What is the best way to keep a league balanced over the years?

[FFHawk12]

I'm looking for ideas on ways to keep a 16 team league balanced year over year.

Is a salary cap league the only way to do this? As the stronger teams get better their unable to keep all their stars similar to the NFL?

I'd like to avoid having a salary cap if possible but more importantly I want parity.

Appreciate all the help!

[FiremanEd]

Teams are only as good as their owner, and their luck. Ups and downs can't be avoided. Got to hope a team drafts well and/or doesn't go too 'all in' and leave themselves drowning later on. Good owners will keep trucking regardless of situation though. Two drafts can quickly turn the outlook (i.e. Cooper then Zeke in back-to-back drafts).

Contract leagues don't guarantee parity, as bad owners will still struggle. In concept it should help though.

[Goddard]

Agree that luck has a lot to do with it. But if you truly want parity, you need good, dedicated, experienced owners.

[Goirish374]

Should parity be a goal?

I mean, its kind of right there in the title--Dynasty. The whole point is to build a team that dominates consistently.

Now if, by parity, what we actually mean is keeping the entire league from getting disillusioned or losing interest or bailing on a losing team or a difficult rebuild...well, then the issue can be mostly addressed with owner selection.

FiremanEd is right on (as he usually is). The lifecycle of a dynasty league should be measured in tens of years, not years. Over the course of that time there will be a cyclical nature to the power balance.

It's a feature, not a bug.

[Tsunami]

I assume that you already determine the order of your rookie draft by reverse order of season standings? In many leagues this is enough, and this should be especially true in a 16 team league as there is a huge difference in value between 1.1 and 1.16 every year. If this advantage isn't enough to keep your league relatively balanced then you might want to consider replacing the losers (or at least link them here so they get better). But assuming that's not an option, you can give them additional advantages like waiver priority, but this might not be enough.

An alternative to a salary cap would be to change to a keeper league where instead of keeping their entire roster the top teams can only keep a certain number of players from year to year. A keeper league with 20 keepers is not much different from a dynasty league, whereas a keeper league with only a few keepers plays more like a redraft with less of an advantage from year to year. Maybe you can find a happy medium somewhere in the middle so that the top teams end up dropping enough talent to create some parity.

[BuckeyeNation]

In a full dynasty, salary cap/contracts is about the only way to have a legit chance at long-term parity in the league. Obviously there is luck involved in the game, but there's also skill involved. Over a several year period, any skill advantage that one owner or a few owners have will be magnified and compounded and at will definitely show in the strength of their team. This is where owner selection becomes important.

Now that I've been in the game long enough to see leagues progress into their 4th-5th season, IME you shouldn't really have to worry about one team becoming so dominant that the entire league loses interest. Yes you usually end up with 1-2 teams that are clearly the best teams on paper, but that doesn't automatically mean they win the championship every year. That's where the luck aspect comes into play and at least affords most teams a chance at winning during any given season.

The problem I've seen after a few years isn't the one dominate team making the league uncompetitive, it's the 1-2 teams that get run into the ground by bad management and who's owners give up and leave the league. You're then left trying to find people willing to take over a rebuild project with very few assets, and that sometimes leaves the league having to offer a discounted/free season in order to attract replacement owners. If you can find good replacement owners though, that can really bring back some league parity. I've experienced several instances where I've either seen an owner (or been the owner) that took over an atrocious team and by the second season had turned around the roster to where it was competitive.

[MEuRaH]

Forcing a cut-down date is also another way to help with balance.

I run 32-team leagues and up. Each of those leagues has either cut-downs (aka keeper settings), salary caps, or contracts. You gotta do that with large leagues or else they become impossible to recruit for. Turn-around for a bad team is usually 1 season. Any good owner can finagle his way to a playoff-caliber season year after year no matter the settings, so I'm never worried about the good owners.

[FiremanEd]

Yes you usually end up with 1-2 teams that are clearly the best teams on paper, but that doesn't automatically mean they win the championship every year. That's where the luck aspect comes into play and at least affords most teams a chance at winning during any given season.

I agree with this. Much more than in redraft, where the delta between top and bottom is limited on paper, dynasty can go in with much bigger extremes. I recall a new owners first week where he looked at his opponent and marked it as an obvious loss due to his 'super team' on paper, and that 'super team' didn't finish top 3 and now is on the decline due to guys like AP, Lacy, Rivers, BMarsh. Things can change in a hurry. Similarly, my Nuk, ARob, Dez, DT WR core last season served as a below average group, which isn't what someone would have expected. Simply put, you can get caught up with paper. People got to stay the course and manage their team appropriately for the big picture. Things change quick.

[FFHawk12]

Thanks for all the help!

I agree good owners are the way to go.

The league will be pretty unique in that it's actually 32 teams (2 roster pools, hence the 16 team league) but it sill be based on european soccer. 3 divisions, a first, second, and third level with promotion and relegation each season. I don't want to see the same team in the first division for 5 years, even though it's the idea haha.

Overall I agree that finding good owners who won't tank a team is the most important thing, I always have owner pay minimum one year in advance and sometimes more so this usually helps with destroying teams.

Cheers!

[Goirish374]

3 divisions, a first, second, and third level with promotion and relegation each season.

neat!

[FFHawk12]

3 divisions, a first, second, and third level with promotion and relegation each season.

neat!

Got a couple PMs on this already, it's not ready to go as I'm still sorting out all the details. Anyone interested please shoot me a PM with your email and I'll be in touch when it's ready to go.

Cheers

[moishetreats]

One small thing that my dynasty league does is re-distribute the divisions each year based on finish. While not as drastic as having a soccer-tiered grouping, it does make it impossible for the same teams to be in the playoffs every year since each division winner gets an automatic berth. So, for the teams that aren't the top 1 or 2 on paper, they need to compete with non-top 33% of the teams for a playoff spot... where, of course, anything can happen.