My league buys a trophy every year from affordabletrophies.com. They have a bunch of fantasy football trophies for around $20 or under that are pretty clever. The person who scores the most points that week gets to keep the trophy at their desk. After the Super Bowl, the winner keeps it at his/her desk permanently. I have two sitting on my desk (one is a football bobble head trophy, and the other is Natural Light beer can trophy). I am quite proud of them.

This year we are going to order a plate with the winning team name on it. In the past it has just had the league name and the year.

I've been commissioning my league for four years now. When we kicked it off, we mulled trophies. Since the major trophy is prize money, I did not want to reduce that amount too much. However, I am a firm believer in giving out trophies. Long after the money is gone, I can appreciate my wins through my trophies.

What we did in our league, on the first year, we bought a perpetual plaque. On it is a plate about the league, a nice football symbol, and 12 plates for the league winners. In addition, every year, each divisional winner (we usually have three), gets a trophy as does the winner of the Fantasy Bowl. From year to year, we have special events and the winners of those events all get some type of memorial doohickey or trophy.

The important part to consider is budget. My annual budget is about $50/year for trophies. This will buy a minimum of five trophies and get the plate for the perpetual plate engraved. They are cheap trophies, but good enough for us.

John wrote in with a comment that wasn’t exactly a response to the question, but is nevertheless relevant.

I don’t know what the right way to handle the trophy situation is, but I know that having a trophy of some sort is important. I play in multiple leagues, and the ones that have lasted the longest all offer trophies. I’ve brought up trophies in the leagues that don’t offer them—and everyone just sneered and said they would rather have a few dollars more in the purse. The funny thing is there’s no purse the next year because those leagues don’t last. I’ve often thought that the leagues that fell apart after one or two seasons would have lasted a bit longer if the owners looked into trophies more thoroughly.

Darrell shares John’s sense that trophies are important, but he doesn’t like the idea outlined above of having multiple trophies:

It’s simple. If the Colts want to keep the Lombardi trophy, they need to win another Super Bowl. By the same token, if the guy who won my league last year wants to keep it for another year, he has to win the league again. The thing that gives the trophy its appeal is that there’s only one, and there’s only one way to get it. Once you start making multiple trophies and trying to make everybody feel good about what they did once upon a time, you diminish the value of the main trophy.

I feel Rudi’s pain. Nobody in our league likes giving up the trophy to the new champion. In fact, this is what led to one of the really cool traditions in our league. We handle the trophy exchange at our draft each August because that’s the only time we all get together. We thought it was weird that the guy who was going to have to give up the trophy showed up wearing a jacket in August (in Florida!), but when it came time for him to hand the trophy over, he took off his jacket and revealed the T-shirt that he had made just for the occasion. It said:

FF Champion 1998 & 2001

The next year at the draft, everybody who had ever won a championship in the league came to the draft with a T-shirt commemorating the year(s) of their victories. The league didn’t pay for the shirts; people had to pay for their own. So my advice to Rudi would be that if the owners who have won championships want something to remind them of their victories after they’ve passed the trophy along, they should have T-shirts printed.

Unaccountably, the most thoughtful and comprehensive reflections on trophies came from Craig, who admits that he’s never participated in league with a physical trophy:

Having played all my leagues through online services (Yahoo/Fox) with friends who are in different states, I’m not familiar with having any type of physical trophy. However, some of these services keep track of your finishing place (using trophy graphics at times), so you can click on teams and see how they’ve ended up in the past which is nice when you have the same players each year. I’ve liked seeing that some players, while not winning, always ended up in the final 3 spots the last few years in a row, meaning that he must be doing something right (and if you are that player it does feel good to know you’re always competitive if a bit unlucky at the end).

But to answer the question I feel that a “traveling” trophy is the way to go. For starters it makes it convenient to find out a history of the league. And it also can add something extra to play for if you have a lot of returning players in your league, as returning/consistent champ will be targeted by other players to knock them off and break any streaks. And when it is all said and done, the only people who really care about your league championship win are other players in that league, so having a trophy you can keep to “show off” to others not involved in it is kind of silly.

I do think that if you have a long returning player who finally leaves your league for good, a nice going away gift might be a small trophy with all his championships so that he can have something other than memories of his 5-10 years in your league.

Last Man Standing (Courtesy of Mike Davis)

Trap Game: Indianapolis at Houston
The Colts are a great team, and they’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of beating up on the hapless Texans and Titans for the past few years. Nevertheless, the Texans found a chink in the Colts’ armor last year when they beat the Colts in Week 16. (True, the Colts were already locked into their playoff position, but a win is a win.) This year, the Colts and Texans are both of to a 2-0 start. Something tells me that Houston will come to this game emotionally prepared and ready to beat the Colts for the second time in a row. Be warned.

#3 New Orleans over Tennessee:
The Saints haven’t looked like their 2006 selves, and the Titans are trying to pick up where they left off with Vince Young’s momentum last season. Nevertheless, these teams are both so similar to what they were last year in terms of personnel that I think we really do know them better than their start in 2007 suggests. I expect the Saints to rise to the occasion at home.

#2 Carolina over Atlanta:
I have warned readers for years against divisional matchups and against picking the visiting team. This recommendation runs counter to both of those guidelines, but that’s just how discombobulated the Falcons appear.

#1 New England over Buffalo:
I’m breaking one of my rules here by focusing on yet another divisional game, but at least the Patriots are at home. The logic behind avoiding divisional matchups is that once teams get to know each other extremely well, anything can happen. That logic may not apply to the Bills, who are going through players (both good and bad) with Raider- and Redskin-like regularity.