So, There is a guy in my league, very competitive, but not particularly good at drafting.
Anyway, there is something he continually does most weekends, that I have decided can not be explained by simple incompetence. He makes waiver moves early Saturday morning. Often picking up players only to drop them immediately. Now everybody does this occasionally, you see a guy you think you want and grab him, only to have buyers remorse after looking into the details of the situation, or seeing somebody better.
But this guy does it most weekends, and almost never plays the guy he ends up with. Now we play standard rules, waiver for 2 day after being dropped. So being picked up and dropped Saturday morning blocks guys from being picked up and used that weekend. It doesn’t effect me all that much, because I have a good team ;). But it does seem pretty cheap and non-sporting, but I’ll let the commish do something if he feels like it. I’m sure other people have seen it, or maybe even done it :(, but if you are commish and see it, what do you do?
I’d send him a quick message. Sounds like he might be listening to call in shows or reading web sites that give so much information that he gets paralysis by analysis and ends up dropping and adding players at random.
Sounds to me like he’s picking and dropping players on Saturday morning specifically to make them unavailable to other players in his FF league. That’s a dick move.
How is the strategy working for him? Is he in the top of your league, or is he floundering?
I am a commish if a league I’ve run for 12 years or so. We’ve had the same 10 players for the most part, with usually 2 people falling out every year. Some people are just dicks, and tend to find the dick things to do. Other people try to learn on the fly, are afraid to ask questions, and generally use the opportunity to play with the software.
I had this problem. I fixed it by permitting the waivers to have no wait time, so if you cut someone, whoever you cut is now available for all. This has cut down recreational add/dropping to almost zero.
I also listen to the static from the league, and I have restricted account access when I think it is warranted. I don’t want to be a prick, but I also don’t want to spend hours digging through bogus transactions.
In the final analysis, I don’t think anyone wants to be the commish in our league, so they pretty much police themselves. If someone gets out of hand , I switch them into the commish role. They usually grow up pretty quickly
Its hard for me to have an opinion at this point, and without being more familar with your specific league and especially his team and how he runs it overall, I could see this going either way. It sounds very possible that he’s just scatterbrained with his moves, but its also very possible that there is a method to his madness and he’s trying to exploit a loophole in the way the waivers run because he thinks its giving him some kind of advantage (or maybe just to be a dick).
If I were running the league, my main focus would be on closing the loophole, and I see two fixes off the top of my head:
First would be to implement a waiver fee (assuming your league is for money). If its costing a buck or two to make these moves, it might make him think twice about making so many moves. At the very least it would add to the pot the winners get.
Second would be to look at the way waiver transactions are processed, and see if you can avoid immediate drops from having to clear waivers again. I know in my Yahoo baseball league that if a player was picked up and dropped right away that it wouldn’t send him to waivers. Not sure what the criteria were, or how long until a move was “official”. Depending on your league, this may be something you can customize.
It was called “churning” where I figuratively come from, and often explicitly against the rules. Basically nothing is officially against the rules anymore because the host sites don’t want to police millions of leagues, but I still consider it actual cheating. It should be prevented one way or another.