There are far too many
keeper/dynasty/contract leagues out there in which there are a select group of
outstanding teams, and a separate group of outright bad teams, and the rules
act to keep the better group good, or even make them better. Let’s face it, the rookie draft is a
crapshoot. We’d all like to believe we
can identify the “next big thing” by just putting in the extra effort, and that
this is where the true separation between the best dynasty FF owners and
everyone else exists. But if that were
so, the Patriots, the winningest team over the past 15 years, would be better
at drafting, instead of pretty awful compared to the rest of the NFL. Many NFL teams, such as the Ravens and
Browns, have come to the conclusion that the way to build through the draft is
by having as many draft picks as they can acquire, so that their odds of
finding good players increase in comparison to the other teams.
Don’t get me wrong, having a
rookie draft is incredibly fun, and I definitely want one to be part of every
league I play in. But it cannot be the
only method of improving one’s roster.
In fact, the more difficult the rules make it to improve a team’s
roster, the greater difficulty that league will have in keeping owners or
attracting new owners. Because their
pitch boils down to: please give this small group of owners your money for the
next 3 to 4 years before maybe, if you’re both lucky and good, have a chance to
compete with them.
In the first complex league I
joined, I took over a dynasty league team that had made it to the Championship
game the year before. And yet, the
ultimate outcome wasn’t in question, because the best team in that league,
roster-wise, was miles ahead of everyone else.
It was as if this one team was a Pro Bowl squad, and all the rest of the
league’s best players were divided among 11 other teams. That best team would occasionally put one of
his aging star players on the trading block. Since he had an all but monopoly on the best
players, there would be a bidding war for that one player in which he ended up
acquiring a bunch of rookie draft picks.
With a deep roster, he could afford to carry the young players to see if
they developed, and his mastery continued.
When I joined, the end of the league was already foretold. More and more owners declined to continue to
toss their money away, with there being increasing difficulty in finding
replacement owners willing to take over a crap team, until a critical mass of
defections caused the league to disband.
So when designing your league
rules, make sure you give advantages to the worse teams and place obstacles in
the best teams’ path toward continued dominance. I usually not only have a rookie draft, with
the worst teams getting primary place in draft order, but I allow the
non-playoff teams to compete in the postseason for bonus rookie picks. That keeps things exciting, keeps them
motivated to continue to improve their squads, and improves their chances of
improving in future years. I’m also in
favor of placing limits on how long a team can keep their best players. If we’re playing a game, make everyone
actually make an effort each year to improve their team, rather than having
some teams resting on their laurels, while others lose interest due to the
apparent lack of opportunity for improvement.
In most new start-up leagues,
the teams will very quickly separate themselves into tiers, with a group
dominating, a group doing miserably, and another in the middle. I’m in a relatively new contract league (not
as a Commish, just an owner), where each offseason we bid on veteran free
agents, and then assign contract years between 1 and 4. All teams get the same amount of money to
bid, no matter how they fared the year before.
So what ends up happening is that the better teams, who have fewer holes
in their rosters, can concentrate their monies on just a few targeted free
agents, and thus outbid the worse teams who need help in multiple areas. Thus
the best teams stay better than the rest.
Personally, I favor the
complex leagues that try to replicate the NFL, which means salary caps,
multi-year contracts, and rookies with cheap four- or five-year deals. Having high draft picks in such a league is a
major advantage as they get better talent (supposedly) on sweetheart deals and
thus can afford to spend more on the free agents as well. So this gives the worse teams twice the
advantage. At the same time, having that
extra money for free agents can be a double-edged sword as locking up a high-salary
player for multiple seasons should hinder that team if the player doesn’t
produce points that corresponds to their acquisition cost.
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