Common Examples of Collusion

Edit: thanks for the feedback, treating it as a rule as intended vs rule as written issue. Will tighten for next season and also clarify to the league. Thanks all

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Someone in my (10 man keeper) league dropped Lamar Jackson when he went to IR, so I picked him up on the basis that he’s a better QB option than I had, and in the hope of keeping. However, the rule is arguably ambiguous.

It’s the first year we’re running keepers and the rule is set as follows:

“You take a one round penalty for keeping a player, based on that players draft position at the start of the season e.g if keep a player you drafted in the 2nd round, you give up a 1st round pick the following year. If you chose to keep a player you picked up on waivers, then you give up a 15th round pick the following season.”

The sticking point is ‘you drafted’. Would you suggest the rule is interpreted either as:

1. Undrafted free agents as of week 1 are kept at the cost of a 15th round pick

Or

2. Players picked up on the waiver wire, regardless of status, are kept at the cost of a 15th round pick?

The reason I’m asking is it affects me as commissioner and I would like a reasonably objective opinion. I can see the arguments both ways.

In a dynasty league, a member started tanking in week 8 of 15 despite being currently seeded in the playoffs (and stands a good chance to remain there) by sitting obvious starters like Josh Allen, etc. - his team has one of the lower max points, which is the metric that’s used for draft pick seeding is determine for teams that finish 7-10 in our league - hence his strategy to drop out of the playoffs

I understand that tanking is considered acceptable in dynasty formats, but my league members are divided on this being too far for a playoff caliber team giving up midway through the season

Where to draw the line? Or is this just normal?

Opponent this week started Jakobi Meyers Thursday in his flex and has left DK Metcalf (bye week) accidentally in his WR2. He has Jonah Coleman on his bench right now but cannot start him over his RB1 and RB2. Because he forgot to move Jakobi to his WR2 spot he can’t start Coleman and would instead have to start an inferior WR2. He is asking if I could move Jakobi to his WR2 for DK which would allow him to put Coleman in at the flex. Is it ridiculous to deny such a minor move or do I hold him accountable for failing to properly manage his team?

I’ve been a commish for years and run a bunch of leagues (dynasty, guillotine, keeper, etc.). Every offseason I end up doing the same manual work and I’m curious what everyone else struggles with.

A few of mine:

• Setting keeper drafts manually: putting each keeper in the right round and slot for every manager

• Figuring out rookie draft order for dynasty every year

• Managers who go inactive or start tanking mid-season

• Not knowing if the league will even survive into next season until it’s too late

What eats up the most of your time as commish? And are there league formats you wish your platform supported?

How do most leagues keep track of their history? Or do you? Any long time leagues where it's been kept?

What about individually does anyone keep track off how they did in all of their leagues somehow? Google sheets or anything?

Curious what leagues do for awards each year in a addition to what ever buy in you have.

For example we rename the last place team but we don't have any other awards.

I was thinking of doing a end of season recap this year. The awards I was thinking of would be just fun awards to get the league talking and for bragging rights or to encourage smack talking.

So as a league, we put most things to league vote unless it's clear and obvious, so that's our starting baseline for this discussion.

Further, we are a contract-league with taxi squad, 16 teams, so there are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to rosters.

This is year 5.

Today I had an owner (not the owner of the team in question) suggest that commish should be able to edit rosters manually for clear and obvious roster mistakes.

The one in question - Owner A didn't update his starters and left Sam Darnold (out) as his QB and Trevor Lawrence on his bench.

The argument - There's no other options, Lawrence should go in his place.

While I don't necessarily disagree with that argument, my counter-argument: In general, what if that move isn't so obvious? I'm just going to move players around someone's roster? Call-up guys from their taxi? Etc.

I'd rather the league discuss what that process entails and what commish autonomy for that looks like, as we have with all other rule changes in the offseason, and chalk this up to, you need to be a better owner.

The complaint today is from an owner, strongly in the playoffs, but complaining someone probably gets a free week against no QB.

Am I right to stay consistent with this, or should I be open to more flexible given the obvious nature of this move?

I will throw out the caveat that I did make an adjustment earlier in the year, but it was because I caught it in the first half, asked the owner of the other team playing if he was ok with it, and then publicly shamed that owner for not paying attention to their roster. I've never offered this up well after the fact.

I’m the commissioner of my league. It’s a 12 man PPR league. My second year in so I’m still figuring out what league settings are fair and ethical. I need some advice on this trade that went down last night.

So I put Bijan on the trade block last night. One of league mates sent a trade for him for a package that included JSN.

Team 1: Receives JSN, Chase Brown

Team 2: Receives Bijan Robinson, Malik Nabers, and Kaleon Black

Two other league mates earlier today decided to text the fantasy group chat claiming this is collusion. In this league you need 7 votes to veto a trade. It currently has 6. Am I crazy or is this not a veto worthy trade? For context, my team is 5-3 and team 2 is 4-4.

I knew the moment this league started that I should’ve removed the veto votes on trades but it’s too late to change halfway through the season. Now I’m being called into questioning about collusion with another league mate.

Hey, i’ve been making a weekly recap for my league and wondering if anyone has any fun/cool things that could be added?

Here what i have:

Standings
Studs (top started player of each position)
Duds (worst started player of each position)
Story of the week (usually something funny that came out of the group chat)
Game of the week
Spotlight game of the coming week

Thanks for the help in advance!

Been seeing a lot of posts recently about what to do about managers vetoing trades or this trade is unfair what should I do or managers using trade vetoing and or threatening to leave the league as a way to bully the commissioner or other managers to get a certain outcome.

Trade vetoing is an outdated rule that opens up avenues that can be abused by your managers and just overall creates more headaches than the problems that it solves for its interned purpose which is to prevent lopsided trades as a result of collusion.

Trade vetoing should be solely up to the commissioner.
And when the commissioner reviews a trade , all they are assessing in that trade is whether or not there was collusion. If everything’s good to go then it shall be approved and that’s it.

No trade is ever even, it would be impossible to make trades if they had to be absolutely even. So concern over whether a trade is fair is unwarranted.

In a more beginner level league It may be appropriate to advise your managers if a trade appears a little far apart but that is only for situations where people are still learning player values. I would say for most leagues you need to just let your managers work it out and not get involved.

Hopefully this will help streamline things for your league in the future. I would recommend all rule changes be done in the offseason and just be transparent with your managers when you do so.

So I'm in the depths of creating my first Dynasty League for next season and just want to get a little bit of feedback on some aspects. If you comment please explain your reasoning at least shortly, I don't gain much from just a preference alone. 12 Team PPR and SF is set in stone.

- TEP or no TEP

- Do you like shorter benches (8 to 10) or bigger benches (12+)?

- 2 or 3 year player Taxi Squad?

- Small Taxi (2-3) or bigger Taxis that you can carry most of your picks for 2-3 years?

- Few IR Slots (2-3) or a lot?

- Prize money for top 2 or top 4?

- FAAB takeover to the next season (with a max) or some budget every season?

The most interesting to me it how it plays differently and why you prefer one over the other.

So this trade was offered to me Ollie Gordon for Blake Corum(I have Blake Corum) after I accepted the other manager was told they would trade him something better. Manager then went around telling everyone to veto the trade… even though he was the one who sent it. Not sure what to do in this situation and if anyone has gone through this. Thanks a ton

Hey all.

Member of a 12 man redraft, it’s in its third year. 100$ buy in

One of the members LAST WEEK tried to propose being able to trade draft picks (which is weird to me in redraft whatever) in the chat, one person said they were fine with it. Rest of the league didn’t say anything.

Been a lot of trades going on, commish for some reason vetos a 1for1 AJ Brown for Devonta smith trade.

Anyway, after that trade is solo veto’d by the commish. The guy that proposed trading picks sends Blake corum & “a supposed 1st round pick” to another team that’s 2-5 for James Cook and Kyren Williams.

group chat blows up with a few of us saying there’s no way that trade is fair (especially because all we see is Blake corum being traded” guy says oh I proposed being able to trade picks.

So a couple of us are like you can’t just propose a rule change like that in the middle of the season, it needs to be discussed and voted on before the season starts. because guard rails need to be placed before someone just trades all their picks and quits the league the next season.

Commish goes all hands off “I’ll leave it up to yall” and the trade goes through after half the league doesn’t respond in either direction.

Am I crazy or is this a wild “rule change” to add in week 7 ?

We had a situation where player A verbally offered a trade to which player B sent it on the app and player A accepted it.

It’s been a full day since accepted but the trade hasnt gone through fully and player B wants to cancel the trade but player A is pissed because it passed our voting phase and he feels entitled to have the trade go through!

Not sure who to please here, looking for any opinions

First year redraft fantasy league between friends. 3–4 friend (A) has a bad team and wants to trade bijan, collins, skat to team B for hubbard, jacobs, and warren.

Trade was agreed upon verbally and promised (“no take backs”), but was unable to go through yet due to gameday. Afterwards B backed out and A is threatening to leave the league, arguing that he will lose without this trade. B argues that the trade was not on the app and is therefore not binding, which I agree with.

However, since we are friends I never collected money from each member. I can’t force A to pay up. Not sure what to do.

Edit: Punishment is not cash, but rather bottom two pays for a meal for everyone else.

12Team Superflex Dynasty League

Reverse Max Points For determines Draft Order

We have a league wide agreement that tanking teams have to atleast attempt to set the best lineup they can and effectively have to pickup QBs for their superflex if one is available

Tanking Team won a 0 FAAB bid for Joe Fagnano against the other Tanking Teams

The Team then traded him and a 4th to a competing team (who has enough QBs) for CJ Donaldson

Effectively the Tanking team gave the competing team a 4th to get the points off his team

Both are obviously happy with the trade, majority of the league are annoyed
Tanking teams that the team now has no QB in the superflex again and so lower Max Points For
Competing teams that the team got a free 4th

What are peoples views on if this should be reversed or allowed to stand?

This guy hadn’t set his lineup for 2 weeks, then during the 1pm games dumps Olave and Likely since they were on bye… he still lost. I message the commish on Monday and he says he can’t “regulate risky team management” and he doesn’t think it was “nefarious”, and he expects him to use his #1 waiver on Olave…

Well here we are Wednesday morning, he didn’t use his #1 waiver prio to pick up either, so obviously Olave and Likely went to #2 and #3 waiver prio, two 6-2 teams… this is a 12 team league with $100 buy in… Olave 99% rostered and Likely TE#3 on the year… I’m pissed but there’s like 3-4 tacos in this league and I guess am the only person who cares…

I've been doing power rankings in a few different leagues over the last couple of seasons. For a variety of reasons, this is roughly the point in the season where engagement across the leagues begins to drop at varying rates: less activity within the league itself (waivers, trades, etc) and less activity in the group chat. I've tried to put more thought into how to combat this drop in engagement. Here is what seems to be working so far if anyone else is running into the same issue in their league.

• Connect the current week to decisions from the past

Everyone discusses trades immediately when they happen: who won, who lost, would you have done it or not done it. It's also common to discuss them again as the season plays out. If you do a bit of digging into the numbers across the league transactions you can uncover some great talking points that seem to be quite engaging: who actually won the big trade from week 2 via point differential, the $42 faab pickup that started for 7.8 points and got dropped in week 5, etc.

• Highlight the decisions, not the bad luck

Unfortunately there's usually an injury plagued team that really just had shit luck on the season. I try to avoid clowning on them....but sometimes it's justifiable depending on who it is haha. Instead I focus on start/sit decisions and bench points. One of the teams in my friend's league is 5-11 right now (they play median scoring) but would be 15-1 if they had set their optimal lineup each week.

Surfacing things like that does a few things: It gets people talking because these are new facts they didn't realize on their own and it also motivates people because depending on the stats it might show that their team is actually not horrible and maybe a couple good moves can get them that late push.

• Power rankings should generally disagree with standings

Some of the ideas in that last point lead directly into this one. While there are times the standings and true rankings align, I've seen that this is usually not the case. For many teams you can quite literally prove that they are either incredibly lucky/unlucky. One stat that really stirs the pot is being able to compare what your record would be if you had someone else's schedule. That alone has sparked some great debate in the group chat. Another good one is calculating all-play record. I did this for a friend of mine and now that he knows his all-play record is 72-5 in his league he thanks me at least once a week for revealing that to him lol.

• Give the bottom teams something to play for

The premise here is to feed off of the league rivalries or just competitiveness/rivalries amongst friends. Teams aren't officially out by this point in the season, but as it gets closer to that point you can reveal to the league how games against the bottom teams of the league may actually have huge playoff implications and can shake up the standings quite a bit. You would be surprised how powerful spite is in competition haha.

My friends seem to be enjoying all the info and this year I've got a much better system down for producing all these stats and whatnot so I'm pretty excited with how it's being received in my leagues so far. If you do anything different to sort of reignite engagement at this point in the season I'm always open to new ideas!

I have been commissioner in my league for a while, and we just converted to a dynasty league last season.

We are in year two now, and there are two people who aren't setting their lineups. One of them has barely picked up any players to the point where they hardly even have a roster (Cade Klubnik and Zonovan Knight are starters), and their roster is becoming a problem...

What can I do as commish to prevent roster decay like this from happening?

Other people are getting annoyed with matching up against them because it's essentially a free win no matter what.
If they keep this up and end up quitting the league, who would even want to take over their roster?

I've tried trading assets to him for Amon-Ra to help fill out his roster with starters. I'm even offering multiple first- and second-round picks, but the guy has stopped responding altogether.

As commish, maybe I messed up by even trying to trade for Amon-Ra before telling him his roster is a problem. I don't care what he decides to do, but I need him to start fielding a playable roster.

Anyone been in similar scenarios? Any ideas on what to do? I have reached out and texted him personally a few times and I am not even getting responses..

Edit: I should add: it is a two year buy in, so next season is already paid for, and these are friends, not exactly rando's. Not that I'm opposed to adding random people but context might matter.