How to Manage a Fantasy Football League
Fantasy Football Commissioner Tips
Knowing how to a manage a fantasy football league lets your time as fantasy football commissioner run smoothly, and helps the team owners have a good time with the game. Managing a fantasy football league isn’t hard, if you have a good mix of league members and you take care of your own business. Like an sports umpire or referee, if you do your job right, the competitors should hardly notice you’re there. Run a fair game, while at the same time appearing to run to fair game, and everything should run like the proverbial well-oiled machine.
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Below are tips for fantasy football league management.
Eliminate Problems Beforehand
Manage problems before they become problems. Anticipate the various sorts of trouble that might arise, then eliminate those trouble points when you can. Write a logical and comprehensive set of rules, so there aren’t questions every week about some rule you hadn’t considered. Have a rulebook people can refer to, so you don’t have to ask league members to “take my word for it”. Below are rules you should have in place before the draft.
- Draft Rules
- Scoring System
- Waiver Wire Process
- Trade Rules
- Playoff Qualification
- What Happens in Case of Tie
- How New Rules are Enacted
Buy League Management Website
Most fantasy football leagues have their own league website online these days. Go to a fantasy football league management site like “My Fantasy League” and purchase a league, which tends to be somewhere between $70 and $90, depending on what time a year it is. You can buy a league homepage from big corporate names like CBS Sportsline for $160 or $170, but in the opinion of most fantasy football geeks, CBSSportsline offers an inferior product (for twice the price) that MFL does.
In either case, having a league site lets you communicate with league members before draft day, since you can send out league messages that reaches everyone’s email address. You can discuss any rule changes or clarifications, and otherwise coordinate on the draft and the season in general. Also, you can trash talk throughout the summer.
Recoup the money for the site by taking up a $5 website fee from every team at the draft. This is in addition to the league entry fee. Add the two together and collect a lump sum from every owner. Don’t let anyone leave the draft without paying their money, or you’ll never see that money recouped. I don’t let one draft pick be made without a full accounting of league fees.
Managing a Fantasy Football Draft
Managing a fantasy football draft starts with the draft date, time and location. You want to settle on a draft date and announce it roughly two months before the draft, because everyone has to set aside time in the late summer for drafting. You want to have the schedule set before people fill their schedules with that final family excursion for the summer, school clothes shopping, or other fantasy football draft dates.
Find a good location for the fantasy draft, discussing it with the membership. Ideas include your living room, your basement, a private room in a local restaurant, a banquet hall, a church’s fellowship hall, the local civic club, or just about anywhere you can fit 10 to 15 grown men. You’ll probably want to have food and refreshments there, as well as tables, chairs, and room for a draft board. Consider the league membership and their likes, dislikes and habits, since you don’t want to bring 12-packs to a church.
Call everyone a couple of times before the draft, to make sure they’re still coming. Remember to call one week out from the draft, so you have a full week to fill a spot, if someone drops out.
Once everybody is on site, make sure the draft starts on time. If you need votes for rules, get everybody’s attention and get the vote over with. People are going to lounge around, if you don’t stay on the ball, so you want to keep things moving. Remember that at least one impatient wife is watching the clock at home, and remember that at least one league member “has plans for later”. So get the draft started on time, then keep a stopwatch to enforce the draft time rules. Generally speaking, you might allow 3-5 minutes per pick in the first round or two, 2 minutes per pick between rounds 3-10, and 1 minutes per pick in the final rounds of the draft. This tends to come out to 4 or 5 hours, anyway.
Again, remember to collect money.
Managing a Fantasy Football Regular Season
Now that the draft is over and the regular season starts, you’re main job is managing free agency, trades, and playoff brackets.
Fantasy Football Free Agency
Free agency is also called “Add/Drop” and the “Waiver Wire“. This is adding players who aren’t on team rosters to a roster, and dropping players to remain at the roster limit. As commissioner, this is an important aspect to keep the league running smoothly, because free agency is the most common way teams improve in the season.
One option is the waiver wire priority list, which usually gives priority to the teams with the worst record. Once a week, people put in their waiver wire claims and players are assigned, according to the waiver priority list. After this, add/drops are done on the first-come, first-served basis.
Another option is first-come, first-served free agency. This is the easiest for you, since you have nothing to transact. On the negative side, teams can and will drop valuable players, letting other teams get free upgrades, just for being online at the time the drop was made. This rule can be abused, since a failing team can arrange to drop a player, while a contender is online, allowing them the certain player upgrade for free. Leagues have “Can’t Drop Lists” to keep teams from dropping their star players, though this gets tricky, with injuries and bad performances.
Perhaps the best way to handle free agency is through the blind bid waiver wire. Everyone in the league is given an imaginary point pool they use to bid on players. Whoever has the highest bid wins the player. These bids are unseen by everyone else or “blind”, and the commissioner make the transaction at some appointed time in the week. This requires the most work on your behalf, but is the fairest, the most orderly, and the one that requires the most strategy.
Fantasy Football Trades
More league commissioners have lost support through fantasy football trades, than through any other issue. When a trade happens, teams are going to have a lot of opinions about whether it’s fair or not, or whether one side is profiting from the trade or not. When a contender is perceived to be getting a sweet deal in a trade, this often leads to hard feelings. The commissioner has to be on top of this aspect of the game more than any.
First off, the commissioner should avoid suspicious trades himself. If the commish makes bad trades that help his team, he’s on shaky ground trying to police others doing the same.
Second, make certain there are set rules in place to handle trade rules. One option is to have the commissioner review every trade for fairness or collusion. “Fairness” is a subjective area, while collusion requires you to call out two cheaters, without any real proof of their collusion. Some leagues prefer to vote on trades, or simply have unrestricted trades.
Other leagues select three random trade committee members to review all trades in the season. Others have the commissioner and two random trade committee members. Whatever you do, have it in the rule book in black and white what the rules are, then enforce these rules to the letter of the law. Consider a trade deadline to make sure losing teams don’t dump players to their friends.
Fantasy Football Playoffs
Once the fantasy playoffs arrive, you’ll need to set up a fantasy playoff bracket. Have rules in place to determine who plays whom (seeding), while also having a rule in place to handle ties. This should take no time to set up.
Once the playoffs are over, send out checks to the prize winners the Monday after the fantasy football championship. This efficiency will be noticed by the winners, who can use the money to buy the wife a gift for putting up with him throughout the football season, or help buy an extra Christmas present or two (since ff season tends to end in December).
Managing a Fantasy Football League
Learning how to manage a fantasy football league is as simple as that. Even if you are an exemplary fantasy league commissioner, there are going to be times where you get drawn into a controversy, or even when your integrity is called into question. That’s why I saw you need to be fair, but also “appear to be fair”, because you want the majority of the league owners backing you up when nonsense allegations are made. When you make a decision, it needs to be final, and the league membership should get on with the rest of the season. Handle your business and a commissioner shouldn’t “lose” his league.
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For more information related to how to manage a fantasy football league, visit some of the following pages:
- Fantasy Football Advice
- How to Play Fantasy Football
- Fantasy Football Rules
- Fantasy Football Questions and Answers
- How to Manage a Fantasy Football League
This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Games, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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