Keeping the Fire Burning in September
As the founder and commissioner of my local league since its inception in 2003, I face a difficult task every year. Invariably, as the calendar flips to September, at least one owner who has little chance at finishing in a money spot, essentially abandons his team. This is not a free league for simple bragging rights. It’s certainly nowhere near the high stakes played for in the NFBC, but it’s enough to incentivize owners to remain active all season long. And yet, it’s clear that the entry fee alone is not enough.
What happens during this time is owners lose interest, turn their attention to football and leave injured players in their active lineups. This inactivity could have a real effect on the standings and could change the outcome of the league. An owner might end up winning solely because he passed a team in home runs who continued to start a player deemed out for the rest of the season. That kind of behavior must be prevented. But how?
I have a strict policy when it comes to inactivity in my league. If I notice one week a player on the disabled list is in a team’s active lineup, I will contact the owner and ask him about it. Usually the owner gives me some silly excuse, fixes his lineup and things are back to normal. Then it happens again, at which point I warn him that this is the last time. The third strike usually springs me to action and the owner is kicked out of the league. It’s a terrible situation, because I have to then take over the owner’s team in the middle of the season and make transactions based on rules I developed for this exact situation.
While this happens in the middle of the season, it mostly occurs the last month or so. I understand it. If you have no shot at the money, do you really care whether you finish in ninth or 10th place? Of course, it’s not too difficult to check in once a week just to ensure you have a healthy lineup active. So really, there’s no excuse. And by not remaining active, you’re potentially altering the eventual final standings. That’s not cool.
I have struggled with ways to resolve this issue. Every idea I have read about had some real problems that discouraged me from trying it out. So let’s discuss some of the possible ways to keep owners active through the final transaction period. I should note that my league uses an auction to fill rosters, so a common idea to base the draft order on final standings is not an option. It is also a single-season league, not a keeper.
First Half/Second Half Prizes – Award prize money to the best teams over the first half and then again over just the second half; or just award a second half prize since the second half is when owners lose interest
Pros: Encourages owners to remain active all season since the second half trophy could be in reach, even if the full season one isn’t.
Cons: This additional prize pool would have to be removed from the main prize pool, meaning the overall winner wins less, which I’m rarely a fan of. Also, splitting the season into halves reduces the sample size, which increases the luck factor, also a negative in my opinion. Last, your fantasy website would have to be able to calculate standings for the second half, or it would require some extra work for the commish, which I’m definitely not a fan of!
Monthly Prizes – Same as above, but award prizes for each month of the season; or, just award a prize for September.
Pros: If September is the biggest problem, then awarding some prize money for just that month should provide the motivation to continue competing.
Cons: Similar to the above, but with the arbitrariness of caring about just one single month. Who cares which team was best in a particular month? It doesn’t really mean anything.
Reduce Auction Budget/FAAB Following Year – Any owner that finishes below a certain number of points will be forced to auction with a reduce budget and/or begin the season with less FAAB than every other team.
Pros: Provides the motivation to ensure your team performs well, or at the very least, doesn’t fall below the threshold that would remove money from your auction budget or FAAB.
Cons: Yeesh. This makes the assumption that a poor fantasy season equals inactivity. That’s obviously not usually the case. An owner could remain active all season, but just suffer through terrible luck with disappointing performances and/or lots of injuries. Moreover, what owner is going to want to even join the league the following year when he already knows his budget has been reduced? He’ll say screw you and find another league.
Add a Preemptive Inactivity Fine to Entry Fee – Add a small, but meaningful additional amount to the entry fee which will be refunded at the end of the season if the team remains active all year. This fee will not be returned if an owner is inactive, with specific rules to be developed to determine “inactivity”. Inactivity fees collected go into the final prize pool.
Pros: This attacks the issue head on with additional money tied directly into an owner remaining active. If an owner knows that he won’t get his money back if he becomes inactive, he’ll be significantly more motivated to stay active.
Cons: Some owners in my league, and I’m sure yours, have sometimes expressed financial difficulties, in that they need some extra time just to pay the entry fee. If the entry fee itself has to be scraped together, then requiring owners to come up with even more could be problematic.
So that’s all I have off the top of my head. The last idea just came to me after reading on a message board thread bout a league that imposes fines. But that league imposes the fine after a violation occurs, which I dislike because how does one ensure the owner pays the fine? So I feel that collecting the money up front is a better option.
What do you think about the ideas above and what ideas do you have to ensure all owners remain active all season and always set a healthy lineup?
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Roto league with a payout a function of final point rather than position. You can add a championship bonus etc if you want but players at the bottom of the standings will still fight to minimize their loss.
We are dealing with a similar problem in a long-time league of mine, except in this instance, there is an owner actively tanking to get a top draft pick by populating his lineup with guys on the DL or still in the minors. It’s a head to head league and this has significantly altered the top of the standings a couple weeks from the playoffs. It’s a keeper league and has had a strong retention rate of participants over the years, with probably 80% of the original core intact after 8 years. There is little risk of people quitting, and is seems like fines for this type of behavior will be the solution next year. My preference is for this person to act like a 35-year old adult man, have some integrity, apologize to his supposed friends, and promise not to act like an a-hole again, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Anyway, I am very interested in the responses to this post to see if there are any better solutions. Thanks in advance for putting this out there Mike!
1. Nothing you can do retroactively that would be fair.
2. Don’t give the #1 pick to the last place finisher. The pros give the st pick to the worst team not only for competitive balance reasons but for marketing reasons, thats not an issue in roto. Give the #1 pick to either the top team that didn’t make the playoffs or the winner of the consolation bracket. This will reward the team that fights for the playoff spot but just misses, or makes the teams in the consolation bracket care.
3. Make a rule that players still in the minors can not be on teams active rosters (you can do the same with the DL). This will prevent teams from tanking. Our stat services is set-up so if you have an active player that gets put on the DL or sent down, you can keep him on your active roster, but once you reserve hi, you can’t bring him back up until his team activates him.
I like the DL/minors rule, but in a weekly lineup league like this, sometimes when lineups lock for the week, some guys are still technically on the DL, but slated to come back mid-week (like Carlos Carrasco this week). This could also happen if a prospect is known to be coming up later in the week, but not active on Monday when lineups are set. It could easily prohibit legit moves, unfortunately.
Simple. Don’t draft in the reverse order of the prior year standings. Options include:
a) Random draft order every year
b) NBA-style draft lottery for first few picks. But for the love of God don’t weigh anyone’s chances.
c) Draft order based on the rolling average of multiple year’s results
d) Put the money winners (or playoff participants) at the bottom of the draft, but assign the top draft picks in standings order starting with the best team not to win anything.
(d) also helps to solve the problem of owners who check out late in the year. Finishing 5th or 6th will mean a good draft pick, and finishing last will mean a poor pick.
D seems the best option I’ve seen. Of the suggestions above, unfortunately the current situation (contact, warn, sim) seems the best option.
Still doesn’t address the issue of the owner who stayed active all year despite having a lousy team, and then he’s going to get punished with a mid-round pick instead of top of the pile. If that was a rule in a league I was thinking about joining, I would re-consider.
Just curious, what do you think is wrong with his strategy? So he’s trying to be the Sixers and you guys get his entrance money every year it doesn’t work, plus access to all the actual players he’s leaving in the market.
The problem is not that his team is bad, it’s that one week late in the season, he left healthy, active players on the bench and instead played multiple guys on the DL and in the minors. The players left on the bench could have filled those same positions, and, if played, would have resulted in a win for his team. It ended up meaning the difference between a 3rd and 4th place finish for the team he lost to that week. That sucks. The rosters are huge in this league, there is no reason he could not field an active/legal lineup while still stockpiling assets for next year.
Make the last place finisher pay for the winner’s entry fee next year. Put it in the rules at the beginning of the year so everybody is aware you don’t want to finish in the cellar on purpose (or you’ll pay double next year).
For it to work, this has to be true “There is little risk of people quitting,…”
An effective way to have all teams continue to be active and try to maintain and/or climb in the standings relative to draft picks is to award NFL style the top pick to the team that is not in the money. So if you have a 12 team league and award $ to top 3 finishers, the 4th place team get the #1 pick followed by 5th and sown to 12th. Then it goes 3-2-1. Every team is still active as their potential pick is in jeopardy.
We do something similar in two of my keeper leagues where the top 5 teams are in the money and the 6th place team gets the first pick in the minor league prospect draft the next season.
Still doesn’t really fix the problem of 8-12 checking out if they are waaaaaay out of 6th place though.
We give money to the top four finishers, but otherwise have the same structure with the following year’s draft going 5-6-7-8-9-10-11-4-3-2-1. Also make sure that the reserve round is a straight format rather than snake to increase the benefit of having an early draft slot.
Honestly, I’m having difficulty maintaining my focus right now even while winning all but one of my leagues. It’s been a long grind since March, and some level of fatigue along with diminished interest is natural, especially if you’re also a football fan and get excited about that sport at this time of year. I can’t imagine many owners being influenced by small amounts of money, either as prizes or penalties.
So very surprised that this many commenters are in favor of this system.
Why are we preemptively punishing bad teams just out of the assumption that one of the owners will go AWOL eventually
I should also add that the degree of this “punishment” would vary in redraft vs keeper vs dynasty leagues
I don’t know that there’s a blanket solution that can cover all league
I think you need to make bottom-tier teams compete for the 1st overall draft pick in the consolation bracket. The winner would get the 1st pick, the loser – 2nd and so on.
I like this idea, but it would be easier to implement in one league as opposed to another. Let’s say starting September 1 you keep track of who performs the best from that point forward. Disqualify all of the teams who finish in the money and then you set your draft order from best-worst in the month of September.
In a head to head league, no problem. Now, how do you do this in a roto league? You’d have to have the commish independently keep track of each team’s stats daily and award points accordingly once the season is over.
I have this problem, and I really liked the “refundable activity fee”. The only problem is determining what inactivity is and trusting the commissioner and/or “interested” league members (who can increase their prize pool) to enforce it fairly.
Do you have any ideas how to define it? Do you limit it to post-July when you have a better idea of who is out of it?
Inactivity is like obscenity. It’s difficult to define but we all know it when we see it.
Use a super-majority league vote to tag an owner as “inactive”. If 2/3 or 3/4 of the league wants a guy out, that says something.
An owner who is inactive at the end of the season is not the sort of owner who would alter his behavior based on a rules change, IMO. The only realistic options are (i) get the right sort of owner, or (ii) live with the owners you’ve got.
That said, I do think prohibiting the activation of players on the DL / in the minors is a great rule, as is setting reserve draft order as 4, 5, 6…, 3, 2, 1. You don’t want teams to be actively tanking. But that is a different problem.