Running vs. Ruining the Draft

It's that time of year again, time to draft your fantasy football team. 

Here's a piece that I put together recently about the commissioner's duties in terms of setting up your fantasy league draft:

 http://lesterslegends.com/commishs-corner-runningruining-draft/

 Let me know if you have any comments on it or disagree with it!

Labor Unrest

What's a commissioner to do when he doesn't know the future of the NFL?  This question is especially pertinent to those in dynasty or keeper leagues.

My suggestion is that you be prepared for three scenarios: 1) nothing abnormal hapens to the 2011 preseason and regular season, 2) the season is partially interrupted, but finishes on time; 3) the entire season is missed.

1. You continue as if nothing happened between players and owners.

2. This one gets tricky.  When do you draft?  How do you play an abbreviated schedule?  What teams make the playoffs?  Icky.  My suggestion: condense the schedule for your league to play only conference or division opponents, in order that teams who make the playoffs might have an equal strength of schedule to those that miss.  Maybe expand the playoffs.  Kind of depends on your league.  Especially in dynasty leagues, there can be a lot of implications for the future based on who finishes where.  Commissioners need to know their league-mates and determine how to proceed in a way that makes as many people happy as possible.

3.  This is perhaps a better outcome than #2.  If the entire season is missed, you have a lot of doors open. It seems to me that it's the perfect opportunity to change up traditions if there has been any resistance in the past.  After all, you'll go basically 18 months between "official" fantasy football activity.  Heck, why not even start over completely from scratch?  Who knows.  There's a lot that could be done in any league after missing a full season.

Any thoughts?

How to deal with Home field advantage?

One league I'm in deals with the same question every single year: "Why do we have home field advantage points?"

We started using a couple of HFA points years ago, because games showed up as "home or away" on the randomly-generated schedule. So we thought it would make things more interesting: it becomes more difficult when you play in someone else's (digital) house.

But the same people do all they can every year to try and get it eliminated. Each year, however, the HFA rule is supported when our owners vote.

However, it turns out that this past season, one of HFA's most vocal opponents ended up winning the league, because one of his wins came by HFA and that squeaked him into the playoffs, where he subsequently won the whole thing. Without HFA, he would not have won. He's not quite as vocal an opponent of HFA anymore. "Hey, I won with the system that was in place."

But perhaps even more unexpected was the response from the owner whose team would have won the title if there were no HFA points. He's "still a fan of home field advantage" despite the fact that its use cost him the trophy this year. Pretty impressive stance, if you ask me.

I like the HFA points, but I think they make much more sense in the playoffs than in the regular season. Maybe just a tiebreaker for most of the year, but something to denote regular season success into the
postseason, I think, is merited.