Fantasy Football Saturday Mailbag for Week 12
Welcome to this weekly mailbag series! This article will take selected questions from The Footballers’ Discord that you can join here. In it, you can find a dedicated channel for start/sit questions, public fantasy advice, and a general channel for all things fantasy football. There are also exclusive channels only available to Footclan members. Discord members are great at answering questions and you never know when your questions will appear here.
This starts a crazy season for dynasty managers since it should be pretty clear who most of the playoff teams are. This gives commissioners headaches since some managers are starting to blatantly tank. I left it for the end, but I went into great detail about dynasty leagues in regard to rookie draft picks. In general, I think it’s a big mistake to not take into account tanking. Good luck this week!
Question #1 – Trade
Super flex league where Kyler and Carr are my 2 other QBs. Justin Jefferson or Trevor Lawrence? – JoeyBagadonitis
Answer: I know Justin Jefferson has been a hot trade piece because of the injury and unknowns at the QB position in Minnesota moving forward. I think, barring a Jets-like disaster at the QB position, Justin Jefferson will be one of the top two or three WRs in the league for several more years and those league-winning WRs are hard to get. You can figure out something at the QB position without giving up a top player like Jefferson for Lawrence who is a solid young QB but isn’t looking like he’ll become an Allen-, Mahomes-, or Hurts-like player so far above the average QB that they run roughshod over the league. I would sit on Jefferson although I wouldn’t be opposed to moving him for one of those top QBs or another stud WR and future draft picks.
Question #2 – Trade Settings
Offered a trade to someone before our trade deadline but he hasn’t accepted and our trade deadline has passed. Does the offer still count and can he accept it or no? – The9-2Rookie
Answer: If the commish has the settings right, the trade shouldn’t go through. If the trade does go through, the commish should reverse it. All this can be avoided by simply revoking the trade offer.
I chose this question because it brings up an important part of trade negotiations. Some providers like MFL have a built-in trade deadline. After so many days, the trade will automatically be revoked. Some providers like Sleeper don’t seem to have an automatic setting for trade deadlines (maybe the commissioner can set one?). There is a risk to having trades sitting open. Let’s say you offered your 2024 second-round pick for Cam Akers. If that trade sat there leading up to his career-threatening injury, someone could have accepted it and you would be out a draft pick with no hope of any return.
The best thing to do is negotiate trade offers in some sort of chat forum. Sleeper is nice because it has that feature built into the app, but I’ve negotiated lots of trades on X, Slack, and WhatsApp. If you want, you can offer the trade but revoke it before a slate of games starts. It’s not a bad idea to message the manager and let them know you’ll be pulling the trade on a certain date/time. You can also tell the other manager that you will still be willing to make the trade even if you revoke it as long as nothing else changes.
Question #3 – Start/Sit
Kyren or JT? – Zach
Answer: Kyren Williams is coming back after having a huge start to the season finishing as the RB4 through the first six weeks. It’s important to remember how he got there though. He had a few explosive weeks, but a couple of stinkers too. I admit, it’s a good matchup against Arizona but I would want to see how he’s going to be used before trusting him in the lineup especially where I’d be starting him over Jonathan Taylor who the Footballers have ranked RB2 this week.
Question #4 – Start/Sit
Start 2 Kupp, Olave, Dell…full ppr? – absolutezero89
Answer: This is tough. Cooper Kupp is coming off an ankle injury that saw him miss last week. He’s playing this week, but there’s no way to really know where he’s at with that ankle. With two good alternatives, I would probably go with Tank Dell and Chris Olave this week. If reports are good regarding Kupp and you can stomach the risk, Olave would be my odd man out.
Question #5 – Dynasty Settings
“I’m the commissioner of a 1st year dynasty league. It’s recently been brought to my attention by multiple managers that they disagree with the actions of a manager. This manager is 2-8 and is gearing up to bench his stars (JT, Mixon, Puka, etc.). Just looking for thoughts and opinions on how to tackle this because the manager had ample opportunity to trade for future assets at the deadline and choose not to.” – Garber19
Answer: I play in several dynasty leagues and all have different rules and settings to determine rookie draft order – all have benefits and drawbacks. I’ve thought about this very topic for an embarrassing amount of time. This could easily be a full article (maybe it will become one next year), but here are some of my thoughts.
I think from a philosophical standpoint, there are two types of teams that you want to see improve. You want to see the terrible teams get top draft picks to become more competitive. You can do this by awarding teams with the worst records the highest draft picks, but then you deal with issues like the one above where teams blatantly tank, and frankly, the draft picks are good enough incentive to do so if it’s legal. The second type of teams that you want to see improve are the ones that just missed the playoffs. They may only be one or two stars away from making a deep playoff run.
There are also things that you want and don’t want in a dynasty league. You do want active and engaged managers so you want something for managers who missed the playoffs to play for during the playoff weeks (i.e. toilet bowl). You do want to see managers putting up their best teams every week. I have been in playoff races with good teams that have matchups against teams (like the 2-8 team above) that are sitting their studs and it is really frustrating. You don’t want to incentivize sitting your studs.
I’m going to give you an example of a league that demonstrates how changes in rookie picks can have repercussions you might not have anticipated. I’m in a 12-team SF PPR league, starting eight (QB, one to four RBs, two to five WRs, TE, and SF). We have 14-man active rosters and an eight-man taxi squad where players can be stashed for their first three years in the league. Initially, the draft order was determined by a rotisserie-style toilet bowl. That meant teams that missed the playoffs still set lineups during the playoff weeks but instead of head-to-head matchups, the scores from the playoff weeks were added up and the top teams got the top picks.
The commissioner in that league proposed a rule change and got enough support to change it to a lottery system where the worst teams received a greater lottery chance. We kept the toilet bowl, but the toilet bowl winner received a 1.13 draft pick. This system seems fair, but there were some unintended consequences.
After the rule changes, teams were incentivized for “sprints to the bottom.” Teams literally started tanking in Week 1. All the stud rookies they received got mothballed on the taxi squad. So many teams were starting players on byes or injured that we had to make another rule to penalize teams starting players that posted zero points in a week. Even then, we’ve had managers start players who posted zero points several times this year. In the last year with the toilet bowl, the bottom three teams had a 31.3% win rate. The year after changing to the lottery system, the bottom three had a 21.9% win rate. This year the bottom three teams have a 10% win rate while Jordan Addison, Kyren Williams, Romeo Doubs, Isiah Pacheco, Breece Hall, and Josh Downs are sitting on their taxi squads. That’s not even including a fourth team with a 3-8 record. The four managers are so checked out that they’ve combined for one trade since October 1st (it’s not for lack of effort. I’ve proposed several trades to all four teams. Ironically, I would have lost a lot of those trades so it’s not like I’m lowballing a bunch of offers).
Part of me wants to thank them for their yearly donations since none of them are anywhere near being close to competitive and having four teams out of the playoff race since Week 1 means a playoff birth is nearly assured for any type of decent team, but it’s like the league is just going through the motions until the playoffs.
The two ideas I came up with are a coinflip system between standings and toilet bowl and a lottery system. The lottery system is probably more fair, but the coinflip system is easier. Both should keep teams engaged through the year and create a little excitement for determining draft picks.
In the coinflip system, the worst team in the standings and the best team in the toilet bowl coinflip for the first rookie pick. The winner gets the pick and the loser goes on to another coinflip for the 1.02. Let’s say Manager John finishes last in the league and Manager Jenn finishes first in the toilet bowl. They face off for a coinflip that Jenn wins. Manager John then goes to another coinflip against whichever team finished second in the toilet bowl for the 1.02. Whoever loses that coinflip does another coinflip for the 1.03 and on and on until all picks have been determined. Commissioners can figure out details like what to do for ties, how to do the coinflips live, etc.
Commissioners can also use a lottery system for the teams missing the playoffs. Run the lottery live immediately following the season so that pick positions are known and can be traded. Conduct two test runs just to make sure that whatever lottery app is being used is actually working and then do a real third drawing. Lottery chances are determined by the standings (worst to first), toilet bowl (best to worst), and manager efficiency (best to worst as defined by ‘points for’ divided by ‘possible points’). How lottery chances are divided is up to the league. I’d probably start by dividing a total of 35% lottery chance (11% to worst team, 8%, 5%, 5%, 3%, 3%) to standings and (12% to best team, 8%, 7%, 5%, 3%, 0%) to the toilet bowl. The remaining 30% would be divided 10% to the most efficient manager (7%, 5%, 5%, 3%, and 0%).
As an example, we can use that 2-8 team. They will probably end up last in league standings, middle-ish in the toilet bowl, and last in efficiency. They would get an 11% lottery chance due to being the last-place team in the league, 5% from the toilet bowl, and 0% in efficiency for a total of 16% chance of getting the top draft pick. They deserve slightly less than a one-in-six chance of getting the first pick for blatantly tanking and not trading. Meanwhile, let’s say a team just misses the playoffs despite having a strong team. They get 3% for having the best record, 12% for winning the toilet bowl, and 7% for being the second-most efficient manager for a total of 22% chance of getting the first overall pick.
If I was a commissioner in a startup, I’d go with the lottery system right from the beginning. If I was a commissioner looking for a change, I’d propose the coinflip system since it’s far easier to explain and more likely to be accepted by the league. Neither system is perfect, but at least the best rookie picks aren’t always going to bad teams who will squander top picks.