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Keeper Leagues:
The Next Evolution
4for4.com Exclusive
By Ralph Durham
August 7, 2007 |
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This article assumes that either you already have a keeper league going, or have a reliable, knowledgeable group of owners who are considering making the jump to a keeper league. I’ll have some suggestions for spicing up the rules for your league if it is a basic keeper league, along with some warnings of the possible pitfalls that go along with different league rules and procedures. I’ll also have some recommendations on how to avoid those pitfalls or minimize the damage they can do. Call it ‘lessons learned over the years.’ Finally, I’ll have some suggestions for dominating your keeper league.
If you haven’t already, I suggest that you check out two excellent articles related to keeper leagues on 4for4. Marc Hess gives an
excellent overview of some fundamental keeper league issues, “Running A Keeper League” and Greg Alan’s article “Evaluate NFL and Keeper Trades” gives some great advice on
keeper league strategy and trade
value. I mention these articles, because you’ll want a full picture, and I want to build on the insights of those earlier entries.
First, for the basic keeper league, obviously you just keep your best player(s), taking into account your expectations for winning this year balanced with prospects for future years. While there are some variations on the theme (keep 1 player, 2 or 3, or I player per position, etc.) it is a fairly simple value equation to factor current year projections, age, injury history, and so forth.
4for4’s standard Keeper Draft Rankings should be extremely useful for such leagues. If your keeper league has any unusual scoring or atypical starting lineup options you’ll be particularly interested in
4for4’s new custom keeper
app, which should be of enormous help with determining the value of various players on your roster. There’s nothing even remotely close to it on the web. You’ll need to make sure you
carefully input your league’s scoring system, but once you’ve customized it to your league’s scoring you’ll have a tremendous edge on your competition.
Constitutional Issues
Marc Hess makes an excellent point that I want to expand on – that keeper leagues have a particular need for precise rules. I would go so far as to say that your league rules need to be treated like a Constitution. So be careful, thorough, and precise with the language, and how things are worded. If situations are left unclear or open to interpretation, believe me, the situation will come up, and depending on the outcome of the dispute resolution someone will win or lose a matchup, or a playoff spot. Losing is bad enough, but if somebody loses and feels an injustice was done, you’re likely to have a disgruntled owner. One example: in our league we used to have scoring broken down by position like normal, assuming the usual ways players score. RB’s WR’s and QB’s get touchdowns, kickers kick field goals and extra points, etc. What if a snap is fumbled and a kicker recovers the fumble and runs in a TD? Does he get 6 points? Some years back Brad Johnson threw a pass which was deflected back into his hands, and he ran it in for a score – does he get the points for a TD pass and reception? Either way you decide, it just needs to be clear. One way to handle these situations if you’re using league management software, is to only count those things that the software allows for. That is an easy default position.
It’s also a good idea, once you have a solid set of rules in place, that all of your owners find agreeable, to protect the stability of those rules. One way to do this is to have a requirement for a supermajority to make any rule change – say 9 out of 12 owners must vote to approve any rule change. Disadvantage, it makes it difficult to get a desirable rule change passed. On the other hand, if the proposed change is all that desirable, those owners in favor of it can argue, explain and persuade the other owners and try to change their minds. The advantage is that when a crazy idea pops in someone’s head, and they enthusiastically bring up the idea, you have some protection against making crazy changes on the instinctive reactions of half your owners. Everyone, or at least almost everyone, should be on board before changing a good thing for something that might or might not be an improvement.
Trading Issues
You’ll also need to be able to decide whether your league allows trades or not – generally, trading is a good thing – but you want to have very precise rules about what is, and is not permitted with trades. Why, you may ask? What’s wrong with just letting any two parties who agree make a trade? Here’s a couple of scenarios which should illustrate the hazards of totally unregulated trading:
1) The disinterested owner and the shark – let’s say one of your owners is losing interest in fantasy football, and for whatever reason, just isn’t paying the attention he used to. Maybe he has new stresses on the job, a new baby is keeping him up all night, or he’s picked up a $300 a day smack habit. Maybe all three. Smelling blood, the shark cruises by, and offers Randy Moss, Lamont Jordan and Mark Brunell, for say, Chad Johnson, Frank Gore and Tom Brady. Still not sure what year it is, and wearing the same shirt and shoes he had on in 1999, the goof says ‘yeah, sure.’ You might want to have a provision where either the commissioner, by fiat, or a supermajority (say 9 out of 12 owners) can veto such a patently lopsided trade. You hope you would never get an owner in your league who would collude with another owner to pull off such a trade, but IF it ever happened by intent rather than accident, you’d definitely want to have some provision for redress.
2) The cellar dwelling owner who not only tanks his team for this year, but trades away the future to boot. As playoff season approaches, some owners may be tempted to tank their teams, and trade away all of their players with value. In one league I’m in we addressed this issue two ways: first, by awarding weekly payouts to the high score for the week, all the way through Week 17. Even if you’re the bottom-ranked team, and out of the playoff picture, there’s an incentive to scratch and claw, pore over the waiver wire, and try to at least win a weekly prize. Also, in addition to our playoffs, we have payouts for the top five ranked teams in overall points scored. If even the 4th or 5th ranked team gets a token payout (even $25 or $50) they have an incentive to compete deeper into the season. This way almost no team is decisively eliminated from finishing “in the money” until deep into the season. Teams that have something to play for don’t give up.
3) You need to protect the future integrity of your league by limiting the long-term damage an owner can do to their franchise. Let’s say I want to make a playoff run and I start trading away all of my young prospects for well-positioned playoff prospects, and then start trading away future draft picks. Should I be allowed to trade away my top 3 draft picks for next year, or two years from now? What if I pull such a deal to win my playoffs, and then don’t return to the league next year? The league has to replace an owner, and oh, by the way, the franchise you get to take over has been blown up and has no high draft picks. No, you can’t allow a “free market” decision to wreck the integrity of your league.
Drafting and Trading for a Successful Playoff Run
Preparation, Preparation, Preparation. As a teacher I can tell you something you can take to the bank. Do your homework, you have a great chance of making an A. Don’t do your homework, you’ve got almost no chance. It applies to fantasy football as well. Before your draft, you’ll want to make extensive use of your 4for4 tools, and make some decisions for yourself about your own keeper philosophy: how much emphasis are you putting on winning this year, and how much are you factoring in the future. (See
Keeper Cheat Sheet for a more thorough discussion of this balance) Make sure you have run practice drafts on the
PCDrafter, and look at the Keeper Draft Rankings for some general player rankings. Finally, to separate yourself from the pack, make sure you run the
custom keeper app. You’ll be able to identify value players, players you want that you should be able to get in later rounds, and what players you should target and which you let others overpay for.
As the season goes along, you’ll want to tighten and improve your team, whether through the waiver wire or trades. 4for4 has a massive toolbox at your disposal that is constantly tweaking the value of certain players as the season unfolds. Doing your homework will help you identify players to dump at their peak value, and players to target as undervalued trade prey. 4for4 can help you with the relative value of players, but your own trade strategy will be determined by where you stand at mid- to late-season. If you’re out of it, you might want to trade a stud for a prospect or two. If you’re in the playoff hunt, and you’re loaded with prospects, you might trade a couple of them for a stud to help your playoff run. If you snooze at this point in the season, your opponents will beat you to the punch, and next thing you know you check your email or league web site, and your top competitor has just solidified his roster with Peyton Manning and Steven Jackson for a couple of future Pro Bowlers, and you’re left out in the cold. Last season I called up an owner who was at the bottom of the standings 2 weeks before the trade deadline and offered him Jerious Norwood and Braylon Edwards for Marvin Harrison (He couldn’t keep Marvin another year). I was weak at WR, and Marvin was the missing piece for my playoff run. The other guy now has two fine prospects coming into this year, Norwood and Edwards. We both got something we needed.
Finally, I’ll just say that you should make use of 4for4 resources throughout the season.
Trader’s Alley is quite simply a triumph of simplicity and comprehensive basic information to help you dominate your league’s trading market. Joe Hawlik’s blog is a fount of wisdom, and the current Draft Board will evolve with 4for4 staff and the collective wisdom of some damn well-informed 4for4 members.
Post your comments to us, and let us help you both build a fun keeper league, and once it’s going, win it.
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