As we wrap up another fantasy football season one thing I always like to do is take a look at ways to improve my league. I’ve found one of the best ways to do this is to play in other leagues. When I was constructing my league rules I had a basic concept of what I wanted to do. As I developed the rules I took the best pieces of all the leagues I’d participated in and meshed them into my league. This made for a good start, and I thought when I initially finished the league setup that I wouldn’t have to do much with it again. However I find that I typically make rules changes every year in order to add new twists and keep things interesting. Rarely do we make dramatic changes, but adding a new wrinkle or two each season also helps keep the owners involved in the league and makes them think about what changes they want to see in our rules. In last week’s column I asked for and received some feedback regarding unique rules. I wanted to give the readers and myself some ideas for adding a unique wrinkle to our leagues. Below is some of the feedback I received.

1. Draft a Head Coach – I read about this rule in a league I was considering playing in at one time. I’ve never implemented it but it seems interesting because coaches are as important to NFL teams as are star players. They can take a mediocre team and make them a playoff contender (Tony Sporano) or they can take a playoff contender and run them into the ground (Norv Turner). So why shouldn’t your fantasy team have an NFL coach? A simple way to do this is to allow each team to draft a coach and award points for each win. For example, if you have Mike Tomlin and Pittsburgh wins their game this week you get 10 points for Tomlin, or whatever works with your scoring system. You’d have to find a work around for the bye weeks and I’d suggest that once you select your coach, you’re stuck with them for the season as coaches typically (not always as we’ve seen this year) ride out the season before getting replaced. It would add a little twist on draft day, especially if you make the points for a coach win significant enough to where drafting them wouldn’t be an afterthought like kickers are. You’d really have to examine teams and schedules and identify sleepers like maybe John Fox this year who had a decent team plus a marginal schedule to help turn him into an 11 – 13 game winner this season.

2. Defensive Team Win – One thing that bothers me in a scoring system is when certain positions devalued because there isn’t much statistical difference between the top and mid-performing players. Kickers and Defenses stand out as un-draftable in many leagues because those on the waiver wire as just a likely to be successful as those that are drafted. One way to counter this is to add more performance based scoring statistics to differentiate the best teams from the worst teams. One stat I developed to help do this is a defensive team win. Basically if a defensive unit holds their opponent below 19 points (Roughly the average points scored per game by NFL teams) and their team wins the game, that defensive unit gets points for the win. The reason being is that the defensive unit was a major contributor to the win by holding the opponents offense below the NFL scoring average. This stat has helped the better defenses further differentiate themselves statistically from the middle of the pack. Units like Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Tennessee have greatly benefited from this stat as they achieve this mark nearly every week. This stat has helped make the Baltimore DST the highest scoring position in our league this season and on par with the top QB’s and RB’s but it doesn’t bump all defenses up so that they are still a dime a dozen. Good defenses are a premium in our league and are drafted as early as the 5th round as we’ve taken a lot of the chance element out of drafting a team defense.

3. Flex Schedule - Thanks to John in Plainview, NY for this idea. It is based on a 12-team, 2-division league. The original rule was that all teams play each other for 11 of the 13 weeks. Then in week 10 and week 13 you’d play the team in the opposite division with your corresponding ranking. So, 1 plays 1, 2 plays 2, etc. Now if you have divisions I prefer an unbalanced schedule, but this premise would still work in a 12-team league. You’d have 10 games inside the division and you’d have three weeks where you’d play outside your division and you’d play the team with the corresponding ranking. You could do this in weeks 5, 9 and 13 to space out the match-ups to hopefully avoid the same teams playing three times, but I do like the concept.

4. Flex Divisions – When I first set my league up, I assigned teams to divisions based on personal relationships. My premise was that because we played a weighted schedule, I wanted guys who knew each other well to have more games against each other. This did work out great and many of the guys really liked the rivalries it created. Over time though, I noticed that we had about 4-5 owners that were playoff fixtures every year. Not that these guys didn’t deserve it, but I didn’t want the league to grow stagnant. I had played in a league where the divisions were assigned based on prior year’s performance. This was a 12-team, 2-division league. One division had all the playoff teams from the prior year and the other had the non qualifiers. Therefore your division changed each year based on your performance. I felt this would be a good solution to get some new blood in the playoffs. We have a 14-team 3-division league and divisions are assigned by the prior season’s finish. Some of the regular playoff teams complained at first about being stuck in a division with all the better teams. However the NFL does the same thing with its scheduling and each year is truly unique in fantasy football so I don’t think it’s a terrible handicap. It also provides encouragement for owners to stay out of the loser’s division as each year we vote on a creatively insulting and humiliating name for that division.

5. The Monday Night Rule – This rule has been suggested to me by one of my owners but we’ve never implemented it. I do think it would be a great rule for leagues that have a more social component. Simply put, if you have a player on your roster whose team is playing on Monday night, you have to start him. Only one Monday night player is required so if you have multiple players in that game you don’t have to start them all. The reason for this is obviously to make the Monday Night gathering of the league more entertaining by having as many games as possible still in play. Obviously it goes against some of the hardcore principals of fantasy football but if your league is more of a social function then this or some variant of it would be great rule.

6. Player Fines – This was sent in by Brad and I’ve tried to implement it in my league but it’s been voted down. “This is the classic kangaroo court rule. If a player on your team for that week gets arrested for any criminal act or other general stupidity (here's where the grayness of the rule stops us) then you put $5 in the pool as a penalty for having such a bone-head on your team. So, one of the funniest events of the year- Tatum Bell's longest run as a Detroit Lion, albeit with someone else's luggage- would have resulted in a $5 fine for the owner who still had him on the team. The sticking point is defining the judge/jury/executioner and what level of stupidity is required before the rule gets enforced.”

I really do like this type of rule to incorporate player conduct into the game of fantasy football. In a related rule change in my league, at next year’s draft if anyone drafts Plaxico, they have to take a “shot”. Now you know why I’m not a comedian.

7. Sudden Death Overtime – Or maybe I should name this the Donavon McNabb rule. This rule has rarely come into play now that most leagues have transitioned to decimal scoring. However prior to that ties were a common occurrence in Fantasy Football. There are several common methods of breaking a tie, bench scoring, a tiebreak player, or even accepting the tie in the standings. However I found none of these really mimicked what the NFL does by playing an extra period where the first team scoring wins. So I actually developed a Sudden Death OT rule that we use only for playoff games. In these games, each player selects a tie-break player from their bench. If that player scores either a touchdown or a field goal (yardage points and extra points do not count) then that team wins. Because it’s the playoffs, the higher seeded team’s player has the first opportunity to break the tie. If he fails to do so it then goes to the lower seed’s player. Honestly its not one of the more popular rules in our league, but I liked the idea of somehow duplicating the sudden death format and now that we use decimal scoring its highly unlikely the rule ever comes into play.

That’s a wrap on this session and on this season of the commissioner’s court. I wanted to thank all of you who read and sent in your questions and were patient with my responses. Being a rookie writer on this team has been an eye opening experience. Writing isn’t something I do for a living (as I’m sure you’ve noticed) so I’ve had my ups and downs with developing topics and sufficient subject matter to hopefully keep your interest. I’ll still be around though and perhaps we’ll do and off-season article or two, so keep your questions coming. Thanks again for reading and good luck to all of you who are in title games over the next couple of weeks.