If you want to know how to keep your league engaged, it’s simple–stay together but don’t get married!

I know. I’m such a comedian. But honestly, it is an issue that needs a little levity. Most of us have been in leagues that, come late in the season, at least one or two owners seem to go M.I.A. Or maybe owners are pretty active during the season, but your league has a severe turnover issue. No, I don’t mean fumbles and interceptions, but owners leaving your league. And the league is then stuck trying to replace those owners, which can sometimes be a real pain in the behind.

The good news however is that there are plenty of ways to combat this. I am a commissioner of one league for example that has been around for 20 years. And no, it’s not a bunch of folks who went to college together or all served together or worked in the same department. In fact, most of the owners didn’t even know each other before joining the league.

And that’s just one of many leagues I am a part of that thrive. Thus, I come from a place of experience when I tell you how to keep your league engaged.

Here are a handful of suggestions.

How To Keep Your League Engaged

Don’t Be A Jerk

Let’s get this one out of the way. Whether you are a commissioner or an owner, treat the rest of your league mates with respect and decency. Nothing kills a league quicker than a commissioner with a Napoleon complex or a league that has owners who are real jerks. A competitive league is amazing, but if owners find themselves actually wanting to cut each other’s throats, that’s a bad thing.

Set your lineup each week, respond to trade offers, be polite when responding to trade offers, and so forth. Take your league seriously and be an active participant. But don’t take it too seriously. Not winning your league’s Super Bowl is a bummer, but it’s not the end of the world either.

Fantasy Football is supposed to be fun. Whether you are the commissioner, longtime owner, or fresh to the league, don’t be a killjoy. As Bill and Ted said, “Be excellent to one another.”

Before we all start singing Kumbaya, let’s move on to some more concrete suggestions.

Change It Up A Little

You might have a successful league year after year, but at some point, like it or not, it’s going to get a little stale. Encourage your league to be open to changes and make some changes. You don’t have to make complete transformations. Going from a draft league to an auction league or a redraft league to a keeper league can be fun, but you don’t even have to do anything that drastic.

You can change your scoring just a little. Go from four points for a passing TD to six points for a passing TD. Or give TEs an extra half-point per reception. There are tons of possibilities.

Or don’t touch the scoring and simply add an additional bench spot. If your league doesn’t have IR spots, add that possibility. Even something simple as creating divisions or reshuffling your divisions is a way to bring a little change to your league that might be another way how to keep your league engaged.

Divide The Pot A Little More

There is absolutely something to be said for a “winner take all” league. So many of us hate the “participation trophy” culture in which now so many of us live. But you can open up the winning possibilities without having to give money to additional owners. For example, instead of just awarding the SB winner, award whoever finishes the regular season with the best record as well as the team with the most points. All three of those could be the same team, but it could also be three different owners.

Or award points for weekly high scorers. If you have a truly dominant team, they can still win the entire pot. But the odds of that happening are pretty slim and you could easily end up having each owner in your league win a little bit of their money back. Imagine a team that has a stud player who gets injured early in the season but is due to come back in say week 10. A team that knows it won’t make the playoffs might be very inclined to remain active knowing it can still win some money back if it can just win one of those final few weeks of the regular season.

And in one of my leagues, we take it one step further. Not only are teams that are out of the playoffs can still be weekly winners, we actually award double the weekly win prize for the last five weeks of the season. It requires a little more accounting by the commissioner, but it’s really not too difficult.

Of course that league instituted another league change that also added more accounting but certainly forces owners to remain active until the end: a skunk rule.

Add A Skunk Rule

I don’t think this is too complicated, but it needs to be instituted correctly. If a team gets “skunked,”, they toss an additional preset amount of $ into the pot. A team who fails to score a certain amount of points AND gets beaten by a certain amount of points, will help build the end-of-year pot.

This helps account for bye weeks when a team’s stud(s) might not be available but still forces an owner to start an active roster. It should not be such an onerous amount that it angers that skunked owner, but just enough that is annoying and will hopefully keep owners from starting a squad full of injured players.

I understand this might be controversial in some leagues, but I have an even more controversial suggestion for how to keep your league engaged….

Eliminate the Trade Deadline

Hear me out on this one. We all know that nothing chaps the rear end of owners more than a lopsided trade right before the deadline that completely shifts the balance of power. But what if there was no trade deadline?

There is no longer that one defined point for a season. So someone selling doesn’t need to unload everything all by a certain date and time. And even if an owner does make a late-season lopsided trade, this allows other owners to make their own trades afterward to help restore the league balance. This helps stretches the league trading window, enabling more activity and involvement, rather than confining it.

Plus, it is possible to have no trading deadline with some other restrictions that keep things fair but still keep the trade market alive. For example, you can institute a rule that teams who are out of the playoffs cannot trade with teams that are still in the hunt. For keeper leagues in particular, this is a great rule that allows two teams who are out of the playoffs to make a trade with one another.

I’ve seen other leagues where they’ve eliminated the trade deadline but you can’t trade with a team more than X spaces away from you in the standings. This prevents the first-place team from taking that last-place team’s remaining stud. That gets a little complicated for my tastes, but it works for that league. Or to eliminate teams from tanking and to keep teams involved, you can go with the option made popular in part by the FX show, “The League“.

The Sacko Award

The “Sacko Award” is a “prize” given to the last-place team. It can be a trophy, but more often than not it is some sort of “fun” punishment that the entire league can take part in, such as the example below:

But have fun with this.

Make the league loser shave his eyebrows or get an embarrassing haircut–perhaps having “LOSER” shaved into their hair? No, it doesn’t have to be physically punishing like in the video above. It can be something humiliating like having to wear this shirt out in public. Another popular option is to make that owner provide snacks and refreshments for the following year’s draft.

Or looking to do something cost-free? I’ve seen leagues in which the Sacko Award winner gets his team name changed for the entirety of the following season. Or how about those administrative duties that you hate as commissioner? Let the Sacko Award winner take care of those! It can be anything.

One Sacko Award that I knew of had to endure a very tough live draft situation the following season. While the other owners were sitting in soft couches and reclining chairs, he had to sit in the host’s five-year-old daughter’s Princess Tea Party chair. Ignoring the emasculating nature of it, the seat was about shin-high on this 6-3 240-pound man, making it extremely uncomfortable. I promise you, he was extremely active the following season!

Conclusion

I’ve given you half a dozen different ideas/options on how to keep your league engaged. But it can sometimes be even more basic than any of the above. Instead of doing your draft online, do it in person. Or need some fresh blood, expand your league. I myself am looking to institute a “relegation” system similar to soccer or find a league that has that option. But those are just two of countless more options. Hit me up on Twitter (@MarkStrausberg) and I am happy to give you more suggestions!