9/1/10
Everything from seemingly harmless trash-talk to underhanded
collusion can cause hard feelings among owners… and even
divide an entire league. Whether you’ve been the accused,
the betrayed, or just an innocent bystander wondering which side
to take, this column is for you. E-mail
the Devil's Advocate with a description of the controversy
brewing in your league (or a potentially unpopular move you’re
about to make), and I’ll give one of those emails an outsider’s
viewpoint in a future column. Maybe you’re right, maybe
you’re wrong; there are always two sides to a controversy.
Both sides will be explored in hopes of finding some middle ground
that helps you, and that any league can use to bolster its rules
and maintain that rogue ownership that makes fantasy sports all
the more entertaining.
One Good Favor...
There are two aspects of fantasy football team management I can’t
stand: collusion and neglect. They both seem to screw with a league
more than any other rule-bending. But despite my spite, I’m
sure I’ve perpetrated them myself in one form or another.
They’re just too easy to do, and I’m as much a hypocrite
as the next guy—when circumstance calls for it. Since neglect
is so easy to spot yet so difficult to correct, this round we’ll
focus on the problem of collusion. A reader recently sent in his
description of one of the more tame examples of this issue:
I once swapped players with another team so
we each had a good player during a bye week, and then we traded
back a week or two later. I felt it was wrong, but the league
had no rules against it, and I had to make the move knowing others
would do the same if they had thought of it.
The Guardian Angel
Swapping keeps both money and players from the rest of the league.
Favoring teams for trades or other dealings robs the league of
parity. Ganging up on other owners is just unfair. A good owner
is not afraid to make all his dealings public. Not all the rules
encompass all the wrong-doings in fantasy sports. Dealing in the
open helps the rest of the league stop a bad move before it goes
down—and that helps keep the league intact by keeping each
owner out of trouble.
The Fallen Angel
Pacts, alliances, treaties: they are all common practice in competition.
Those agreements you make with another owner are between the two
of you. Not all of your dealings have to be completely in the
open. No one needs to know that you gave so-and-so an extra five
bucks as incentive to trade players, or that your trade to some-other-guy
involves a number of contingencies. The only thing the league
needs to know is which players have moved to which teams. Everything
else is simply business and it’s simply none of theirs.
Here on Earth…
First, I think, an official definition of collusion would be helpful.
According to Webster’s New World Law Dictionary, collusion
is “an agreement between two or more individuals to perpetrate
a fraud or to commit an illegal act.” Okay, maybe that’s
not so helpful, and applying that to fantasy football is tricky.
What if the act is not specifically illegal, as in the example
above? And what exactly is considered fraud in fantasy football?
In the case above, the fraud simply involved the original trade
of the player. The league saw only the surface trade, not the
backend of the agreement. Therefore, they could do nothing about
it until it was too late (points were already scored and in place
before the trade-back occurred, so those points would have had
to be recalculated—seriously sketchy dealings for any fantasy
commish).
Though the teams did not break any rules on the surface, the repercussions
led to a number of acts that would have been considered illegal
if pulled off straight-up. If a fee of one dollar for each free
agent pickup had been a rule in their league, those owners would
have kept four dollars from the pot. Each of them would have picked
up a free agent and then dropped him after the bye week. That’s
two moves and thus two dollars per owner. They also kept two players
from the free agent market, creating a normally non-existent roster
spot. That could have seriously disrupted the waiver wire or,
at the least, kept a much-needed player from another team.
And that is merely one of the more innocent representations of
collusion. As the good angel suggests, there are at least three
kinds of collusion: swapping (which we’ve been looking at),
favoritism, and ganging up. Those three forms have different variations
and can span numerous situations, from friendly nepotism to utter
vengeance. I’ve known of husbands and wives, siblings, or
friends combining teams when one was out of the race; owners selling
their entire team when they knew they wouldn’t be back the
following year (call that favoritism toward their wallets); and
teams being compensated to gang up on another to knock them from
contention.
However, not all pacts and alliances are collusion. If that were
the case, every trade would be bad. A move can indeed be legitimate
if it works in the favor of more than one team even if it hurts
other teams in the process. Though it may seem rather crappy,
there is nothing wrong with an owner sending another team a great
player on the week that team plays the owner’s rival—as
long as the owner doesn’t expect to get that player back
free of charge. There is no rule-breaking in that case and no
fraud (since there are no contingencies and since the entire league
can see that beat-down coming).
Though you can see how the legal definition of collusion above
relates to our reader’s example, it doesn’t really
solve anything. The point here is for you to catch yourself before
you do something that will land you on the defensive. Getting
more to the root, it may help to think of it like this: In fantasy
sports, collusion is an agreement based on a set purpose rather
than a player’s value. In other words, it’s a favor.
Each player and pick normally carries a numerical, statistical,
monetary, or even a sentimental value. But swapping, playing favorites,
and ganging up all devalue a player or pick for the sake of a
specific outcome. A swap makes two players exactly equal in value—and
no two players have ever had exactly the same value. Playing favorites
by granting favors blurs a player’s value, since the return
for that player is yet unknown. Ganging up falsely decreases a
player’s value if the other owner has a stake in the outcome;
it falsely increases a player’s value if the other owner
needs moral swaying.
By destroying a player’s value, those favors hurt the rest
of the league equally. In the example from our reader, those two
teams kept a player from every other team with equal malice. Although,
in that particular case, there was no malice whatsoever. The intent
was not to hurt the league, only to help their teams skirt a roster
dilemma; but the that move impaired the league across the board
by denying free agency status to a player who should have had
it.
All that said, there is nothing wrong with trading a player with
the intent of getting him back on your team. You could say something
like, “I hate to let Player A go, but I can’t afford
to keep him on my roster during his bye week. Maybe we can make
a deal later to get him back on my squad.” Yes, that does
sound like a sample from some sort of compliance training where
you would check the box for “unethical behavior.”
But we’re not some corporation submitting forms for the
sake of bureaucracy. We’re playing a game and we're actually
expected to use our brains—furthermore, we have a human
sense of right and wrong that is dependent upon the nuance of
the moment.
As long as there are no winks or nudges or uncomfortable, yearning
looks into the other owner’s eyes, there’s nothing
wrong with that last scenario. You’re just letting the other
owner know not to hastily let your ex-player go—that you
want the guy back and are willing to pay for it, perhaps even
more than another owner. You are giving that player value. You’re
not exchanging favors, only knowledge. But hopefully you would
both have the sense to make a new trade instead of just trading
back, to ward off any potential allegations. To request another
owner to “hold” your player, on the other hand, would
be to step over the line.
There is also nothing wrong with actually having a favorite trade
partner, or with trading more often with some owners than with
others. That’s just the way things work. However, if an
owner you have a problem with offers you a better trade than a
friend has offered for the same player, and you take the friend’s
deal...well, you may want to review that move before you finalize
it. There could be legitimate factors pushing you toward the friend’s
deal; but if it’s just a buddy-buddy thing, that’s
not exactly kosher.
Since collusion is defined mainly by intent, it’s tough
for a league to set rules against it. And a league can certainly
go too far in trying to fight it off. Broad yet simple, well-worded
rules are the main deterrent to the problem, but that’s
another subject entirely. Until appropriate rules are created,
individual owners will have to be responsible for heading off
collusion themselves.
And the main problem with spotting collusion has to do with it’s
surface appearance. Often the most innocent-looking moves have
the worst effect on a league, and the most dastardly and bastardly
are perfectly legit. Even if it seems cruel but helps two teams
equally and doesn’t keep anything from the league, it’s
probably not collusion. If it looks innocent but somehow thwarts
the entire league, you may have a problem. Often it’s less
about how it looks, more about how it feels. And if it feels like
you’re playing monkey-in-the-middle with a blind-folded
monkey…nix the deal and figure something else out.
So, before making any move with another team outside of an everyday
trade, look first to how it will affect the league. If your move
doesn’t equally hinder the rest of the teams, you’re
probably in the right; then it’s your decision whether to
be a bastard. But being a bastard, no matter how right you are,
may not really be the best thing for your team. Unless, of course,
you’re the “Birmingham Bastards.” In that case,
you’re just living up to your name.
|
