Last Week’s Question: How can
you prevent owner apathy? (Be specific.)
I have long advocated weekly payouts to high-scoring teams in money
leagues as a simple, sensible measure for keeping owners engaged
even after they have been eliminated from the playoff picture.
If you’re on the playoff bubble, it’s sickening to see
an undeserving team advance to the last wildcard spot just because
the owner got to rack up a series of late-season wins against a
string of abandoned squads. As Jacques commented on my last installment,
“One person in our league is starting [the following players]
in Week 10: Rivers (Bye), Anquan Boldin (Bye), Stevie Johnson (Bye),
Dion Lewis (IR), Indy D (Bye), and Josh Lambo (Bye).”
These circumstances are especially maddening when the abandoned
teams are abandoned as a direct consequence of your own hard-fought
victories over them earlier in the season, when they were still
doing their best to win the championship. “After I beat Team
A twice, Team A gave up and stopped logging in, which is why Team
B beat Team A in Week 11, which is why Team B is going to the playoffs
instead of my own team. Aargh!”
When I mention small weekly cash prizes as a way of keeping the
Team A owners of the world engaged, I don’t mean to imply
that such prizes are the perfect solution. The first shortcoming
with this idea is that lots of FF leagues (like Jacques’)
don’t want anything to do with monetary incentives. Handing
out bonus purses (or issuing fines) will only work in certain contexts.
But even if the bonus prize sounds like a good fit for your league,
it still has flaws. Abandoned teams are usually abandoned because
they are bad, and the owners of bad teams may think that the odds
of getting the weekly high score are too remote to justify the time
spent managing their rosters. These people probably don’t
think of themselves as exhibiting bad sportsmanship. Try to see
things from their perspective: They paid their dues; they made an
honest effort at the draft/auction; their teams failed; they aren’t
complaining or asking for special treatment; but now they have better
things to do with their time. Some of them cheerfully post “See
you next year” on the league message board before deleting
the bookmark for the website.
Another flaw with handing out weekly high-score prizes (as a reader
pointed out to me) is that such incentives make no sense in the
early weeks of the season, when owners are still enthusiastic about
their teams.
Accordingly, I guess I can only recommend using weekly high-score
prizes to combat the apathy of some owners
in certain leagues for a portion of the season—which
isn’t nearly as effective an anti-apathy measure as the ones
I get to feature in this week’s column.
Let’s start with Tedd’s approach, which uses an annual
divisional shake-up to keep things interesting:
[Our] hybrid keeper/dynasty league is divided
into three divisions of four with the top two division winners getting
a playoff bye and the third division winner in a "wildcard"
round with the next three highest-seeded teams. The remaining teams
play a similarly structured "consolation playoff" to determine
the "best of the worst."
Each year the divisions are "realigned" with the final
four "championship" playoff teams in one division (“Champions”),
the two "wildcard" losers and the first and third place
"consolation playoff" teams in the second division (“Middlings”)
and the remaining four in the third division (“Laggards”).
League fees are determined by division with the Champions getting
a 25% discount and the Laggards a 25% penalty. . . .
The draft is a "straight" draft (not snake) determined
by the playoff results for the Champions (picks 9-12) and the Middlings
(picks 5-8). The first four draft positions are determined by lottery
for the four Laggards with cumulative record, playoff record and
points scored used to determine the number of draws adding more
incentive to [perform] even after you have been eliminated from
the championship playoffs.
There are lots of nuances here to appreciate. Perhaps most important
is the decision not to use a snake draft, since the team that picks
first maintains that advantage throughout each round of the draft.
Snake drafts are popular because they seem pretty fair, but any
league that seeks to achieve parity (like the NFL) will recognize
that teams at the bottom of the heap may need more than their fair
share of help to compete with teams at the top.
I also appreciate the touch of determining the first four picks
with a lottery. You don’t want to incentivize owners to sabotage
their own teams just to get the top draft position next year. In
Tedd’s league, if you want the loser’s advantage of
a top pick each round, then you have to pay 25% of another team’s
entry fee—and you might only end up with the fourth pick.
I think Tedd’s league has struck a nice balance between carrots
(high draft picks for bad teams) and sticks (cash penalties for
finishing in the bottom 25%).
Bart’s league also focuses on draft position, but takes a
slightly different approach:
The 4 teams that miss the playoffs go to a "loser
bowl" where they play for next year's draft position. In a
dynasty league, that drop from 1st to 4th can really be painful
as you watch other owners enjoy Gurley/Cooper for the rest of their
careers. The owners involved in last year's loser bowl loved having
high stakes games despite a lost season. Granted they aren’t
the most active waiver owners, so it's a small sample size, but
I personally love the rule and how those owners were acting during
that playoff.
I heard from a lot of commissioners with creative ideas for using
draft picks to incentivize engagement from owners, but the solution
that seemed most useful to the greatest number of leagues came from
Will:
We have instituted a reverse draft order for
the bottom 5 non-playoff teams. In other words, top 5 teams make
the playoffs, and the 6th place team gets the #1 pick the next season,
7th place team gets the #2 pick, and so forth. It helps strike a
balance between encouraging teams that are “out of it”
to keep trading (for picks and prospects) while not discouraging
them from trying to win each week - especially when their games
have playoff implications for the teams still in the race. This
year we had an owner start 0-8, but he has fought back and now has
caught the next team and will probably improve his draft position
for next season. We stole the idea from a rotisserie baseball league,
and it seems to work great without getting bogged down in penalties
and fines. While we have ten great owners, the problem we ran into
was what I dubbed “passive tanking”, where they weren’t
intentionally making bad roster moves - they had just checked out,
and losing was actually a benefit.
I love the simplicity of this last model. It seems like something
that could easily be adapted in all sorts of leagues, especially
for folks like Jacques who don’t want to rely on fines and/or
cash prizes.
I also received a number of suggestions that had nothing to do with
draft picks (including an intriguing midseason redraft from Dan’s
league that I look forward to featuring in my next column). But
since I’m probably already taxing the patience of readers
at this point, I’ll cover solutions unrelated to draft picks
in Week 12.
My thanks to everyone who wrote in.
This Week’s Question: Does your league
know how to keep owners from checking out?
My Week 12 column will continue this examination of league-specific
solutions to the problem of owner apathy. If you have any tips worth
sharing, please email them
to me or post them in the Comments section at the bottom of this
column.
Survivor Pool Picks - Week 11 (Courtesy
of Matthew Schiff)
I owe my readers an apology. The last two weeks have been just about
the craziest in the NFL in my 20+ years of picking games. In Weeks
9 & 10, yours truly has gone 0-6 straight up, let alone against
some monster spreads. Vegas may have benefited from this, but survivor
pools have turned into bloodbaths. If you are still in your survival
pool, it isn’t because I helped you. Regrettably, I haven’t
helped a single reader a single bit in two consecutive weeks (for
the first time in my many years of writing this column). With that
acknowledgment/caveat out of the way, let’s try and help those
who might still be alive in their pools. If you are one of those
lucky few, pick against me–haha!
#3: NY Jets at Houston: (4-6, Cin, Phi, AZ,
ATL, KC, SEA, SD, NE, DEN)
The Texans found a way to win last week against the heavily favored
Bengals on Monday night. This week, the Jets should have Ryan
Fitzpatrick back under center after his surgery last Friday to
repair a torn thumb ligament on his non-throwing hand. More importantly,
the Texans await the results of Brian Hoyer’s concussion
protocol or T.J. Yates will have to play QB against the fourth-ranked
defense overall (eighth in points allowed). Last week the Texans
gutted out a win against Cincinnati’s stingy defense (that
only gives up 17 points a game) while holding the powerful Bengal
offense to six points. But unlike the Bengals (who don’t
know who their own primary RB is and only have one dangerous WR),
the Jets feature solid running by Chris Ivory and the two-pronged
attack of Brandon Marshall and Eric Decker. The Texans might keep
pace if Arian Foster was healthy, but the single weapon of DeAndre
Hopkins isn’t enough. Take the high flying Jets on the road,
and maybe yours truly will get this set of picks above .500.
#2: Jacksonville over Tennessee: (7-3, GB, Bal,
NE, SEA, NYG, MIN, AZ, STL, ATL, PHI)
The Jaguars are “in the hunt” for a playoff spot.
Wow. With no one taking control of the AFC South, Jacksonville
could finish 8-8 and represent the most inept division in the
NFL in the playoffs. With two games against Tennessee left on
the schedule and an offense that is getting better under Blake
Bortles, the Jags could surprise everyone. But before they can
fight for the playoffs, they have to win this week. They may not
be much better than the Titans, but at least they have something
to play for, and the whole country will get to see whether they
are up to the challenge on Thursday night. Go Jags.
Image by Tilt Creative (Ty Schiff)
#1: Carolina over Washington: (6-4 NE, Mia,
SEA, AZ, ATL, GB, STL, KC, NO, Cin)
Many fans believe that Carolina is built to make a deep playoff
run with a scrambling quarterback, a stout defense, and a running
game that can take time off the clock, just like Seattle in the
last few years. But don’t coronate them just yet. This week
is not a simple test with Kirk Cousins making the most of his
opportunity to lead a Redskins team that is within striking distance
of the NFC East lead and only needs to put two good games together
to take control. The Redskins defense played very well against
the high-powered offense of the Saints last week and even posted
47 points on them. Don’t expect 30+ from the Skins this
week on the road as Cam Newton reminds them that you need to be
on the field to score points. Take the Panthers as the bizarro-version
of the NFL (with its preposterous Lions-over-Packers and Texans-over-Bengals
outcomes) begins to resemble its former self.
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.
