Last Week’s Question: Does your
league have unique procedures, penalties or prizes?
I ended last week’s column
with a promise to reveal more of the oddball practices in Jason’s
league. I already mentioned the prerogative of each year’s
champion to institute a new rule for the league (pending a vote
of approval). That was just the beginning of special privileges
and responsibilities for the champ, who also “gets to name
the last-place team the following season” and “must
spend $20 on a gift bag for the last-place team.” Want more
details? Of course you do:
This can be anything from $20 worth of toilet
paper to a cache of dollar store schwag and/or highly inappropriate
items. The unboxing is either filmed and distributed or occurs [at
a league gathering].
But the champion isn’t the only one affected by other weird
rules in Jason’s league, such as one introduced this season
that has become known as “the Manning rule”: “If
[your] team’s kicker outscores your starting QB in any given
week, you owe $5 to the highest-scoring team that week.” Ouch.
(And if my QB has to leave with an injury sustained in the first
series in the game, double-ouch!)
The most interesting rule under consideration in Jason’s league
makes me wonder whether Jimmy Wales is a participant:
Pending: The league gets to jointly create a
Wikipedia page about the league champion's team/ownership/season.
Jason’s league has other, more serious rules designed to maintain
competition throughout the fantasy season. We’ll look at those
a bit later. For now though, let’s review some other unique
practices, such as this brutal penalty in ADT’s league:
In my 12-man PPR money league, if you finish
in last place you get kicked out of the league and shot down to
the league our children play in. If you are the champion in that
league you once again get to play with the adults the following
season. In the event one of our children win: the open spot becomes
available to someone outside of the two leagues.
The most unusual prize awarded to a league champion was mentioned
by Phil, whose league has taken a page from the Masters Tournament:
“We do a weekend-long draft event (golf, etc.) at a rental
house. The champ not only gets first pick of bedrooms but he also
sets the menu for draft night.”
Gary mentioned a number of oddball traditions that have evolved
over the years in his league , including a bizarre fixation on actress
Bea Arthur. The tradition from Gary’s league that I like best
is the practice of placing side bets on which owner will be the
first to attempt to draft a player who has already been taken. As
I encountered one reference to alcohol after another in Gary’s
note, it became clear that once you have placed a wager on which
owner will be the first to select an already-claimed player, you
go out of your way to get him drunk.
A similar alcohol-related provision was instituted in Phil’s
league: “If you have a draft where there's lots of drinking
goin' on, you simply must institute this one: If you try to draft
a guy already taken (or in an auction, nominate an owned player),
you take a shot!”
I’ll let a bass-ackward trophy tradition from Craig’s
league carry us to the finish line in this section for reasons that
will soon become obvious:
We are not a money league. We do throw in $10
a team at the start of the season to be divided 60/40 by the two
Super Bowl competitors, but nobody really plays for that. About
10 years ago the start of the holiday season would cause some teams,
even those still in playoff contention, to drop their game a little
bit and on the flip side, those who thought they were out of it
would do little to win or actually purposefully lose in order to
advance their draft position the next year. I bought a Heisman-like
bronze trophy and had it mounted on a marble base. The 4 sides or
the base have brass plaques affixed. The Super Bowl winner has his
name, his team’s name and the championship year engraved on
the trophy and gets to keep the trophy until a new Super Bowl winner
is crowned. The guys are much more interested in hoisting that trophy
than they are in the $60.
At the same time I bought an equally large trophy with a marble
base and brass plaques – and a roll of toilet paper mounted
above the base on a spindle. This trophy was named the Benduever
award in honor of our then league commissioner (and first recipient).
The last-place team’s owner, team name, and year of infamy
are engraved on that trophy. And, like the Super Bowl winner, that
team owner keeps possession of that trophy until it is wrested away
from him by a successor loser. EVERYONE works through to the end
of the season not to have his name on that trophy.
How effective are the two trophies? Heading into week 9 NO ONE is
out of playoff contention.
This
Week’s Question: What’s the most effective technique you’ve
encountered for incentivizing engagement from owners who are out
of playoff contention? (Specificity encouraged.)
Although some of the responses I received to my question about “unique
procedures, penalties, and prizes” were inexplicably weird,
most of these idiosyncratic practices evolved for a very specific
purpose: to keep fantasy owners engaged whether their teams are
likely to advance to the playoffs or not (like Craig’s “trophy-of-shame”).
Consider this rule from Jason’s league: “$20 fine for
incomplete roster. Commish fills game day roster w/ avail bench
players” or this one from Phil’s league: “$40
fine for the last-place finisher (nothing like seeing a cellar dweller
making add/drops in Week 13 to keep up the fight!).”
Obviously, there’s no perfect recipe for eliminating owner
apathy. Each league has to engage this problem in its own way and
on its own terms. I invite commissioners who are on the warpath
against apathy to look back through the Q&A archives for all
sorts of reader perspectives on this problem over the years.
However, this year, I want to mention Kevin’s dissatisfaction
with an anti-apathy measure I have long advocated: a weekly prize
for the high-scoring team. As Kevin explains:
I had a hard time getting my owners to go along
with a weekly prize for the team with the highest score because
it meant taking money away from the big purse. As one owner said,
“You don’t play fantasy football to see who can put
up the most points in Week 6. You play for the same reason NFL teams
do: to win a championship.” I saw his point, but he eventually
saw mine about using a weekly prize to keep people on top of their
game even after a championship is out of reach. So we took $130
out of the purse to award $10 to the high-point scorer each week
of the regular season.
That was dumb.
Nobody gives up on their fantasy team in September[, so] that “extra
incentive” was no incentive at all. It was just a month’s
worth of $10 fees that we stole from the league champion (whoever
that turns out to be) for no good reason.
We’re changing this for next year. We don’t want to
start handing out $10 to the high-scoring team any earlier than
we have to. If we start our playoffs in Week 14, when should we
start handing out weekly prize money?
To answer Kevin’s question as simply as possible, I think
it’s probably safe to use Week 7 as the cut-off point. Apathy
can creep in a little earlier than that for owners who get off to
a horrible start, but I don’t think it becomes a major problem
in the average league until Week 8.
I invite readers who have their own answers to Kevin’s question
to email me with their responses
(or to post them directly to the column). But I want to expand the
question to make it more generally useful. Anti-apathy measures
are always evolving, and since I got such detailed feedback from
readers on unique procedures, penalties, and prizes, I hope to encourage
detailed responses from leagues that strive to incentivize engagement.
Kevin is right to observe that weekly high-score awards are mostly
pointless in the early weeks of the season, so I look forward to
learning about the particular tweaks that various leagues have made
to maximize the effects of practices that I sometimes discuss in
oversimplified ways.
I’m grateful to all the readers who responded to my last question
whether I had a chance to quote them or not.
Image by Tilt Creative (Ty Schiff)
Survivor
Pool Picks - Week 10 (Courtesy of Matthew
Schiff)
#3: Green Bay over Detroit: (4-5, Cin,
Phi, AZ, ATL, KC, SEA, SD, NE, DEN)
Dear reader, take a look at my HORRIBLE pick’em pool record
this year before you even think about using my third pick. Clearly,
this slot hasn’t been the best pick by yours truly this
season, but if you look at my record over almost 12 seasons with
the Q&A column, I’m probably better than 75% overall
with my picks during this time. With that in mind, it’s
time to “pad my stats” by taking the Packers at home
against a Lions team that is apparently in “permanent rebuilding”
mode. While Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson are still the
heart of this team, the franchise has lost something from the
last two years – namely Ndamukong Suh – who is in
Miami. Without the fear of a decent pass rush, Aaron Rodgers should
be able to pick apart these division rivals en route to an easy
victory at home. So if you haven’t used Green Bay yet, go
ahead this week without the fear of being booted from your Survival
pool like so many Denver and Atlanta fans last week.
#2: Philadelphia over Miami: (7-2, GB, Balt,
NE, SEA, NYG, MIN, AZ, STL, ATL)
Dan Campbell knows all about playing against the Eagles in Philadelphia
from his playing days with the NY Giants. This week, he brings
his Dolphins to the Linc in hope of getting back on the winning
track after losing two tough divisional matchups in a row. Campbell
benefited from a wave of team emotion upon his promotion, but
the crest of that wave is a distant memory at this point. If anything,
the emotional edge in this Week 10 matchup should go to the Eagles,
who will want to stake their claim to first place in the NFC East
with a win at home (followed, in the minds of Philly’s faithful,
by watching the Giants implode vs. the Patriots). Admittedly,
this is not your father’s gimme, but as we get later in
the season, you have to go out on a limb and hope that it doesn’t
get sawed off behind you.
#1: Cincinnati over Houston: (7-2 NE, Mia, SEA,
AZ, Atl, GB, STL, KC, NO):
The Bengals are atop the AFC North with an 8-0 record. They may
be ready for a challenge, but they’re unlikely to get one
this week against a struggling Texans team that will be playing
without Arian Foster for the remainder of the season due to a
torn Achilles. With Foster gone, we can expect the Texans to rely
more than ever on the Brian Hoyer-DeAndre Hopkins connection that
wins lots of games in fantasy football, but not very many in the
NFL. The Texans move the ball efficiently with almost 400 yards
per game, but they are being outscored by their opponents by almost
a touchdown per game. Why should a defense that couldn’t
stop Miami or Kansas City fare any better against the likes of
Andy Dalton, A.J. Green, Tyler Eifert, and the 1-2 punch of Jeremy
Hill and Giovanni Bernard? Look for Cincinnati to continue its
“magical” season with a win over a Texans team that
needs another year (and possibly a cloning procedure for J.J.
Watt) to improve on its defense.
Mike Davis has been writing about fantasy football since 1999--and
playing video games even longer than that. His latest novel (concerning
a gamer who gets trapped inside Nethack after eating too many shrooms)
can be found here.
