TheLinnDynasty wrote:
Middle school education aside this is all pretty funny to me. I've noticed that the people most active in trades tend to be the more successful. I'm willing to chalk some of that up to more trade activity correlates to more overall activity and the more active an owner is in general the better they are likely to do (up to a point...skill and luck and all that). All of that said skilled fantasy players are generally skilled in multiple aspects of the game. If you aren't attempting to make the most out of the draft and free agency and trades then I just don't think you are playing the game correctly.
I definitely notice an increase in the success of teams who participate in some trading but I've also seen it go to the extreme where people 'just want to trade' and they're ALWAYS making trades. Those teams seem to be just as big if not bigger train wrecks than the guys who don't trade. The guys who don't trade, from my experience, just tend to have longer rebuild cycles.
On the main point of the topic, I consider myself an active owner. I usually have some sort of discussion going with at least one other owner even if it's just kicking the tires or talking general player evaluations but my trade total isn't actually that high. I'm also on our league pages just looking fairly frequently but I will say that if I saw a league with some of these rules around requiring you to send out x number of offers, requiring you to log on to the site every [insert time block here]. I would run away from leagues that have rules like this like the plague for a couple of reasons:
1.
Most of these stipulations are either going to be too strict to the point where they'll need exceptions (at which point why have the rule) or too loose so to be meaningless. For instance, say the rule is that you have to log on to the league website once every week...what if I'm going on vacation for longer than a week in the middle of February? I'd like to think no one is going to slap me on the wrist if I'm not logging in to the site. But maybe if you're going on vacation you just tell the commish? So now I have another chore to do when planning to go away? That's ridiculous. You could make it two weeks or a month but then it might as well not even be a rule.
2.
I don't want a 'check box' for my league or a chore to send out an offer every week (or month or whatever). Sometimes there are trades I'm looking to make or things I'm looking to do with my team and once I accomplish those I like to think I can lay low as my team develops. I also don't want to be spammed by people who are required to make an offer.
On a side note, what a nightmare/waste of time to police such rules.
To me, trade talk and league activity in general boil down to the two things that have already been mentioned; roster size and owner recruitment. If you want to let anyone who's interested join your league you're going to get owners who think the fantasy season begins at the NFL preseason. If you're going to have a 10 team 20 spot roster league everyone is going to have good starters and prospects and there will be plenty on the waiver wire.