My Own Modest Proposal
Trade deadlines have a long history in fantasy football. They exist to prevent teams from unilaterally buying championships, and to protect against broad abuses of owner power. I hate them. Let’s discuss!
First, a disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are wholly my own. Many smart and reasonable people acting entirely in good faith will vehemently disagree with me. This does not make them evil, misguided, or fascists. (I’m not ruling out the possibility that they’re evil, misguided, or fascists— fascists are people, too!— but if they are, it’s certainly not because they like trade deadlines. Well, almost certainly not.)
Why Do We Have Deadlines?
I wrote this preseason about how the common rules of fantasy football were not handed down all at once, but were instead cobbled together from various sources over the years until a collection of “best practices” was settled upon. While the oldest dynasty leagues were cropping up at the same time as the oldest redrafts, modern dynasties take much of their cues from the redraft traditions that newly converted owners are already well used to.
One of these conventions that has become widespread in redraft is the idea that teams that are mathematically eliminated from contention should not be allowed to play kingmaker and, through blatantly anti-competitive processes, decide who wins the league in their stead. Or, to put it more bluntly, we don’t want bad teams trading their best players to their friends right before the playoffs.
bad apples and upset apple carts
Even in redraft, this convention is fraught with problems. For starters, it assumes bad faith on the part of certain participants. Instead, I prefer to defer to the wisdom of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in the 18th century wrote “...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.” This principal is often restated a bit less charitably as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
In short, I generally am of the opinion that nobody in a league is deliberately trying to upset the competitive balance. While examples of disgruntled owners trying to ruin the league certainly exist, the overwhelming majority of the time a seemingly bad trade goes through, it is done with the best of intentions. And note that I say “seemingly bad trade”- this is not by accident, because I have seen many trades that initially looked terrible but later proved to be prescient.
It’s generally agreed that each owner should be allowed to run his team as he sees fit. Paternalistic hand-holding has little place in established fantasy leagues, and in fact often defeats the competitive purposes. Fantasy football is a marketplace of ideas, and they should all be allowed to compete on their own merits.
With that said, in order for the trade deadline to be useful, there has to be an individual party who desires to upset the balance of the league. We have to ignore our principles of assuming good faith and, instead, assume bad faith.
The problem, of course, is if we assume bad faith from the get-go, it is clear that a simple trade deadline is not going to be enough to protect us. If a mathematically eliminated owner really wants to upset the apple cart, there are a lot of ways he can do so that don’t involve lopsided trades. He can cut his best players outright, for instance. He can start players on byes to give his friends easy wins. He can vote against fair trades in leagues that put trades to a league-wide vote, (which is, in itself, another can of worms entirely).
If we have a bad apple in our leagues, trade deadlines alone are not going to deter him from spoiling the whole bunch. We can add a whole suite of other rules— No starting players on byes! No cutting good players!— but in my experience, trying to legislate against everything undesirable on a case-by-case basis only encourages nefarious rules lawyers to actively seek out loopholes.
So what is to be done? Should bad owners be allowed to run unchecked? Personally, I advocate for a much broader solution to the problem of bad actors. I believe in laying out clear expectations for behavior in a spirit-of-the-law but not letter-of-the-law manner. I believe in finding a trustworthy commissioner and vesting him with the power to take action as he sees fit when, in his judgment, it is necessary. And I believe in trusting that judgment.
One outcome of this philosophy towards league management is that trade deadlines become unnecessary. Bad trades will be halted, regardless of when they occur. Likewise, good trades will be allowed, regardless of when they occur.
leveling the playing field
Another interesting phenomenon in redraft leagues is that, when teams become mathematically eliminated, their owners often lose interest and cease trying to compete. This problem is so pervasive that some leagues award prizes for weekly high scores, or create a smaller prize pool that eliminated teams can compete for to keep them active all the way to the end of the season.
Why do leagues bother with these measures? Why not let the eliminated owners move on early? In short, because it disrupts the competitive balance of the league. If I play a team in week 1, it is assumed he will be doing his best to beat me. If that team later becomes eliminated and my biggest rival faces him in week 10, my rival might gain an automatic win against a team that is starting several players who are injured or on bye.
Clearly it’s not fair to me if I’m facing a team trying its best and my competition is facing a team that’s not trying its best. That’s an arbitrary advantage being bestowed through a scheduling quirk. It’s in the interest of fairness if all owners continue to compete to the best of their ability until the season is actually over.
The problem with trade deadlines, then, is they remove one of the tools teams typically have at their disposal to remain competitive. Instead, late in the season owners are managing their teams with one tool missing from their toolbox.
If an owner that is eliminated from the playoffs makes a trade in a good-faith effort to make his team better, then not only is this not a bad thing, it is actually a good thing. It means that teams have to work just as hard to beat him late in the year as they had to work early in the year. It means fairness and competitive balance are preserved.
An Arbitrary Objection to Arbitrary Rules
Finally, trade deadlines are, by their very nature, arbitrary. Why should a trade that is 100% fine before week 10 be 100% disallowed before week 11? Can the landscape really change that much in the course of a single week? And if the landscape really can change that much in a single week, how do we know we have the proper week? Why have it in week 11 and not week 12 or week 13?
Many trade deadlines are completely arbitrary, and I object to arbitrary rules from a purely aesthetic standpoint. I’m aware that this objection is, in itself, wholly arbitrary. Luckily, I have iron-clad logic on my side; either you are open to arbitrariness, in which case my objection is perfectly valid, or you are opposed to arbitrariness, in which case you are likewise opposed to trade deadlines.
Of course, the big flaw in the “arbitrary” objection is that there are two specific trade deadlines that are not the slightest bit arbitrary. Some leagues disallow trading as soon as a team has been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Other teams only disallow trading during the playoffs. Both deadlines are non-arbitrary, and if a league absolutely must have a trading deadline, these two are perhaps the best to choose.
But even in the case of non-arbitrary deadlines my previous criticism still stand.
A dynasty-specific critique
While trade deadlines are, in my opinion, not the best course even for redraft leagues, they are even more inappropriate in a dynasty setting. This is because the basic underlying assumption behind redraft trade deadlines, the sine qua non of their existence, is not applicable in a dynasty setting.
Simply put, trade deadlines in redraft exist to prevent teams that have nothing left to play for from deciding outcomes. But in dynasty leagues, no team ever has nothing left to play for. Even if eliminated from contention this year, there are always future seasons to concern ourselves with.
Even more simply put, trade deadlines prevent bad teams from getting better.
When you think about it, many of the pivotal mechanisms of dynasty leagues exist to further the efforts of parity. Why is the rookie draft always a straight draft instead of a snake draft? Why do the best picks go to the worst teams and the worst picks to the best teams?
The answer, obviously, is because leagues are set up to give bad teams an opportunity to get better. We create artificial tailwinds filling the sails of floundering franchises, while setting artificial headwinds athwart the paths of the best.
We don’t do this because we feel altruistic, either; it is in our best interest to give bad teams an advantage in their quest for relevancy. These measures increase owner engagement and make dynasty leagues more enjoyable for all involved.
Now, with that in mind, picture in your head what types of trades are likely to occur during the fantasy playoffs. You won’t usually see one competitor engaging in win/win trades with another competitor. Instead, you will see the playoff teams spending future assets, (draft picks, young prospects), to buy expiring assets, (aging veterans, untalented players in favorable situations), off of the eliminated franchises.
In this manner, valuable assets are redistributed from good teams to bad teams for players that were doing those bad teams no good in the first place. Playoff trades are a mechanism for parity!
By denying bad teams the opportunity to make those trades, we are denying them a chance to improve.
On the potential purchase of championships
One criticism against these late-season trades is that it allows overdogs to effectively “buy” championships. Again, though, the arbitrary nature of trade deadlines works against them here. Why is a trade “buying a championship” if it happens in week 13, (or 14, or 15), but not if it happens in week 10, (or 9, or 8)?
Any team at any time is free to trade future assets for present assets before the deadline. They may do so or not as they see fit, understanding that such a decision presents a trade-off. The decision still presents a tradeoff late in the season, though. Such trades improve championship odds at the expense of future team strength. The thing that changes late in the season is not the tradeoffs that these trades represent, but the willingness of teams to make those tradeoffs in the first place.
But let’s examine the phenomenon of “buying championships”. Setting aside for a moment the idea that nothing is ever guaranteed in fantasy, so what if the fourth-best team cashes in all of its future value to make a run at a title today? The top three teams all have an equal opportunity to do the same if they so desire.
And if they opt not to, they are rewarded with the ability to compete for a title today without compromising their ability to compete for another title tomorrow.
On the charges of rewarding bad Management
Another argument against allowing trades late in the season is that it rewards owners who failed to prepare with quality depth. If I have two great running backs and one of them goes down, allowing me to trade for a new starter fails to punish me for the fact that I didn’t accumulate enough depth in advance.
But what, I wonder, do critics assume I’m trading to acquire the new running back, if not my depth? In truth, it’s hard to acquire replacement players unless you’ve accumulated enough trading chips ahead of time.
And who is to say that I didn’t accumulate adequate depth? If I had a quality backup at every position, what happens if I suffer two injuries at a single position? If my depth ran two deep at that one position, what happens if I suffer a single injury at a different position?
Allowing competitors who suffer injuries to trade for help explicitly rewards the teams that have accumulated enough capital to acquire a decent fill-in. Shallow teams are still punished when trade deadlines are removed, because they don’t have anything to trade when holes arise. The deepest teams still fare the best.
The biggest change is that removing the deadline mitigates the role injury luck plays in deciding outcomes. And, in my mind, anything that minimizes the impact of injuries on fantasy football is decidedly a good thing.
If Men Were Angels
As we have seen, trade deadlines disallow teams from trying to improve for several weeks of the year, reduce parity, limit interesting decisions, and allow injuries to play a larger role in determining outcomes. So far they seem like a pretty bad trade. In a perfect world, we’d all be better off without them.
At the same time, we do have to acknowledge that we don’t live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, we’d have no use for products like LeagueSafe. In a perfect world, our rulebooks would be a lot slimmer. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t even need commissioners- we could just grant everyone the power to make what adjustments are warranted and trust them not to abuse it. To quote James Madison, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary”.
For the most part, our leagues are not perfect, and so we compartmentalize power and create rules to help everyone resist the temptation to gain an unfair advantage. I can make all the appeals that I want to the better angels of our nature, but smart leagues will still enact a few rules to help empower those angels in their task.
This is why leagues create inconvenient rules like trade approval processes, or outlaw essentially benign practices like “trade backs”. Sometimes safeguards must be put into place to protect against potential abuse. And as one such safeguard, a trade deadline can seem appealing.
My last argument, though, would be to consider carefully what you are guarding against. The biggest concern I have heard when a contending team wants to trade during the playoffs, (outside of concerns that he’s trying to “buy” a championship), is that the team is going to gut his team for one last run and then abandon it afterwards before the bill comes due.
Events like that can kill an entire dynasty league, and it makes sense to guard against them. The question, though, is whether a trade deadline is the best way to do so. It seems to me most dynasty leagues already have safeguards in place against a very similar activity. In order for owners to trade future draft picks, most leagues require that those owners pay future entry fees, either in whole or in part.
By paying future entry fees, the owner is essentially precommitting to stick around for future seasons. And should the owner violate that precommitment, the league already has a pre-paid subsidy with which to attract a replacement owner.
Wouldn’t this system of prepaying league dues also protect against the worst abuses of late-season trades? Instead of inventing a whole new rule, why not expand the scope of an already existing and relatively uncontroversial rule?
It is easy enough to say that anyone trading after a certain date must pre-pay a portion of next year’s entry fee. If this discourages late-season trading, well wasn’t that the desired outcome of the original trade deadline? And if owners are willing to pay this fee, then doesn’t that demonstrate that they’re probably making a good-faith effort to improve their team?
Throwing a Lifeline to the Trade Deadline
So that’s it, a humble proposal to take the trade deadline and turn it into something better suited for a dynasty environment. I expect it to be a hard sell, but hopefully I’ve managed to put forth a credible case for why the deadline is not just unnecessarily inconvenient, but runs directly contrary to the true aims of the overwhelming majority of dynasty leagues.
If you feel that I’ve overlooked certain arguments or dismissed them too easily, feel free to let me know. If you’ve done away with the trade deadline and have horror stories or success stories about the experience, let me know that, too!
Fantasy football attracts a huge range of participants, and there will never be any one-size-fits-all solutions. If there’s enough response, I’ll gladly revisit the subject after the season and give the dynasty community at large a platform to make its own case for why the trade deadline is or is not generally appropriate to the hobby.
