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How to Keep Your League Interesting Year After Year

Many leagues have a lot of enthusiasm the first couple of years but then either die off or become stale with only a couple of owners really excited.  Our league, Blue Sky Fantsy Leagues (aka The BSFL), has been running for seven years now and we have tried a few different things to keep the league interesting for all owners.  Below are a few of the ideas that we have implemented and have seemed to work for us.  Not all of these work for every league, but you may want to try them out.

Historical Stats:  When I polled the league owners about what keeps the league interesting to them, the first thing many of them said was, “I like knowing the all-time records and stats”.  These stats allow us to argue over things like which team is the best franchise of all time and who is the best owner.  Our league has kept detailed records of every game since its inception.  We know each team’s record against the other teams, how many points each owner has scored at each position, and many more stats that any one of the owners may have been curious about over the years.  Now, not everyone is lucky enough to have someone who has kept all of the reports from over the years.  If you don’t have someone who does this, you may want to elect a league statistician or historian.  This will get another owner involved with something that they are responsible for.

Once you have someone in charge of the league’s stats and history, you are going to need to  compile the records.  Trying to piece together your league’s entire history in one weekend will be too much.  I suggest first just getting all of the information together and in an organized format so you can look at it again in a few weeks.  There are a lot of people in the world who do not throw things away and I would bet that there are some owners in your league that have a box full of  reports in the basement that would be helpful.  Get everyone to give you a copy of their records and try to piece the information together.  Once you have all of the reports, decide which stats you want to keep and track.  You may want to have a little party to get some help from some of the other owners.

Once you have the stats up to date, it is a lot easier to keep them updated year after year.  In our league, we issue the all-time stats at the year-end dinner.  It creates good conversation and generates some fueds over who is better than who.

Offseason Movement / Keeper League:  I highly recommend that you create some sort of arrangement that allows owners to trade players during the offseason.  Allow players to be traded, and if you set your draft order based on the previous year’s results (I recommend doing this) then draft picks get traded much more often.  The best way to accomplish these things is to have a keeper league, where owners can keep a certain number of players for the following year.  Remember, the league is yours and doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s.  Create the rules that make sense for the owner’s wishes in your league.  In our league, we didn’t want to keep the whole team, so we limited keepers to 3 players a team for the first year (“protection spots).  The next year we felt that this may cause a star to stay with one team for their entire career, so we implemented a contract system.  This contract system is a little confusing at first, but each of our owners understands it and it moves some of the better players around to different teams.  We looked at the NFL processes and altered them to fit our needs.  Then we wanted to see more trading, so we gave each owner the right to trade their “protection spots”.  Now we are considering altering some of the contract rules to better generate movement.  This example leads me to my next recommendation.

Accept Change:  Don’t fight changing things.  I am not one of these freaks that say, “Embrace change”.  I just think changing things around a little makes the league interesting.  It allows owners that do not like something about your league a way to change it rather than quitting.  You can always try something and if it doesn’t work, just change it back.  Our rules dictate the process that has to be followed in order to implement a rule change.  This is to make sure that someone hasn’t been planning on a certain rule while making their roster moves and suddenly has to face a new rule.  We propose changes at the draft that will take effect after the following year’s draft.  This gives an owner one year to adjust.

Year-End Dinner:  Try to get everyone together for a dinner to celebrate the Super Bowl Champion’s prowess.  Every owner in our league pitches in $30.00 at the beginning of the year as part of our yearly fees.  After the season, we go to a local restaurant where we can present the awards and make fun of each other.  We hold the dinner every year on the Saturday of the week between the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl.  The dinner typically sets the stage for some trades since only one of us is happy with the outcome of the season and the sting of defeat is fresh in our minds.

League Traditions & Rules:  Create reasons to have an owner do something for the league.  We force the team that finished last the previous year to hold the draft; and the second to last place finisher has to create, buy, or bring the boards that we use to keep track of the draft and the draft order.  These are little traditions that make it a little more fun.  Keep league dates the same year to year.  Have the draft on the same day each year (like the Saturday on the weekend before the season starts).  Keep the dinner on the same day.  Try holding a playoff party to get everyone together on the first weekend of your playoffs at the previous Super Bowl Champ’s house.  These things allow owners to plan to be around for league functions when their loved ones want them to be somewhere else.  I know of owners who have planned vacations and business trips around these events.

League Paper / Report:  If you have someone in your league who enjoys writing, ask them to write a one page report during the offseason.  This will keep everyone up to date with league issues and even non-football stuff, like birth announcements and other things happening to the owners.  This may seem like a hassle, but it really only takes about 15 minutes and is worth the effort.  Our league paper has been off and on for a few years.  We call it the Toilet Paper (the “BS” in BSFL didn’t originally stand for Blue Sky).  One of the owners writes it when he gets around to it and it seems to keep everyone up to date.  It helps to have email for all of the owners when doing this type of thing.

Well, I hope these suggestions have atleast given you some ideas for keeping your league interesting and fresh.  If there is one thing that I feel every league can do, it would be to be creative and make whatever rules you want.  This is fantasy football and not the NFL.