Talk Fantasy Football

Hello,

we've started a new league in our beloved city, and we're using a rather tight playing scheme (1 game in 3 weeks). Thusfar, we've not implied penalties for coaches not playing their games, since we hope and motivate people te play their games.

Alas, the day will come that coaches will struggle to keep themselves to the deadlines, and before that day comes we'd like to have some fixed "penalty" for those games. And this proves to be a hard one: you have to make a penalty that is not too hard not to undermine the rest of the season for both coaches, but is hard enough not to make a tactical decision (like an Elf coach deliberalty not playing dwarves, if the penalty for not playing is "better" than the risk he takes when playing the little buggers) a viable option.

So: how do you guys do this in your leagues? What happens if a match isn't played in time?

We have two levels of concession: "concession" and "forfeiture." Forfeiture is the current concession rules out of the rulebook, while concession is what happens if you have an excuse.

If you forfeit a game before it happens (that is, if you break three arrangements to meet and time runs out, or if you don't make a good-faith effort to play your match and time runs out, especially if your opponent is complaining), your opponent wins 1-0, and may "play" a ceremonial match yielding a TD to a player of his choice, a Comp to a different player of choice, and all the stuff in the rulebook (like both teams' MVP, etc). This is also what happens if you forfeit at the start of your turn, though you do earn any SPP acquired to that point in the match.

If you know you can't play before the game starts (and you have a valid excuse), or if you choose to concede at the start of overtime, then there's no penalty. If it's the start of OT, your opponent gets the ceremonial drive/TD/Comp, which means you lose, but that's all. If the game isn't going to happen (out-of-town or whatever), the conceding party gets winnings (1d6-SE) and MVP, while the other guy gets to call it a 1-0 win with no FAME.

If it's nobody's fault, or if nobody wants to play OT but there's a standoff as to who should concede, it's a tie. If no match was played, it's a 0-0 tie, each side getting 1d6-SE winnings and an MVP. This would be problematic in some leagues: our tiebreakers run on raw wins vs. win %, as our fixed schedule ensures that everyone plays the same number of games. It's "most wins" then "fewest losses" so a tie is just a little better than a loss, as opposed to the NFL, where it's "best win %" then head-head. In the NFL, ties are almost as good as wins. This would be a problem were they not very rare; unfortunately in BB ties are more common.

Note also that you need an appeal mechanism so people can accuse the coordinator of bias without wrecking your league. It will happen.