Franchise Drops Out Midseason

Q:  We have a fantasy league with 11 teams.  One of the teams managers has dropped out.  What do we do with the players on his team?

A:  It’s shame that you are down to 11 teams as wins are hard to come by and this will unevenly distribute forfeit victories across your league.  Because of this, the best solution is to find a replacement owner to get back to an even 12.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with this.  One, its not easy to find a replacement owner at this time in the season, and two, taking over ownership would require the new owner to have access to the the old owner’s Yahoo profile which probably won’t happen (unless you can work some magic on the league setup page).

There is a silver lining here.  It is almost always impossible to get your league to vote objectively on a rule change during the season because each owner usually has some vested interest in the issue that will affect his vote.  In this case, however, everyone is on the same playing field.  So bring this question to a league vote.  First, vote on whether or not the players should be added back into the pool at all - or frozen.  Majority wins, heck this is perfect you even have an odd number of voting teams, ensuring there won’t be a tie.  Assuming no one wants to freeze the absentee roster, you should then throw all 11 teams in a hat and pick the draft order.  Then start drafting, using the snake style (A,B,B,A).

Couple comments on this.  The fairest way to handle this issue is to freeze the lineup, simply because with 11 teams picking from one roster, the first few draft picks will clearly benefit more from the process.  Of course, its much more fun to do another mini draft.

Also, if you decide to draft the players, you absolutely shouldn’t base the draft order off current records.  What a team has done to this point in the season should have no bearing on if and how these additional players are distributed.  All teams should have an equal chance to improve their team as a result of this issue.