Last Week’s Question: When an owner quits a league midseason
without paying, what should the commissioner do?
In my column for Week
4, I asked readers what they would advise a commish to do
when an owner simultaneously quits and stiffs a league despite
having already drafted a team. I framed the question from the
perspective of a commissioner who was primarily concerned about
the missing $100 entry fee, but also indicated that the commissioner
didn’t have anyone ready to take over the team even if the
entry fee was waived. For readers like Dave, the logistical question
of managing the unmanaged team fairly/consistently loomed larger
than the financial shortfall:
I had a very similar scenario a few years ago in which owners
have until week 3 starts to send in their money (my Yahoo league
has been around since 1998 so it’s worked well) or they
forfeit wins and can be kicked out. This particular owner did
not pay so I booted him and I came up with a few scenarios and
put them out for league vote.
What we ended up doing was this: the Week 1 and Week 2 games were
forfeited. From Week 3 through Week 13 I, as Commish, set his
roster based on the highest predicted points per position. No
roster adds or drops were allowed – his roster at Week 3
was his roster through Week 13 so some benefited from bye weeks
and injuries. The team ended up going 1-12 so it actually was
a lot of fun berating the one guy who got beat by the Ghost team.
Additionally we were forced to change the payouts to remove one
league entry.
I love the way Dave dispenses with the financial concern in a
single sentence at the end (almost as an afterthought) because
his response focuses on what matters most: the competitive experience
for a league missing an owner. I’m not saying his solution
is perfect. I would like to have seen Weeks 1 & 2 treated
the same way as Weeks 3 - 13 even though it’s difficult
to recover projections for players from previous weeks in most
fantasy websites during the season. If past projections are too
difficult to come by, I would rather have seen the lineups for
Weeks 1 & 2 set from the order of the missing owner’s
draft choices (or some such thing) rather than decreeing that
the first 2 games against the ghost team were automatic wins for
his opponents no matter how his players did. But this is a minor
quibble concerning what strikes me as an extremely even-handed
solution.
Although people like Dave and I are both inclined to deduct the
missing $100 from the kitty and focus on finding the most equitable
way of making the ownerless team competitive, we are in the distinct
minority. Most of the readers who emailed me shared the opinion
that the commissioner is either entirely or mostly responsible
for making good on the deadbeat owner’s entry fee. According
to Todd:
Since [the commish] did not do his duties in collecting money
up front like other teams expect, he needs to step up and pay
the fees. He can run the team as his own but no trades should
be allowed between the 2 teams he would own.
Hugh shared a nice alternative to Dave’s ghost team approach
(emphasizing league average to determine the ghost team’s
score instead of using projected points to set lineups) along
with an endorsement of Todd’s idea about the fiduciary responsibility
of the commissioner:
[The commish should p]ay the $100 fee. Their bad choice to allow
team to slide; their responsibility to cover missing funds.
Lock all players to the dead team roster till next year.
Offer the spot starting next season to the highest bidder. Any
extra funds return to commissioner.
Find the avg score of all teams each week.
Have dead team become the "Ghost Team" that scores avg
of all other teams week to week.
Ghost will win some times, and lose some times. Teams will have
to be better than the mean, to win vs Ghost.
Ghost team [is not eligible for] playoffs [even if it finishes
with a playoff-worthy record]
Scott opts for a full season of forfeits from the unowned team,
but holds the commissioner accountable for the entry fee:
In my opinion, the solution to this league's problem is fairly
simple: Have the commish go and bench all of his players then
lock the roster for the remainder of the season. Essentially,
his team becomes a bye week for all future opponents and since
the first three teams that played him won, everybody gets the
same end result.
As for the buy-in, the commish is going to have to eat this one
too. They need to put in the remaining $100 to make the pot whole
and treat it as a lesson learned for the future: No matter the
reason, no matter excuse...if you don't pay you don't draft.
I like the minimalism of Scott’s approach, but I don’t
think it’s as fair as the ghost team scenarios proposed
by Dave and Hugh. If the league has a traditional structure in
which divisional opponents play each other twice, this amounts
to spotting everyone in the deadbeat’s division a free win.
Brad focused on getting a warm body into the owner’s seat
to manage the team as a long-term solution & having the commissioner
manage the team according to his best judgment in the interim.
But he didn’t let the commish off the money hook either:
1. Unless there was tacit approval from all owners to let #12
slide without paying, the cost falls on the Commissioner. He allowed
#12 to draft without paying. The debt is his. If all owners agreed
to let #12 draft without paying, then each chips in $10. I know
that’s a little more than $100 but easiest to calculate.
Commish owns finances.
2. Actively solicit an owner to take over #12 spot for no entry
fee as a way to get into the league. This may take time.
3. In the interim, the commissioner takes over team #12. Any trades
or waivers need approval of a majority of the league. Commissioner
casts tie breaking vote.
4. Assuming you can’t find a new owner, any payouts to team
#12 at the end of the year get evenly split across all owners.
Or can be put back into a pool for next season’s winnings.
If the owners feel sympathy for the commissioner, I think it would
be OK if they voted to let him recoup losses. But if earnings
exceed losses, I think those funds need to go back into the league.
5. Spread the name of owner #12 far and wide across the fantasy
community that he is a welch and a fink and doesn’t deserve
to be in any other fantasy football leagues.
As I expected, I heard from plenty of readers with waiting lists
of people itching to get into their leagues. Since I explicitly
indicated that a waiting list was not part of the scenario in
this commissioner’s predicament, I appreciated Brad’s
decision to work a flexible timeline into his solution.
Rich has a waiting list for his league, but he wouldn’t
force the next person on the list to eat the cost of an 0-3 team
abandoned by its owner:
I’ve been a commissioner for my league for a total of 16
years. If the scenario you described happened to me, the answer
is quite simple:
I would hold myself accountable and pay the entry fee of the owner
who dropped out. I would inform the league of my intention to
pay the entry fee and have another guy on my waiting list take
over the team for free.
It would be a lesson learned for me. But I wouldn’t make
the same mistake in the future!
I also received a number of responses like this one from Orange
Ya Glad, whose focus was entirely on the missing funds rather
than the diminished competition factor:
The owners of any league are relying on the commissioner to handle
things. Period.
The commish is on the hook.
I have played in a number of leagues where this happens and I
have ZERO respect for a commish who does not collect or at least
cover.
I also heard from people who thought that even though the commissioner
should bear a greater responsibility than the other owners for
making good on the missing entry fee, s/he should not bear that
expense alone. Mark proposed a 70/30 split between the rest of
the league and the commissioner:
If I'm the commissioner, I tell everybody in the league to pay
7 dollars (7 X 10). As the commissioner, in good faith and for
not taking care of business, I'll pony up the remaining 30 dollars.
We're friends, after all--nobody should pay the full 100, especially
not the commissioner (who gets nothing for all the trouble).
Team twelve is managed by 3 randomly selected players (if not
willing, the commish can do this, but obviously not against him
or herself). This is just lineup management. Team twelve no longer
is on the waiver wire. Essentially, playing twelve becomes a free
win for everyone, except if team twelve gets crazy hot one week,
then the chump who loses double loses as he's the butt of jokes
for the rest of the season.
Although I think there are cleaner and less labor intensive solutions
to managing Team #12 than the one Mark proposes, I can’t
help agreeing with him about the injustice of putting the commissioner
(who gets nothing for his trouble) on the hook for the full missing
amount. I sometimes think that being a fantasy commissioner is
one of the most thankless and selfless tasks in 2019.
An anonymous reader (I’ll call him Outlook User) is even
softer on the commish than Mark:
A. TAKE TEAM - Have commish take over
the team as a “Ghost” team. Commish will set the best
lineup each week in order for team to compete and make it fair
for all (divisional teams face it twice).
1. Pick up waivers ONLY in case of injuries/suspensions etc. (Barkley,
AB) to set a complete roster.
2. If waivers are picked up based on auction – set a maximum
the Ghost ship can bid on a waiver or just state that Ghost ship
cannot bid on waivers.
3. This Ghost team cannot trade with anyone under any circumstances.
4. Ghost team is excluded from any post season. If it does make
it – it defaults to the opposing team.
B. PRIZE MONEY -
1. Prize is reduced by $100 to compensate for the loss.
2. Everyone pitches in additional money to make up the $100 but
commish pays more (e.g. Commish $20 – Others $10 …
or some such distribution)
So whereas Mark would have the commish pay 3 times as much as
the average league member to make up the missing funds, Outlook
User thinks the commish might only need to pay twice as much.
Anthony’s approach is milder still, as he suggests only
a nominal cash penalty for the commish relative to the other owners:
We cannot go back and have the owner prepay, and absent a paying
stand-in, you resolve it this way:
STEP 1: Find a willing participant who will meaningfully run
the team honestly and trying their best... who will do it for
FREE or SIGNIFICANT DISCOUNT.
STEP 2: Get the league owners to kick in an equal share for Team
Quit. To keep the math simple, 10-team league, each owner pays
$10. If stand-in, 8 teams kick in $11, commish kicks in $12 as
a penalty for not collecting the dues up front.
STEP 3: Any winnings earned by Team Quit are split equally among
all owners at the end of the season in whichever scenario described
above.
STEP 4: Lesson learned, but the league carries on in-full with
a stand-up competitive substitute.
That covers the full range of responses I received via email,
but one posted comment (from TomJ) was an outlier because it 1)
emphasized strategies for attracting a real person to take over
the abandoned team and 2) forgave the debt without any distress
at all:
The bigger problem is an ownerless team, more than the loss of
the money. Reduce all prizes by the amount necessary, and offer
the spot to someone who won't have to pay this year, but will
be able to pay & play next year. If they don't pay this year,
they'd also not be eligible to win any money, of course. But,
come on...that's the problem, that team isn't going to win anything.
But getting a butt in the owner's seat is first priority. Find
someone with a competitive streak who wants the challenge of just
making something out of that team.
For what it’s worth, another commenter (Be Mo) said that
things had played out pretty much according to TomJ’s formula
in his league without any dissatisfaction to speak of.
My thanks to everyone who wrote in.
This Week’s Question: Do you have a quick, objective method
for assessing your prognosticatory prowess in fantasy football?
If you love working in Excel enough to generate your own list
of fantasy projections for players at every skill position every
week, you probably have an excellent sense of how accurate your
predictions are.
But what about the rest of us? Are you mostly accurate or mostly
wrong when it comes to deciding between John Brown and Larry Fitzgerald?
Would you even care if you didn’t have both on your team?
When Baltimore’s schedule for 2019 was released, did you
foresee Lamar Jackson getting off to such a fast start? Do you
even remember what you thought? Of course you knew the Chicago
defense would be great in 2019. Everyone did. But if someone had
forced you in August to pick one defense that would outdo the
Bears in September, is there any chance you would have chosen
New England?
If you’re anything like me, you make hundreds (thousands?)
of predictions each season that you never even go back to check
on. You may do your best to keep up with what you got right and
what you got wrong, but so many things happen on Sunday afternoons
that you can’t possibly keep up with every development on
every team.
If you’re not a full-time expert being ranked by an outfit
like FantasyPros, how would you even know if you’re better
at projecting RBs or WRs?
And if you can’t even identify your own strengths and weaknesses
as a predictor, how are you going to improve?
I’ve mulled over this question for years in an attempt
to come up with a self-assessment heuristic for the ordinary fantasy
enthusiast, but the models I’ve tinkered with in the past
have all been too cumbersome. Last week, however, I was motivated
to try again in light of this passage from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s
Antifragile:
[M]y characterization of a loser is someone who, after making
a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it,
feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new
piece of information. (p. 74)
Taleb is right about mistakes. They enrich us with new information.
They give us the chance to ask ourselves whether we were wrong
because really couldn’t have seen something coming--or because
we put up particular blinders in particular circumstances. Do
we let ego or statistical oversimplification or (worst of all)
homerism warp our perspective in a consistent, detectable, correctable
way?
I don’t think it’s realistic for the average fantasy
enthusiast to keep track of every single judgment and misjudgment
s/he makes in the course of a season. But I think it is possible
for us to learn a thing or two about our own insights and blindspots
through a quick quiz like the one below, which I devised after
reading Taleb. My objectives were to keep the quiz short (10 questions;
really just 2 questions in 5 contexts); confined in scope (the
quiz only asks you to think about 5 players at a time, not the
entire NFL); and administered at meaningful intervals (such as
after each quarter of the season, so I expect to revisit this
heuristic in Weeks 9, 13, & 17).
This quiz does not require a calculator or a #2 pencil. It should
take less than 2 minutes to complete. Ready? Go.
Quick Quarterly Quiz #1
According to the scoring system in the FFToday
Staff League (FFTSL), the top 5 QBs after 4 weeks of NFL action
are:
1) Lamar Jackson
2) Patrick Mahomes
3) Russell Wilson
4) Dak Prescott
5) Carson Wentz
Question 1) Which of these QBs do you consider
most likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Mahomes.)
Question 2) Which of these QBs do you consider
least likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Prescott.)
In the FFTSL, the top 5 RBs after 4 weeks of NFL action are:
1) Christian McCaffrey
2) Austin Ekeler
3) Dalvin Cook
4) Nick Chubb
5) Alvin Kamara
Question 3) Which of these RBs do you consider
most likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
McCaffrey.)
Question 4) Which of these RBs do you consider
least likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Ekeler.)
In the FFTSL, the top 5 WRs after 4 weeks of NFL action are:
1) Keenan Allen
2) Cooper Kupp
3) Chris Godwin
4) Mike Evans
5) Julio Jones
Question 5) Which of these WRs do you consider
most likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Jones.)
Question 6) Which of these WRs do you consider
least likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Kupp.)
In the FFTSL, the top 5 TEs after 4 weeks of NFL action are:
1) Evan Engram
2) Austin Hooper
3) Mark Andrews
4) Travis Kelce
5) Darren Waller
Question 7) Which of these TEs do you consider
most likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Kelce.)
Question 8) Which of these TEs do you consider
least likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Hooper.)
In the FFTSL, the top 5 defenses after 4 weeks of NFL action
are:
Question 9) Which of these defenses do you consider
most likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Bears.)
Question 10) Which of these defenses do you consider
least likely to remain in the top 5 through Week 16? (My answer:
Steelers.)
Please consider jotting down your own answers in a comment below
(or in an email to me).
If you think I’m dead wrong about any of my answers, please
explain why. And if you think this quiz is too easy, just wait
until you revisit it in Week 9, when you can’t reuse any
answers from Week 5--or Week 13, when you can’t use any
answers from Week 5 or Week 9.
Survivor Pool Picks
The bad news is that Matthew Schiff’s perfect streak in this
column came to an end in Week 4. The worse news is that he wasn’t
able to submit picks for Week 5, so I’m filling in for him.
(I don’t like it any better than you do.)
#3 Patriots over Redskins (3-1; PHI, BAL, SF, lar)
The juggernaut Pats are 15-point road favorites vs. Washington.
That harsh line reflects the degree of disarray within the Redskin
organization, where it’s simultaneously too late for Jay
Gruden to save his job and too early for Dwayne Haskins to claim
his. As recently as Wednesday, Gruden admitted that he hadn’t
selected a starting QB for the contest, but it’s hardly
as if making the right choice between Haskins, Case Keenum, and
Colt McCoy will somehow enable the skidding Skins to compete with
the defending Super Bowl champs. Of course, it’s possible
that the confusion on Washington’s QB carousel will result
in just the lucky bounce of the ball the Redskins need to steal
a win for the home crowd. Anything’s possible. But I wouldn’t
bet on it.
#2 Chiefs over Colts (3-1; HOU, BAL, NE, ind)
Although Jacoby Brissett is off to an impressive start in place
of Andrew Luck in 2019, the Colts need a healthy T.Y. Hilton for
Brisset to have any chance of keeping up with Mahomes and the
mighty Chiefs. Hilton missed practice on Wednesday (quadriceps)
and seems unlikely to be 100% for Sunday’s game. The Colts’
leading rusher (Marlon Mack) also missed Wednesday’s practice
(ankle). Indianapolis might be able to limp to victory with either
Hilton or Mack injured against a mediocre opponent, but with both
hurting and the Colts having to travel to KC to face the league’s
most intimidating offense, it’s hard to see a path to victory
for Indy.
#1 Eagles over Jets (4-0; NE, SEA, DAL, LAC)
The winless Jets travel to Philly to face the 2-2 Eagles on Sunday.
The Eagles may be better than their record suggests, but the Jets
really are as bad as their numbers indicate. After losing starter
Sam Darnold to mononucleosis, the Jets almost immediately lost
backup QB Trevor Siemian to an ankle injury and had to turn to
sixth round rookie Luke Falk at QB. Under such circumstances,
is it any surprise that the Jets are dead last in the NFL in yards
per game, points per game, first downs, and yards per play? There’s
a chance that Darnold will be able to play on Sunday, but he hasn’t
been cleared for contact as of this writing, so it seems safe
to say that a rusty Darnold is the best case scenario for the
Jets. If Darnold plays, I would rather take my #2 selection (Kansas
City) than the Eagles. But if the Jets have to roll with Falk,
give me Philly as my top pick of the week.
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.
