The third part in our little miniseries here will deal with fees, drafting and keepers. Hopefully if you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve got yourself a solid group of 12-16 guys who’ve paid their entry fee and are ready to play. You’ve got a nice setup with some divisions, you’ve set the league schedule to make sure there’s lots of division rivalry, and you’re ready to get started.
1) The Entry Fee
I realize that not everyone plays for money, and you might have something against playing for money, but let me tell you, the best way to play involves playing for money. Money motivates people, gives them something to shoot for. Money makes it so that everyone is serious and everyone plays honest. Money is
the ultimate reason for people to NOT screw things up. But there’s a happy medium to it. I like to charge an amount that everyone is comfortable paying, where the prizes are big enough to get you excited, and there’s enough to spread the wealth. For my leagues it’s 125 to enter. With 16 teams, that rounds off to 2000. I don’t keep anything unless I win, I commish because I like to play not because I want to make a living. None of the guys in my league have much issue paying 125, for your league maybe it’s 50 or maybe it’s 200. I will advise against going too high, because that provides a whole new incentive to cheat. No need to introduce that. I pay 1000 to first place, and then spread the rest amongst second place and division winners. It’s good to pay the division winners an amount equal to the entry fee, because that means they have a 1-4 to 1-7 chance of breaking even. That’s solid odds. To collect the money I just use paypal, it makes everything faster and easier. If you’re looking for a service that doesn’t charge a fee, use revolution money exchange. And Remember, collect ALL the money from EVERYONE before the draft. I can’t stress this enough. Collect it and keep it all in that paypal account where you will not spend it. Nothing worse that coming to the end of the season and having to find money to pay the winners. If you’ve ever commished before you know exactly what I’m talking about. Paypal is fast and easy, and everyone should have an account anyway. Make them use it.
2) The Draft
This one is a no brainer unless you’ve never tried it before, but all drafts should always be done auction style. It’s no more complicated than a snake draft, but its much more fun, more involved, and people have to use their brains instead of just clicking on the next highest ranked guy.
It also gives everyone a fair shot at those Tier One players. Two more tips for you here. First, in auction drafts, the Tier One players always go pretty early and are always sold at too cheap of a price. Be sure you get one. Second, Yahoo doesn’t offer auction drafts yet cause their stupid, but ESPN does. More importantly, ESPN does for free. I set up all my leagues to run on Yahoo, but we all draft via ESPN. The only time we don’t is when we gather once a year for a live in-person draft. You should really consider trying that too, it’s a wild time. We have guys fly in from all around the country to do it, and it gets better every year. Logistically it can be tough though so don’t force it. I will now continue as if you’ve done an auction draft because every other way is bunk.
3) Keepers
If you’ve never played with keepers, change that. Likewise, if you play with more than 3 keepers, change that too. Keepers make drafting that much more important, especially in an auction. It basically means you get rewarded next year for having good foresight this year, kind of like the way real teams run. Here’s my rules for keepers, you can take em or leave em. Owners are allowed to keep up to 2 players per season. Their Keeper must be declared by the trade deadline for that season. If you choose to keep a player, you will enter next years draft with that player already on your team, at the price you paid in the previous draft (ESPN makes this process pretty easy for a commish to hook up). You may keep that player for one year, and then he goes back into the pool and you have to choose either someone else or no one. After the declaration date (the trade deadline) if you choose to drop a keeper, you may (incase he does something like going to jail in the offseason) at no penalty. Finally, owners are not allowed to drop their keepers at all during the year. If they do so, that player can not be your keeper. That lasts from the draft to the final week, if you ever dropped a guy, you can't keep him. You also can not trade away or trade for a keeper. You must have drafted the player and held him from day one straight through. These rules are FIRM and shall not be changed under any circumstances.
Remember, your league members need to believe they are playing on fair ground. Never change any rules throughout the season no matter how important it seems. Chalk it up as a learning error and change them next year if need be. When there’s money involved, always act with caution, integrity, and consistency.
Stay tuned for the next piece where I’ll go over in season play including trading, vetoes, and troublemakers. Until then, let us hear from you. Have you ever auctioned drafted? If so, let everyone who hasn’t know why they should!
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