finally had every single owner return, and we all felt strong and committed enough to add 2 new teams. Heck I could have added ANOTHER two, but I didn't want to jinx my good fortune.
At any rate, those are some of the bigger items you must address. An example of a set of fully comprehensive standard league rules can be found here:
http://www.siskosstudios.com/ffl/rules.htm
Heck, if you want to copy them outright, I would consider it a compliment, but feel free to just use it as a basis if you like. (Mine is also a keeper league, not a total redraft league, so keep that in mind.)
Next article…we’ll move on to one of the most exciting days of your fantasy season… DRAFT DAY!
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