I’m going to take some time out to run a little mini series on being a commissioner. If you’re reading this post, then you already have what it takes to be a commish, and I can’t stress enough how much better it is to run your own league. Over the next couple of days I’m going to go through each step of the process to ensure that you set up a fun, competitive, fair league. Let me repeat that for emphasis, fun, fair and competitive. Those are the three key aspects to a successful league.
1) The Members
Thinking of starting a league? Good, but you’re going to need some people to play with you first! It’s taken me many years to establish the groups that I play with. Fortunately for you, I’ve already handled all the ups and downs and can offer you some tips to make the process quicker. For league members, the first place you need to look is obviously your good friends and family. But having these guys in a league can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s important to screen out who will be a positive contributor to your league and who will be a drag. Once you become the commish, your relationship changes a bit, and as one friend likes to point out to me often, it’s all business. After that I go to co-workers, and then I work outside my network. I’ve posted on craigslist, on my old college message board, and I even suggest using the comments section here. The key is to find a diverse group of people that all want to contribute, and have as many members as you can with NO RELATIONSHIP to one another (outside your core friends and family). It helps to avoid issues of collusion.
In order to join my league, I tell people up front that four things are expected of them. If they do not sufficiently comply with these three four things, they will be asked to leave at the end of the season and will not be invited back.
a) You must manage your team
Sounds simple enough, but way too often you’ll find managers who simply give up at a certain point in the season. Be upfront about this, ask them ‘are you the type of guy who will stop following his team halfway through the season’? Even if a team is completely out of the running for any shot at a title, their moves and actions can have a big impact on the ultimate winners. If it’s H2H, they can knock teams in and out of the playoffs, and no one should ever make the playoffs because they got a virtual bye week at the end of the season. I’ve tried a few different methods to ensure this, including implementing a ‘loser’s tax’. What I’ve found works best involves structuring your league format to maintain competitiveness through the end. In a future post I’ll go over the details of that more closely.
b) You must respond to all trade offers in a reasonable amount of time
This one is vitally important. Ignore a trade offer completely, and people just don’t know if you’ve seen it and don’t like it or haven’t seen it and have stopped playing. 1-2 days is more than enough time to respond to a trade offer. If you’re going to reject a deal, I’d like you to either send a counteroffer, or send a note back saying ‘I’m not interested in dealing so and so’ or ‘I’m going to hold my squad for now and see where they’re headed’. Blind rejections are an invitation for a manger to pepper you with deals, which is an invitation for you to ignore them, which causes frustration.
c) You must act with integrity at all times
Collusion will absolutely not be tolerated. As the commissioner it will be up to you and solely you to determine whether or not teams are acting in concert. If you suspect they are, you must put a stop to it immediately. Zero tolerance policy, and let them know it upfront. The one good thing about collusion: it’s wicked obvious. If you are clear about this in the beginning, you hopefully won’t deal with it at all. Everyone needs to be confident that everything is on the ‘up and up’ with your league. Ethics and integrity are vitally important. I can’t stress this enough, if one guy cheats it opens the door to everyone cheating. That’s no fun. Integrity also covers paying your entry fee BEFORE the draft begins. Waiting until after opens up a whole host of issues. Don’t let a single person slide, the people who always screw me the most on entry fees are family members. Zero tolerance.
d) You need to let people hear from you now and again
Use the message board. It helps build a community. You aren’t expected to post every day, but now and again we’d like some trash talking. If someone calls you out, we want to hear your response. Silence is deafening. Posting is a sign of activity and it let’s everyone know you are alive. There’s also a piece of integrity here as we ask managers not to post rejected trade offers on the message board. It just isn’t fair to let everyone know how one person values their players.
That’s all I got for this piece. I recommend getting together 12-16 guys for optimal play. Stay tuned for the next part n the series where I’ll discuss the best way to set up the league for maximum competitiveness.
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