What’s involved in being a commissioner of a fantasy sports league? I know it takes time to set up a league and find owners along with trying to find a draft time that works for most people.
After that, does it pretty much run on autopilot since the league would vote on trades? I’d like to not have to deal with booting inactive players, but I would if I see a team that’s starting players on IR for a month! But, I wouldn’t want to be the hyperactive commissioner who boots owners for not setting their lineup one day. I know that life, travel, and internet problems can prevent even a dedicated fantasy player.
I’m thinking of starting a hockey league with a large number of teams, hopefully a keeper or dynasty type league so it would be an ongoing project. If I do, I’ll only play this league as well as the other large keeper league I’m in so I won’t be too stretched, although the football leagues will overlap for a couple of months.
Other duties involve setting rules that everyone will agree to, collecting any entry fees (if any), and ensure that people will be active by any means necessary. In my experience, these duties will take about an hour or two extra before the draft and maybe half an hour a week during the season.
I run 3 SDMB leagues and it’s not too much work. I put in some extra work but only because I’m hooked on FF. I try to seek out the best players (at least for two of the leagues), encourage participation, discussion, post various interesting stats, propose rule tweaking and gather opinions on everything, remind people when they have empty/inactive slots on their roster - but it’s not too much work. It’s stuff I’d mostly do anyway just in the course of playing FF myself.
You could get by on less work - you can invite people, set up the basic rules, and basically it let run itself, but I enjoy having the higher level of competition and activity that putting in some extra effort can bring. The biggest thing you can do is ensure you get quality people, who will remain active and participate in discussion and not just get bored halfway through the season when they have a poor record and abandon it.
Regarding the issue of voting on trades, last year I switched to commissioner approval because in the past when destabalizing trades were going down, since we were all on friendly not hyper-competitive terms, no one wanted to step in and be the person who objected. There was basically no chance a trade would ever get voted down. So basically I turned them to commissioner approval, and approved them in less than the 48 hours yahoo provided so that people could still be wheeling and dealing on friday and saturday and still have the trades take place by sunday. On controversial trades, I’d allow more time and make sure to ask everyone’s opinion, so that if there was indeed a desire for the league to reject a trade, I would.
As far as a keeper or dynasty league - make sure you get everything sorted out in year one, lest you have problems of misunderstandings about the rules going into the future.
We had threads (1 2 3) about the formation of the dynasty league we created last year if you want to see our thought processes going into it. None of us had tried anything like it before but it seems to be working out fine.
It’s hardly any work at all. All you need to do is set the rules at the beginning of the season and set the draft date. Any more work after that is up to you.
Imho, the best commissioners did the least. The worst commissioners were criticized no matter what they did.
Dunno if I agree with that. Ellis Dee and Senor Beef are both very good commissioners, and both very hands-on.
I will say that fantasy hockey sounds like a lot more work than fantasy football, just because of the schedule. I don’t bother with fantasy baseball and basketball for that reason (also, because I don’t know anything about them).
I run one fantasy football league, so there will be differences between that and hockey.
I spend most of my time on the league in the spring after the season and in the late summer before the season.
In the spring, I deal with doling out the winnings, delivering final rosters to everyone and getting a vibe on possible constitution changes for the following year. It’s pretty easy.
In the fall, it’s getting everyone agreed to a time to draft (Live draft, with keepers), pushing everyone to vote on proposed rule changes, collecting dues, setting up a small website for discussions and voting, and some other small stuff.
If you are going to be wagering on the league it is VERY important that you spell out everything in the constitution. We are at $500 buy in, plus trade and free agent fees. The pot is large and we have to have all of that spelled out so that when Marques Colston is listed as a TE in Yahoo!, but he’s actually playing WR people can’t argue with it. (we defined the players position as whatever Yahoo! lists).
It’s not too tough if you have a group of friends, but I’ve commished a league where people were trying to pull off wide scale cheating and we had some not very involved owners. That wasn’t fun. If you’ve got a good group, it’s easy and fun. If the people are jerks, it can get hellish.
All the whiny e-mails and league MB postings make for some delightful evening reading.