If someone keeps 4 players do they count as your last 4 rounds of the draft? The first four rounds? Do they get bumped up from previous years like in Brandon’s league?

My question is this: In year #2 I would like to set up the draft in reverse order of finish, but I also don’t want teams tanking late in the year to move up in the draft…any suggestions?
Thanks!

Basically, the first few years of the league are a little rocky and then it smooths out. You’ll see what I mean.

Draft a league as normal, play the season as normal. Our trade deadline is week 10 (before week 10’s games start). 15 and 16 are the playoffs for top four teams in a ten team league (we did expand from 8 to 10 at one point).

The trading deadline is also the signing deadline. You submit to the league your list of contracts. We call them “years” but they are really “drafts”. If you sign a player for three years you hold them out of three “drafts”.

Each team distributes ten years any way they want. You want to put all ten on one player, fine. You want to go 4,3,2,1… fine. You want to hold 10 players through the next draft, fine.

You can never extend a “contract”, so when you have a keeper player who has dropped to 0 “drafts” or “years” remaining, they are going to go back in the draft pool the next year.

But you CAN trade any player (including players under contract). So what happens is at the trading deadline there is a flurry of activity to move these top tier keepers around. Some get moved. Some don’t (perhaps you have a gangbusters team and want to win this year). The trading deadline is positioned (we believe) so that its a gamble either way and that makes for more exciting decisions to be made.

You are also free to cut a player at any time, even a contracted one, and those years are simply voided and returned to you. So you aren’t hamstrung to a player who suddenly ages before your eyes. This rule sounds much worse than it is. It actually works well.

You CAN cut a player, free up his contract time, and then pick him back up off waivers, but that has NEVER happened because if the player was any good, he’s lost to you forever. There have been cut “keepers” who are picked up as a flyer by another owner. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

You can also trade picks in our league. We limit trading of picks to no more than two drafts in the future because we might have an owner drop out, a new one take his team, and see his future mortgaged. But no one’s ever left the league.

So, after year one, how do you resign in future years? Well, at the draft, everyone’s contract number drops by one, so if you signed four players to 4,3,2,1 years, you would have them now signed to 3,2,1,0 (one player is leaving your team after this season), and you’d have four years available at the trading/signing deadline (more if you cut a keeper prior to the trading/signing deadline).

Basically, you can count your number of kept players and that’s how many years you’ll have. You always sign back up to ten years each season.

What happens is the league has been ebbing and flowing between locking up superstars for five years at a clip to this season where everyone kept 4-6 players, meaning there is going to be a flurry of trades and lots of key players back in the draft next season.

I’ve probably forgotten to post our corner case rules, but there really are not many. What makes the league fun is it is flexible and there is much more player movement than you might think. Over the ten years a fantasy stud like Peyton Manning is on his fourth team (I had him for four years and trading him in his prime was a bonanza).

The point of the simple rules is that you don’t have to remember much, track much… who are the contracts and how many “years” are left?