Part two of this the series on being a commissioner will focus on your league setup. Hopefully by the time you’ve gotten to this stage, you were able to find yourself a solid 12 – 16 guys to play with. Ideally, you feel that you can trust each of the close friends or family in your league not to try and cheat or collude with one another. Then hopefully, you were able to fill in the rest of the open slots with people completely unrelated to the other members of your league. Be they people from work, people you found on the net, or at school, or wherever. Now it’s time to establish the structure of your league.
1) Head to Head or Roto?
Hands down, head to head is a more fun way to play fantasy sports, but only when it is done right. By that I mean when you can choose the setup where each team faces one another for a game that can span from 3 days to 2 weeks, but at the end of their match, one player is awarded a win, the other a loss or they tie. I know Yahoo offers this option for both baseball and football, but not for basketball. The alternative format generally amounts to teams accumulating multiple category points and at the end of the first week your record looks something like 6-3. This is not only stupid, but it entirely defeats the purpose of playing head to head. If this isn’t an option, such as with Yahoo fantasy basketball for some unknown reason, I move straight to ROTO.
2) Divisions
Remember earlier when I mentioned the importance of keeping things competitive, so everyone feels like they have a shot to win? Well, after many different attempts at finding a solution, splitting into divisions was the best one. I recommend splitting into as many divisions as you can while making sure at least 4 teams are in each. So you got 16 teams, split into 4. You got 12 teams, split into 3. You got 14, well; you gotta split into 2, no other real choice. Do note, you ALSO need to set the schedule YOURSELF, because auto-schedules don’t work very well. You want to be sure that the majority of games played are inter-division games. This way, even towards the end of the season, the guy in last place in his division will almost always have a fighting chance to make it to the playoffs. More importantly, no one will ever be ‘out of it’ until after the trade deadline, thus you won’t have to worry about shady trades.
3) Stat Categories
Call me an old timer, call me simple, whatever, I like the meat and potatoes categories. I’m not really into having 46 different variations of the same stat, or even 46 different stats. It makes no sense to me to have Rebounds, then Offensive and Defensive rebounds. Try to keep your league as close as you can to standard formats. The advantage here is that people can use almost any source of information (magazines, websites, whatever) and the suggestions are readily transferrable. Nothing worse than admitting ‘Oh no, Lebron James isn’t the best player in my league because age and height are both stat categories’. Think I’m joking, if you count rebounds 3 freakin times you’re doing much the same thing. Even if they are unrelated, there is just no logical reason to include things like Technical Fouls as a category. Next season, junk it and stay simple. Your members will be appreciative. They are competing based on skill, not how many stupid tic tac things they can follow.
However, here’s where it gets a little tricky. You need to decide UP FRONT and then be CLEAR to everyone whether or not you’re cool with streaming. If you are, then move on. If not, then I DO recommend adjusting the stat categories to negatively affect streamers. Ideally Yahoo or ESPN would make each position only allowed 3 – 5 starts in a week, but in the absence of the obvious fix, we must do it ourselves. Stat categories that involve percentages, as opposed to amounts, (like 3ptm vs. 3pt%) usually do the trick.
Well, that about wraps up this piece. Stay tuned for the next post in this series where I’ll discuss Drafts and Keepers. Until then, let us hear from you if you’ve found a particular setup that’s worked well in the past.
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