Commish’s Corner: “Eight is Enough”
By Adam Holtz
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How many teams should your fantasy football league have? It’s a question almost as old as fantasy football itself. (And you thought this was going to be a pop quiz about 80’s sitcoms!) What’s the perfect number? I know there are some of you yelling out each of the following numbers right now:
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Eight teams?
Ten?
Twelve?
Fourteen?
Sixteen??
TWENTY???
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And, hey, what about 9, 11, or 13? (Really? Yeah, really. You’ll see.)
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I’m going to give you commissioners (and everyone) some tips on how to decide on an ideal size for your league – and how to deal with an odd number of teams.
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Let’s start with the even numbers, because, let’s face it, most people have never heard of a fantasy league playing with an odd number of teams. Truth be told, most commissioners despise it as well – no one likes having byes (except in the playoffs, but that’s another topic for another column).
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There are people who say having eight is the perfect number because it allows you to play double round robin and then 2 weeks of playoffs (while avoiding the Week 17 garbage time that tends to ruin fantasy seasons if used). Ah, perfect symmetry. (Cue the soft springtime lullaby music.)
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There’s also a number of people who swear that eight is too few and that your talent pool is simply too deep if you don’t have more teams. “You’ve got to make those waiver wire ‘gems’ really be gems!” they argue. “With only eight teams, there’s still way too many good players on the waiver wire – the draft doesn’t hardly matter!” They love having enough teams that there’s not too much good stuff left out there after the draft, but there’s also few enough teams so that making the playoffs – and contending for the title – isn’t too difficult.
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Those people generally prefer a 10-12 team league. While everything in the previous paragraph can be true; on the other hand, there’s no easy way to play a perfectly balanced schedule with 10 teams, and there’s nothing worse than having an owner complain about missing the playoffs because he had to play the best team twice, while the last team to make the playoffs did not. (Cue the whiney crybaby music.)
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Then there are guys like me. I’m happy with 12 teams, but I like to go all out. My ideal league size is 16 teams (even though 14 might be somewhat more practical, as I’ll explain). I even played in a 20-team league once, but I probably won’t ever do that again. My favorite thing about large leagues is that you have to scout very deep to get a solid roster. You can still get a decent starting lineup with relative ease, but to have solid backups at every position, you have to know the third-string RBs and fourth WRs on many NFL teams – some of these players will be on rosters all season long in large leagues, not just bye week fill-ins.
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Another nice thing with larger leagues is that you can set up divisions and/or conferences that allow for balanced schedules within each division, if not for the whole league. The downside (if you can call it that) to these larger leagues is that the draft will more or less completely define your season. For the most part, there tends not to be much left over in terms of waiver wire pickups (see previous paragraph), so if you don’t draft well or if you have to deal with injuries early on, your season could well be a lost cause.
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The main caveat in larger leagues (those with 16 or more teams, and sometimes even those with 14) is positional scarcity – especially at quarterback, but with kickers and defenses to a certain extent as well. With the NFL having 32 teams (and most fantasy owners wanting at least 2 QBs on their rosters), bye weeks and injuries can really hamstring owners who do not plan well. This is why I probably will never participate in a 20-team league again. An owner in that league who did not pay close enough attention to his team actually needed to make a trade for a QB to cover a bye week, because there were literally zero NFL starting QBs on the waiver wire. (He could have picked up and played a backup QB, hoping that the starter would sustain an injury during the game, thereby giving the backup some stats, but who wants to cheer for that?)
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However, having only 14-16 teams still presents similar challenges for those owners who do not plan properly. I have not seen the “trade-or-backup” scenario mentioned above in any league with 14-16 teams, but those who do not plan will end up with poor fodder from the waiver wire if they do not anticipate things correctly. In large leagues like the 14-16 variety, I suggest using one or more of the following options: limit each fantasy roster to 2 QBs (perhaps with an IR-allowance to not count as one of the two), using Team QB (to allow either the NFL backup or the starter to play), or allowing an “average QB” score to be used during an NFL team’s bye week.
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And now for the oddballs. Yes, Virginia, there are successful fantasy leagues with an odd number of teams, hard as that may be to believe. But they do exist, and many of them thrive. Here’s the main reason many of them are successful – they use a dummy team to make the bye weeks matter. For example, in a 9-team league, they set up a 10th team – the dummy team. The dummy team doesn’t have any players, so it doesn’t win any games, but instead of assigning byes, teams that might have a bye would play the dummy team instead.
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Some weeks will see one team with a bye, a couple weeks have three teams with a bye, but it doesn’t really matter. All nine teams play 12 games against “real” opponents and 2 games against the “dummy team.” This means that after 14 weeks, everyone has a 14-game won-lost record, and seeding playoff teams is relatively easy. The nice thing that the dummy team does for you is that each of the 14 weeks counts equally in terms of total points scored, which is usually the first tiebreaker for playoff spots. So the “my players scored 157 points in my bye week, but I lost the tiebreaker because my total points were so low” excuse does not work. (Crybaby music stops abruptly.)
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Leagues with 11 and 13 teams are a bit more difficult, but not terribly so. Yes, you will have uneven divisions, but the NFL has had that for more than half the years since divisions were introduced in 1933. No one died because of it. (Even Major League Baseball has had imbalance for 34 of the past 35 years now before finally deciding that they don’t like it and are now thinking about evening things out.) You still set up the schedule with bye weeks against the Dummy Team instead of versus nobody, and everything works out pretty well, even with an odd number of teams.
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Another option that is popular in odd-team leagues (but is perfectly fine for even ones, too) is to use the “all-play” format, which means that each team plays every other team in the league, every single week. This gives the best scoring team in a 12-team league a record of 11-0 for the week, while the worst team gets a record of 0-11. Weekly records are aggregated over the course of the season (e.g. 91-52) to determine a champion or seed playoff teams accordingly.
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Here’s the thing, though. My honesty philosophy is that the size of your league should probably be determined by the size of your league’s rosters, at least to an extent. My average target is to have somewhere in the range of 200 players on team rosters (counting a team’s defense and special teams unit as one player). If you like the draft to weigh more heavily in terms of determining the course of your season, you can go above that figure. If you want everyone to be able to “rescue” their own seasons by having good starters available each week on the waiver wire, then you want to head south of that 200 figure.
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For example, if your league starts 8 and allows 7 reserves – a common configuration – having only 8 teams in your league means that only 90 total players are on rosters. To me, that really seems quite weak. With that kind of roster setup, my opinion is that you can easily have 12-14 teams in your league and still have some gems out there to find. This also makes the draft very meaningful without killing those owners who have injuries to deal with.
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On the other hand, if your league starts 10 players, and has a total roster size up to, say, 18-20, then you might be best served with only 8-10 teams, as this would give you just under 200 total rostered players.
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A more standard size roster – 16-17 players per team – would correlate to about 12 teams, and give you right about 200 players total. But again, these are just my ideals for what I picture an “average” league doing. (My 16-team league with 16-man rosters totals 256 players. Did I mention that I like to scout deep?) Your league should choose the target figure that it likes and run with it.
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(If your league uses individual defensive players (IDP) instead of team defenses, then that should also be a consideration as well. You’ll still want to try and get a similar type of “magic number” for total players on rosters. If you play IDP, my goal would be to target around 250 – maybe 275 – instead of 200. Rosters in such leagues are probably closer to 20-25 total players, making for an average of about 12 teams. Of course, if you use fewer IDP roster spots, you might want more teams, and vice-versa. Again, your league should decide what it prefers, but I bet the consensus will be pretty similar.)
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Commissioners, do the math for your league. Count up the total number of roster spots on a team, and multiply it by the number of teams in your league. If the number is close to 200, your league is probably in good shape. If the number is below 150, you probably should consider adding a couple. If the number exceeds 230, you might want to consider not replacing the next owner who decides to leave for whatever reason – unless you’re all nuts for fourth-stringers like I am.
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Finally, league size is ultimately up to the people who are in the league. If a majority of the people in your league wants a certain number of teams, then they (probably) get to have their way, even if it’s for reasons that don’t always seem to make sense. And if you really dislike that, you could always consider finding another league that better fits your preference for league size. After all, it’s only a game, and we should all have a lot of fun playing it.
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Adam Holtz is a former college sports information director living in southern Minnesota. His 15 years of playing fantasy sports – as well as 15 years of commissioner’s duties – have given him a wealth of experience on which to draw. His primary league has added teams twice in the past, including when they added a team for his wife – who has now beaten the Commish 4 of the 6 times they have played each other.
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Email the Commish: adam.holtz(at)gmail.com or check out his blog at champguy.blogspot.com.
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November 11th, 2011 at 6:15 pm #
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