Combine Reactions + 5 Ways to Make Your League Better

Are you cheating? This is cheating. Someone is taking advantage of someone who doesn't care. They're out of the league. They're just selling all their good players for bad ones. And now it's going to ruin a league. I feel like the Vopo would probably have some thoughts here. Guys. What are you with chicken? But I've seen players that are really good. They make better trades. And there was win. And I don't want that.

So you're not happy with the results of trades, so you'd rather there just be no trades? Yeah, I don't want to have good trains. So those can't be veto. Here's the thing. It's a slippery slope when you put in a veto and respect a veto on the basis of fairness. Here's why. You might be wrong. Even if it's unanimous that a trade is not fair, all of you could be wrong. Because we can't see the future. We don't know what play or injury or...

scenario or depth move or whatever the case may be. If you traded for Carlos Hyde last year and he was then traded to the Jags and had 0.0 value, guess what? Everything changed about the context of that trade. If you let people vote based on fairness, you're just going to end up wrong a lot of the time. If you let people veto based on unanimous for collusion, I'm fine with that. We get asked during the season, literally,

hundreds of times through the season, maybe thousands of times, hey, this trade just happened in my league, should this be vetoed? Or, hey, this trade just happened, we vetoed it. What are your thoughts? And I can tell you, it's 99%. Like it's, it's so close to 100% of the time that's like, no, this trade should go through. This trade should go through.

That's not me saying, oh, there's a great trade. It's just, no, it doesn't look like it's collusion. It doesn't look like one team's tanking and one team. If both teams want to make the move and they think it's making their team better, then let them do that. And here's the thing. I mean, you are trying as a commissioner. These are commission tips, right? You're trying to facilitate a league that is the most fun, engaging.

league possible. And I believe that the most fun and exciting leagues are the ones in which the GMs are responsible for their team. They're responsible to make the moves, to have ownership over those moves. If you veto trades based on fairness, you will discourage teams from making moves. Now, look, if a team's out of the playoff hunt, and it's a week before the playoffs and they trade seven of their great players,

to some other guy because they don't care about the league anymore, that's not allowed. That's different. That's illegal. But if you are making a trade that you go, man, it might work for them, might not work for them, you got to let it go. You cannot have one of these situations where three or four people in the league because you put the veto in. I remember this from years and years and years ago. You put the veto in and it's a majority veto. Guess what? All of a sudden, you've got people recruiting.

You got people trying to find another. Oh, you come vote no with me because it's not going to help you. You've got people fighting. You've got arguments happening in your league. You've got anger and all these things that go. Like our league, our league of record, for years we had just like every league has, you know, the 24, 48 hour period where a trade goes through and you vote and then it's either approved on majority vote or it is denied. And when we had just that voting system.

There were arguments. There was bad feelings. There was hurt feelings. There were rejected trades. Since we got rid of it. And so that's part of this tip is get rid of the waiting window. Instant trades. When a trade is accepted, then they're on the other players, other teams rosters. It speeds up transactions. It's wonderful. Since that happened, the same group of humans, we have made, I don't know, 100 trades in the last.

five or six years since we went to instant trading and there's never any fights that like ever you know once you know that there's plenty of mocking they're not fighting certainly and that's what you want mocking is great and that so the caveat there is enable instant trading make sure that these things processed right away there's no need for a voting period if you don't veto and uh look we can convince your league to do that on the basis of autonomy we're all pretending to be owners of a team that's the whole point we're all pretending

Let the team take some ownership. You'll have more investment when they can accomplish what they want to accomplish with their team. Win, lose, or draw. All right. Number four. How do I convince my league to stay engaged? This is a tough one. Now, is that with their significant other? You need Picard. Oh, gosh. I liked Andy's better than yours. What? Andy's was bad. Andy's was not bad. Judge, give me a ruling. Which one was better?

Let's go with which one was worse. Yeah, that's probably better. Okay. What do you got there, Judge? And he's is worse, barely. Yes, the law has spoken. All right, engage. Engage. Engage. How do you... See, it's fun. Yeah. Well, I certainly... I won Jason. Look, I'm a next generation type of guy, so this is good. But, and really, you can't, you shouldn't keep people engaged because eventually they should get married once they're engaged. Oh, okay.

I mean, engaged forever. There was a point to this. How do we get people to stay engaged with their leagues? Every commissioner, we get this one a thousand times a year too. How do I get a league that has high investment? People are interested. People come back. People don't give up. People stay engaged. How do you do that? I didn't even know this one was on there, but one of the things we try to do is, look, it starts with the people. So we try to facilitate that at join the foot.com with the foot clan leagues. If you need more people in your league.

But once you got them, how do you keep them engaged? Well, first, we've talked about this before, but you need a communication channel that is just us centered around the football league. You know, whether that's a Facebook group, a Slack channel, whatever.

whatever chat service you currently use as the commission that you like the best. Because every single. AOL chat rooms. Yeah, I mean, it could even. Hey, if you want to kick it old school. I mean, just a group text. You know what I mean? That it's got everyone in it. And, you know, whatever. Just some. Don't do a group text because I will mute that thing immediately. Sure. I mean, I would not want that one. But I would rather have a group text, you know.

place where I can communicate, then nothing. And so many leagues out there have nothing. The only place might be on the message board within the app, within the platform that they're using, and half the people don't check that. There's no place to really have fun banter. Sleeper does a good job of creating that, which is nice, because you need it. Communication is king. You need to be able to mock the trades. Not veto them, mock them. You've got to be able to get them gifts going. You've got to be able to post a gif.

It's a place where the league commissioner, as much as you want to do, you can go put some weekly awards or you could do a league newsletter or you could, you know, it's just a place to have a central discussion about what's going on in the league. Yeah, the write-ups, if you have someone in the league who is just gung-ho and absolutely lives, breathes fantasy football, which by my calculations.

If you're listening to a podcast on March 5th about fantasy football, that's you. So you should probably take up the mantle. You got to carry the sword on this one. The write-ups are so fun that on Tuesday or Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, you go in. Someone has broken down all the matchups. You get all flustered and mad reading about someone trashing your team. And it.

It creates that engagement. It keeps people active. I've never had that. I've only read those and been like, man, I love what they're saying about my team, how I'm going to dominate. Sorry, Mike. Dan Kerber wrote him. That's what you read last year? No, not last year. Yeah, got him. Yeah. No, it's fun. So let me ask you this. What is better to you? What do you enjoy more? The matchup write-ups or the power ranking write-ups. Two totally different.

theories of just, you know, nonsense write-ups for your league. But I am a power-ranking guy. I love seeing the power rankings after the week. Yeah, Power rankings is nice. Power rankings can be a sweet salve when you have a bad beat and somebody's looking at your like total points scored and how you're performing. Look, Dan Kerber from our listener league wrote up write-ups every single week last year in our listener league. They were super fun. A lot of people don't know. This podcast began.

because Mike and I started a podcast for our league. So that is something you can do as well. The barrier to entry there, grab a microphone, press record, put out a podcast. Even, you know, we did it like 30 minutes once a week. All we did was mock one another. Yes. And by one another, everybody but ourselves. You know, we had the microphones. Yeah, we had the microphones. That was rough. It's also a place. Communication is a great way to make the league expectations clear. So people don't.

you know, do something that's against the rules or against, you know, what you're trying to set up. And get a waiting list. That, getting a waiting list, like you brought up the very first thing was the people, right? How do you, how do you keep people engaged? We don't need to, like in our league of record, this isn't a tip we can even apply. Like, how do I get them to stay engaged? Everyone is fully engaged all the time.

But that wasn't always true. What happened is as years went on, and the less engaged people slowly got more and more, okay, I'm thinking about dropping out. Well, we had like a waiting list of people that like, oh, man, I want to get in your league. It sounds fun. It sounds cool. A lot of times they were co-owners with our current, you know, so they're kind of halfway in the league already, one foot in. And then you end up just slowly replacing one at a time just with better and better, more engaged owners. And eventually this.

This isn't a tip you ever need. It also makes it easier to boot bad owners when you have a waiting list because you can kind of say, hey, if you're not all in, it's no big deal. We got somebody who wants to step up and grab your team, right? Number five. All right, you guys can take this one. Number five, our final commission tip for the show. You're beating the dead horse. Let's make it quick. Just get rid of your week 17 championships. But, but my. No. No. Public chicken. But. Baccah.

More football's better. Nope. But we've always done it this way. Nope. But 17 is bigger than 16. Yeah, that's true. I'll see myself out. You got me on one. You got me on one. It creates problems that should not exist in the game of fantasy football. Just come on. Yeah, just fix it. Just stop. All right. Let's go ahead and close this thing out. Christine Dealer Day.

All right, he's talking new contract. Melvin Gordon signed Los Angeles Chargers Speed Mini Helmet just sold on pristine auction yesterday for $65 and $11. Ooh. He's going to get a contract for much more than that. For more than $65? Yes. Yes, I agree. My sources.

Tell me. Might want to tweet that out just so that, you know, breaking news. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people. Melvin Gordon do more than $65. Yeah. You heard it here. They take all these mini speed helmets signed and they make like a, like a, you know, like a pyramid. Like they've got a place where they put all these helmets and they look so awesome. And it's just one of those things. Once you see a bunch of those like signed memorabilia stations, you just, it seems impossible. Like how could someone?

have all of this stuff. One helmet at a time. One helmet at a time. But it's so cool. I see we got Mr. Arthritis up on our wall. Yeah. Check it out. Pristineauction.com. Poor Todd Gurley. Yeah. All right. We'll talk to you on Thursday. Coaching changes and a whole lot more. Thanks for tuning in and listening. Goodbye. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Fantasy Footballers podcast. Join our fantasy football community on join thefoot.com. And follow us on Twitter.

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