CommishRx advice: Help! owner abandoned team in my fantasy league!

CommishRx: What Happens When a ‘Ghost Ship’ Sails into Your Fantasy League?

"Guy in my league who is 3-8 hasn’t managed his league in weeks. He still has Teddy Bridgewater at quarterback. He said he was going to manage his roster, but now he won’t respond to my emails. What do I do?"

You have to stave this off immediately. Frankly, you shouldn’t have waited until Week 12. It’s not fair to the folks who played this dude when he was fully invested. Now that he’s decided to take his toys and go home, some owners are getting a weekly free pass. How many teams in contention to win your league recently got to play this bum? Not cool.

First, you lock them out.

Then, you have to decide exactly what you’re going to do about it. You can either (a) take over the team as a custodian or (b) bring someone in to take over the team.

All Hands On Deck

If you’ve been reading CommishRx long enough, you’ll know that we’re big on transparency. If you act as custodian for the “ghost ship” you need to tell the league exactly how you’re going to do it. For the rest of the season, your process should be consistent. You can set the weekly roster by:

• Using the “optimum lineup” suggestion setting if your platform has one.
• Using player rankings i.e., ESPN, or FantasyPros. Whatever you choose, stick to it the rest of the season.

You will not execute any trades, or work waivers unless you have no other alternative.

If you have to acquire a player from waivers, choose the top-ranked player available. It doesn’t matter whether you would make the choice personally or not. You’ll do this because the rankings can be easily verified by the rest of the league.

If you find yourself matched up against the managed team, you’ve protected yourself from any accusations of doing anything shady because you’ve rostered the team in the same manner each week.

Trim Your Sails

If you bring someone in to manage the team, it should be preferably someone who everyone is familiar with in some way. If that’s not possible, just make sure you can trust them to do the right thing, and play the season out in earnest.

Once you decide your course of action, it’s time to send out a league-wide email. Copy everyone in the league. Everyone knows who the culprit is, so addressing the issue shouldn’t be a surprise.

Turn The Corner

It takes a while for some leagues to separate the wheat from the chaff, to finally get rid of those who would undermine the league with bush league behavior. Sometimes it takes work for commissioners to finally gather a group of people who certainly care about winning, but they also care about the integrity of the league.

You think you know people, but sometimes you discover you don’t really know them at all until you pull out Monopoly and suddenly your seemingly demure cousin turns out to be a raving, real estate mogul wannabe, yowling and throwing dice across the room.

Games, hearty competition, and in the case of some fantasy leagues, the promise of winning money can mutate some folks into denizens of the Savage Land.

Suffice to say, he won’t be invited back next year, right?

"I have an owner who never paid his league fee. He’s actually in the running to win our league, but there’s no way I’m paying him if he wins. There’s tension in the league now, obviously. Suggestions on how to handle this with the league?"

At this point in the season if they are not going to pay you, it’s not going to happen. You’re going to give Mr. Delinquent a final warning with a deadline in which to pay what they owe. In the name of full transparency, and for the record, you’re going to copy (cc:) the entire league, sharing your plan which is: withhold any winnings if they place, along with any end-of-season bonuses (e.g., total points) that they might qualify for.

You’re pretty much stuck. If you can’t cover his fee yourself – and I’m not suggesting that you do because that would suck – you may have to address the league and reconfigure the payout, adjusting for one less owner.

You also get a big Dikembe Mutombo finger wag aimed in your general direction: you’ve shown that you made an allowance for one person that you didn’t make for the rest of the league. Perhaps you should address this in a separate letter. Own it, declare that you won’t do it again and vow  to be the best fantasy commissioner in the history of mankind going forward.