Anybody who has ever been involved in dynasty leagues will have had a conversation, either publicly or privately, about tanking. As soon as an owner realizes that their fantasy football team is unlikely to make the playoffs, attention naturally turns towards the future. A high pick in a rookie draft can be a great way to either add a valuable young piece to your team or can be a useful piece in trade negotiations.
The difficulty for dynasty league commissioners is what to do about tanking. The majority agree that it’s unfair and shouldn’t be allowed, especially if it benefits a rival, but is it inevitable? Or can the league be set up in a way that makes it ineffective?
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What is tanking?
Just like in real life, tanking in fantasy football is when an owner will intentionally set up their team to lose in order to finish the season with a worse record with the intention of gaining a later advantage. In dynasty, this will more often than not come in the form of getting an earlier pick in the upcoming rookie draft and the opportunity to add a higher-rated player to their roster.
Should tanking be allowed in dynasty leagues?
There’s an argument that, as dynasty leagues are long-term commitments, tanking should be allowed. If a player isn’t going to win a fantasy championship, then why shouldn’t they plan for the future?
The issue with this line of thinking is that there are other teams involved in the league, and their chances of making the playoffs could be dramatically impacted by a team tanking. Imagine facing a team at full strength in Week 1 and losing, only to find that same team benching their star players against a competitor later in the season to intentionally lose, gifting your rival a valuable victory in the process.
Is trading away players considered tanking?
No. For the simple reason that it just doesn’t make sense to get rid of your best players in order to increase your chance of getting a better player later down the line. While trading players may significantly reduce a team’s competitiveness during that season and end with them losing more games, it isn’t tanking.
The reason for this is that the team that is trading away players is doing so because they value the assets which they are getting in return more highly. They might feel that an aging player has far more value in the current season than the following one, but they’re not trading players with the sole intention of losing games.
How to prevent tanking in fantasy football
There are many ways of stopping players from tanking in dynasty leagues. The majority of them revolve around not incentivizing losing, but those aren’t the only solutions. It all depends on the league that you play in and the other owners, but some of the most effective are listed below.
Play with people you know and trust
This is perhaps the most straightforward method to prevent tanking. Filling your dynasty league with owners you trust should help to give you confidence that everybody will be playing in good faith. Players who respect the game and the league are more likely to do what’s right. Restricting turnover among owners and knowing that people want to stay in the league long-term will decrease the chances of tanking. Players will be less likely to deliberately lose during a season as they won’t want a similar situation to unfold against them in future years.
Give the first pick to the team that wins the consolation bracket
This can be a fun way to keep teams and their owners motivated throughout the season. Reward the team that wins your league’s consolation bracket with the first pick, the runner-up with the second pick, etc. Doing this encourages players to continue picking their best teams throughout the season.
The downside of this approach is that it does little to promote parity. The team that wins the consolation bracket will, more often than not, be a middling team that just missed out on making the playoffs. By giving them the top pick, they might become one of the better teams in the league the following season, while the worst teams in the league are left with worse players to choose from in the draft, reducing their likelihood of becoming competitive.
Use a lottery system to determine the first pick
You don’t necessarily need to cook up a formula that rivals the NBA Draft Lottery with the team with the worst record having a greater chance of the number one pick (although you could if you wanted to), but you can always use a randomizer to award the draft’s top pick. Which teams are eligible for the lottery is up to you. You include everybody, just the teams in the consolation bracket, or come up with anything else you can think of. Just make sure that you find a way of recording the draw so that you don’t get any complaints if you end up with the first pick!
Track potential points for non-playoff teams
This can get tricky depending on which platform you are playing on, but more and more leagues are turning to potential points to determine the draft order for non-playoff teams. The potential points rule essentially ignores your starting line-up and treats the league in a similar way to the best ball format after a certain point.
Teams that don’t make the playoffs have their records ignored when determining draft position. Points are calculated throughout the season for the entire active roster. The team with the fewest potential points gets the first pick, completely eliminating the benefit for an owner of benching their best players. Unless they decide to trade away high scoring players or drop somebody and risking them being picked up by a rival in free agency, they will count toward their total.
Andy Gallagher is a writer for the Pro Football Network covering Fantasy Football. You can follow him @AndySGallagher on Twitter.