With the NFL and the Players Union playing the lockout/decertification game instead of football at this point, what are the impacts to your fantasy football league should the dispute result in a partial or lost season? For standard annual draft leagues, the impact should be pretty straightforward, and will be felt more at the level of fantasy sports service providers than league commissioners. It will be up to CBS, Yahoo, etc to make adjustments as the situation unfolds, from format and playoff scenarios, to site fee modifications. It all hinges on what the final outcome of the situation ends up being.
From a commissioner perspective in an annual draft league, it will just be following the game plan of the chosen service provider. If the season is lost in its entirety, well, you won’t have to worry about much of anything. Now in my case, I am in two leagues that are built on contracts, salary cap, free agency, franchising, etc. How does life continue in these leagues? Most notably, what is the impact to your contracts if there are no games?This scenario doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending. Is everything suspended for a year and resume the contracts in 2012 where they left off? Or do you let the contracts run off a year? It’s a tough call, because in the football world a year is a very long time, and if you just pick up contracts where they left off, you will be paying the same rate for a player that is now older and there is a downstream effect for any additional years that they were signed. Technically, if the 2011 season is missed all-together, that player will be two years older from the end of the last season in which they played.
Obviously, every league is different in their format and dollars, but would you still be willing to drop 15 – 20% of your payroll on Peyton Manning in 2012 at age 36? Love the guy, but I would be hesitant to make that commitment. If you’re just suspending your contracts and rolling them over, then that’s what you’re looking at. If you run a year off the contract lengths for the lost time, that mitigates it somewhat, but results in a double free agent pool going into 2012, and also creates a scenario where teams built to win in the 2011-2012 range will be adversely affected.So where does that leave you? Flush the contracts and start over? That’s an idea that defeats the purpose of having year-to-year leagues and all the background moves and planning. Rookie drafts from the 2010 season would be rendered meaningless, rewarding owners that were out-drafted, and punishing owners that did their research and laid the groundwork for the future. I would be opposed to a move along these lines, but in the end, a work stoppage will create a lot of debate and voting in leagues, and I don’t know that there is any simple solution for the issue.
It’s going to be messy if the season is a total loss. So let’s hope everyone can get on the same page and we can see some football in 2011. Not just for the fantasy football addicts, but for the thousands of people employed in roles such as concessions, grounds crews, security, camera operators, parking lot attendants, and all the other people that count on football to bring home the bacon.
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