The Murky World Of Collusion

Collusion is a topic I’ve wandered into a few times in the past. I tend to test the fringes of the fantasy equivalent of treason. Just yesterday, I wrote about selling my fellow owners on a strategy. If everything went according to plan, I’d get to dump some of my back-roster assets, and I’d get a shot at some elite talent after the draft. If I just change how the idea is presented, it can come across as an attempt to solicit collusion.

This topic is important because many leagues have anti-collusion rules. However, a widely held sentiment is that collusion is impossible to prove. The corollary: owners think collusion is occurring right under their noses, they just can’t prove it.

We lack a handy fantasy glossario to tells exactly what collusion means to us. If you ask the dictionary, it’s “secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.” However, I reject that definition for our purposes. It’s too broad to apply to fantasy sports because secret cooperation and conspiracy absolutely should be part of the standard fantasy toolbox. 

In fantasy sports, collusion is jargon. It’s risen above the standard definition to become something more. My task today is to define the beast as it means to us. I’d like your help to get to the end point. The following is a starting point. Let’s use the comments to finish this.

In my opinion, when we seek to punish collusion, we’re mostly trying to penalize the instinctive tantrum that causes us to throw the game board when it’s clear things aren’t going our way. In chess, that can be very cathartic – it’s a little less so in a web browser. In fantasy baseball, the equivalent to throwing the chess board is the no-reward roster purge. By attaching a penalty, we seek to prevent the tantrum (usually, we get a lot of “comments” instead).

That’s the easy portion of collusion because it’s not really collusion. It will tend to benefit one or couple owners disproportionately, but it’s really just a tantrum. You can usually prevent this with an anti-dumping rule. If not, the problem comes with an easy solution – replace the offending owner. After a couple years, you should have a good group of reliable players.

There remains the more nebulous side of collusion. Theoretically, this would be most common among owners who share multiple leagues. A friendly relationship could, hypothetically, developing into a situation where favors are traded. Yeah, sure, we’ll make the trades look mostly legit. Except maybe I’ll give you a top outfielder for a bunch of guys who I say are “breakout candidates.” Then you can swap me something favorable in that other league of ours.

To that, I say this: quit being a conspiracy nut. I’ve talked to a lot of fantasy owners, especially about ways to get one over on the competition.This is the sort of thing they would have bragged about if it was happening. Guess what, I’ve never heard so much as a second hand account of a true conspiracy. It’s always discussed as something that could happen.

Here’s the problem with conspiracies – people don’t keep secrets. I’m sure somebody out there has the exact arrangement I just described, but it’s hardly a widespread arrangement. Honestly, you probably don’t even need to worry about this form of collusion.

At the end of the day, there’s no reason to drop an anti-collusion rule from your league charter. It’s a shame we can’t approach the problem the same way as statisticians do with age-based discrimination. Their approach is to determine the statistical likelihood of an event occurring. Unfortunately, since valuations of players are much more fluid than somebody’s age, we can’t nail down an exact scientific approach to saying – this looks suspicious!

So, who would like to further define collusion or offer solutions for identifying it?