Having served as a commissioner for more than a decade, I can say that the success of a FF league is built on democratic theory. This means one does what the majority of the owners desire. I start and end all meetings by saying, "This is not my league; it's your league. Thanks for your participation." This philosophy results in a minimum of turnover and outright abandonment (we have NONE). So my first suggestion is to quit belly-aching and since you enjoy the league and owners, respect the majority opinion.

That being said, here is an idea for you. Approach the owners with the idea of having a second draft based on auction rules (using play money). Offer to set-up and run a FREE league at Yahoo. If they have any inclination to try an auction, they will approve the idea. If not, forget it and yield to democracy.

P.S. Offer to host the draft and provide the beer. If they won't come for free beer and a free league, they ain't interested pal.

Recently I drafted an auction team for the first time for another owner who couldn't attend draft. I was told I would love it . . . and I DID! What a blast. The commish who ran things was very organized (a must) and things went very smoothly. I bid on and got studs like P. Manning and S. Alexander and got good value for lesser players like M. Bennett (get well soon). As a longtime fantasy football owner and commissioner I had no idea what I was missing.

Switching over from a "regular" draft to an auction league would be scary because of the massive change involved for all the owners. I may bring up the idea during next year's draft for the year after, which will give everybody a chance to think about it and mull it over.

I understand Keith's problem exactly. My league has been together for 6 years, and two of us have been trying to get us to use an auction draft for a couple of years now, but the rest of the guys just won't bite. It seemed to me that maybe the other owners didn't want to try it because they were afraid of being taken advantage of. They want to stick with what they know because they feel like it makes the playing field level. I can understand that, so I decided that the best thing to do would be to have a practice auction. I emailed everybody and got them to agree to meet for this year's draft 2 hours early. We usually start at 8 p.m. on the Monday before the season gets underway, but everyone was able to make it at 6. The first plan was for us to have our regular draft from 6 to 9 and then to stick around for a phony auction draft from 9 to whenever.

But then some guys started grumbling that they didn't have that much time, so we agreed to have a kind of abbreviated auction. Since our usual draft is 16 rounds, we decided that for our auction draft, we would keep the players at the bottom of our rosters (the ones drafted in rounds 9-16) and put the players drafted in rounds 1-8 up for auction. It seemed like a good way to save time.

Then at the draft, only one kicker (Vanderjagt) and three defenses (Baltimore, New England, and Dallas-the Dallas guy is a homer) went before round 9. By round 12, a few people were complaining that the auction would be screwy because only the very best and worst kickers and defenses would be available in the auction pool [since the others would stay on the rosters of the owners who drafted them in rounds 9-16]. But that gripe turned out not to matter because by round 16, we were all too tired of drafting to be interested in having an auction anyway. It seemed like a good idea on email, but there's only so much fantasy football a group can take in an evening. The moral of the story is that if you want to have a practice auction, I think you should 1) practice putting together a whole team and 2) schedule it on a separate day than your official draft.