Football Draft Kit: How to Run a Football Keeper League

Fantasy football leagues are fun (why else would you be reading this?), but that doesn't mean they're perfect. Your standard office pool or long-term league with your friends can be great, don't get me wrong, but there can be times when it seems like something is missing.

Consider a season when all three of your top picks get hurt, dooming you to a second-division finish before Halloween. Or think about the time you shrewdly made a virtual unknown a late-round pick (Thomas Rawls, perhaps), only to watch him become a top-10 player at his position heading into the following season without you ever really benefiting from being the first in your league to recognize his value.

The thing missing in those scenarios is roster continuity. A lost season gives you no chance to build for the future when you have to reconstruct your roster from scratch every fall, while those shrewd endgame picks are more properly rewarded when you can keep the player on your team the following year.

The thing missing, in other words, is making your league a dynasty league.

But how do you go about doing that? What's different about a dynasty league compared to a single-season league, and what do you need to anticipate when you make the switch?

Dynasty League vs. Keeper League

First, let's clarify exactly what we're talking about. A dynasty or keeper football league is one where players can be protected from season to season, allowing you to keep the core of your roster intact and thus build a dynasty. Rather than re-drafting an entirely new lineup every year, you'll head into your draft or auction with some roster spots already filled. Not only does that allow you to hang onto your favorite players, it gives you a chance to truly play GM and make moves and trades where you have to juggle future success against immediate returns.

There are two approaches to these types of leagues. In dynasty leagues, there are fewer (or even no) limits on how many players you can protect from season to season, or for how long you can protect them. Once you acquire a player, he can be on your team for as long as you want him. In theory, you could draft a player right out of college and keep him for his entire NFL career if you wanted to. Dynasty leagues tend to be deeper, with more roster spots on your bench or even in your starting lineup, giving you the freedom to pick up players early in their career and let them develop into stars without worrying about losing out on any production in the short term.

Keeper leagues, on the other hand, are a little more restrictive. There will be limits on how many players you can carry forward season to season (typically no more than half your total roster), but it also becomes more difficult to protect players for long periods. If you hold a draft, then players must be slotted into a round higher than the one they were drafted in. If you hold an auction, players must be protected at a higher salary than your original winning bid, or must be signed to a contract that locks in their salary for a set number of seasons, after which they become free agents. Those constraints make it more difficult to keep your roster core together, but not impossible.

Draft vs. Auction

The most important decision when setting up a dynasty or keeper league is whether to hold a draft or auction to distribute new players. Each system has wrinkles that you'll need to iron out before proceeding.

Drafts

In a draft league, you'll need to determine how players can be protected from season to season. There are three basic approaches:

1. Protected players are exempt from the draft

In this setup, the simplest of all, the players carried over on your roster from the previous season are simply kept out of the pool of players that can be drafted. You'll conduct the draft as normal, starting at pick 1.1, until everyone has filled all their roster spots. This will, of course, result in some owners finishing their drafts earlier if they protected more players and skipping their later draft picks. If your league has 18 roster slots and you protect eight players, your last pick will be in round 10. Essentially, the players you protect slot into your latest draft spots, regardless of talent.

This setup requires little bookkeeping on the part of the commissioner, as they need only to collect and distribute everyone's protected lists prior to the draft.

2. Protected players take up your earliest draft slots

This is essentially the opposite approach to the one above. In these leagues, the first player you protect slots into your first-round pick, the second into your next-highest pick, etc. This makes the decision on whether to protect a player much more difficult. Whether a player is worth protecting becomes a matter of figuring out whether you'll be able to get either him or a player of equal or better value back if you leave that draft slot open. If you have three players with ADPs that would make them first-round picks, it's easy to put them in your first, second and third round draft slots. If you have a number of players who would typically be third- or fourth-rounds picks, however, determining whether to protect them and how many of them to protect becomes trickier.

This setup also requires little bookkeeping on the commissioner's part beyond collecting protected lists and blocking out the necessary draft picks.

3. Protected players have escalating round values

In this setup, players must be protected in a higher round than their round from the previous season based on a specific formula. Maybe their round value goes up by two every year, so that a 10th round pick in 2015 must be protected in your eighth-round slot in 2016, your sixth-round slot in 2017 and your fourth-round slot in 2018. Maybe their round value increases by one each time – it goes up by one the first year you protect them, two in the second year, three in the third, etc. In that scenario, a 10th-round pick in 2015 gets a ninth-round slot in 2016, a seventh-round slot in 2017 and a fourth-round slot in 2018.

This setup obviously requires a little more work on the part of commissioner, as the potential round value of each player will need to be tracked for both the current year and subsequent years.

In dynasty draft leagues, you're also better off conducting a straight draft (last to first each round) rather than a snake draft (reversing the draft order every other round), as the object will be to strengthen teams that performed poorly last season rather than even out the talent distribution.

Auctions

If you choose an auction format instead, you'll need to determine how a player's salary increases if he is protected in future seasons. There are two basic approaches:

1. Protected players have escalating salaries

Much as with escalating round values, in this setup a player's salary increases based on a formula. For example, a player acquired at the 2015 auction for $5 could have his salary increase by $5 every time he gets protected, making him a $10 player in 2016, a $15 player in 2017, etc.

Alternately, the salary bump increases the longer the player is protected. A $5 player in 2015 could see his salary increase by $3 in 2016 (making him an $8 player), $6 the next year (making him a $14 player in 2017), $9 the next, etc.

This setup is a little more labor-intensive on the commissioner's part, especially if you choose the latter option, as he will need to keep track of not just a player's salary but how long they've been protected to determine the appropriate salary increase next season.

2. Protected players must be signed to contracts

Modeled after the standard baseball rotisserie format, in this setup if you want to protect a player you must sign him to a contract. After that contract expires, the player becomes a free agent and cannot be protected any more, returning him to the player pool. Typically, the first year of the contract is "free" and doesn't escalate their salary, so that a $5 player can be protected for a second year (signed to a one-year contract) at the same $5. For every year of the contract beyond the first, however, the annual salary of the player goes up by a set amount. If that set amount is $5, for instance, a $5 player could be signed to a two-year contract with an annual salary of $10, a three-year contract with an annual salary of $15, etc. It's up to your league whether you want to put a maximum length on those contracts, but lengthy contracts can become increasingly dangerous given how short NFL careers tend to be and the likelihood of injury.

You'll also need to determine a buyout penalty if a team wants to get out of a contract early due to injury or poor performance. For example, you could require a team to pay the remaining value of the contract into the prize pool as a penalty, or deduct some fraction of the remaining value from their auction budget the following season.

This setup does require the commissioner to track the length and value of all contracts, but overall is a little simpler than tracking escalating salaries or round values.

Free Agents & Trades

Another thing to determine is how free agents are handled if they are to be protected the following season. In an auction league you can use an in-season free agent bidding system (FAAB), which would give them starting salaries equivalent to auction purchases, but in draft leagues free-agent pickups might need to be assigned a round value if you want them to be eligible as keepers. Some options include assigning free-agent or waiver pickups a round value equal to that of the last round of the draft, or assigning them a round value equal to that of the player dropped when they were acquired. You can also make them simply ineligible to be protected, but that takes away some of the fun about running a dynasty league in the first place.

Dump trades also become something to prepare for. In single-season formats, trades are viewed purely in terms of how they help each team in the current season. In dynasty formats, however, a team not in the running for this year's title might want to trade players they have no intention of keeping for players who can help them in future seasons, or high draft picks in a league that uses a draft. On the flip side, a team in the hunt for a championship may be willing to sacrifice almost anything to hoist that trophy: cheap younger players, reasonably-priced injured stars, draft picks, etc.

Determining whether such deals are "fair" is a much trickier proposition, and, as such, vetoes on dump trades should be used only as a last resort. You can, however, set up certain restrictions to limit the size and scope of dump deals.

In auction leagues, you can put a limit on the number of expensive players (players with salaries of a certain amount or greater) who can change hands in one deal, or create a rule that requires the total salaries of the players on both sides of a deal to be within a certain amount of each other. In draft leagues, you can put restrictions on how many picks one team can deal, or even simplify things by not allowing them to be traded at all. You can also alter the draft order to create an incentive for teams not to "tank" and to try to stay competitive. Rather than each round proceeding from last to first, for instance, you could give the first pick each round to the non-playoff team that finished highest in the standings and proceed down to the bottom, before slotting in the playoff teams in ascending order. In a 14-team league, this might result in a draft order that goes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, rather than simply 14 through 1.

Strategy Tips

In your first year in a new dynasty or keeper league, you should decide in advance whether to go for an immediate title or build for the future. Trying to do both will ensure that both goals fall short. Veteran players tend to have their values depressed in dynasty leagues (as they have less perceived upside and value in future seasons), so deciding to go for it right away can provide a lot of draft/auction bargains as other owners chase youth and potential.

On the other hand, if you decide to build a true future dynasty en lieu of short-term success, view each potential roster addition in terms of what the player can add to your team next year. Is he a player on the rise, or a big-name current star who can be traded quickly for future assets? If he doesn't fit either criteria, don't be afraid to let him go no matter the price.

When building for the future, don't worry too much about getting players at specific positions. It's better to simply stockpile the most talent with the highest upside that you can. If you wind up with too many RBs or an extra QB, you can then trade them at a later date to shore up a roster hole when your team is finally ready to compete. Given the amount of attrition in the NFL, by the time your rebuild is finished and you are ready to go for a championship, your roster crunch may have sorted itself out.

Don't plan for a rebuild to take more than one or, at most, two seasons. Short NFL careers and rapid coaching changes make it more difficult for players to remain productive for a long period as compared to a sport like baseball, and if you have too wide a window for your return to competitiveness, you may find that the key players you were counting on to get you there are hurt or no longer in offensive systems that allow them to be productive.

This article appears in the 2016 RotoWire Fantasy Football magazine. Order the magazine.