Has anyone tried to objectively define tanking?

[sloth8u]

Lol, like I said elsewhere, the appeal of higher drafts picks is terribly alluring and there are always a few poor souls who succumb to the temptation.

Also, there's subtle forms of tanking which are very hard to identify.

I have a few of them in my league. Attaining the 1.01 is almost like their championship. Whatever floats your boat, as long as you're paid up.

Its crazy that owners struggle with this concept

[M-Dub]

So we’re five pages deep now and I still haven’t seen anyone lay out any specific parameters that they use to define tanking. It seems like everyone just sticks with the pornography definition, i.e. “I know it when I see it.”

FWIW, my leagues already use PP as a component of determining draft order. We have a simple formula that weighs actual record, potential points and all-play record equally. Most of the guys in the league have known each other for decades and are highly competitive with one another, so kicking owners out should be a last resort. Tanking hasn’t been a huge issue, but due to the competitive nature of the league, a few gray areas have arisen over the years. At one point, an owner was even insistent that Orleans Darkwa was a “must start” based on the other players on that owners roster. We all probably take this hobby more seriously than we should. Haha.

I’m generally on board with the sentiment that tanking is fairly easily identified. I was mainly curious if anyone had come up with any hard and fast criteria to identify the rarer, more subtle forms of it. I was just thinking it’d be nice to have something like that if/when accusations of tanking arise so you could quickly consult the predetermined criteria and say “yes this is tanking” or “no this isn’t tanking” and move on. Perhaps that’s just more hassle than it’s worth. I just feel like without any clearly written criteria in place, it wouldn’t be that difficult for a savvy owner to justify tanking based on a hunch or intuition.

[Phaded]

The thing is - it's also incredibly easy to mistake a lineup decision as tanking and that is why I don't think you can state a specific rule that defines it. Part of the fun of playing fantasy is sometimes taking a risk or following a gut feeling on your lineup. A month ago, someone would have scoffed at the idea of benching OBJ for a guy like Parker - now? It seems plausible.

Generally speaking, I let owners make their own decisions for their teams which again is why I don't bother with vetos. If you are allowing owners to make those decisions on their own trades, you should allow them to make their lineup decisions except for egregious outliers.

There is a lot of strategy to FF, do you bench your fringe WR1 who is going up against a premier corner for a WR2/3 who has an incredibly juicy looking match-up? I think both decisions have merit behind them and one of the mistakes that owners make when trying to determine tanking is that they look at it in hindsight. If you start Parker over OBJ, and OBJ scores more points - you are bound to have owners scream "tanking!". If you start Parker over OBJ and Parker outscores OBJ, nobody is batting an eye or complaining.

Oh - and if you play IDP, you are probably better off not even attempting to determine tanking except for starting defensive players who just are not starters.

[Cult of Dionysus]

The thing is - it's also incredibly easy to mistake a lineup decision as tanking and that is why I don't think you can state a specific rule that defines it. Part of the fun of playing fantasy is sometimes taking a risk or following a gut feeling on your lineup. A month ago, someone would have scoffed at the idea of benching OBJ for a guy like Parker - now? It seems plausible.

Generally speaking, I let owners make their own decisions for their teams which again is why I don't bother with vetos. If you are allowing owners to make those decisions on their own trades, you should allow them to make their lineup decisions except for egregious outliers.

There is a lot of strategy to FF, do you bench your fringe WR1 who is going up against a premier corner for a WR2/3 who has an incredibly juicy looking match-up? I think both decisions have merit behind them and one of the mistakes that owners make when trying to determine tanking is that they look at it in hindsight. If you start Parker over OBJ, and OBJ scores more points - you are bound to have owners scream "tanking!". If you start Parker over OBJ and Parker outscores OBJ, nobody is batting an eye or complaining.

Oh - and if you play IDP, you are probably better off not even attempting to determine tanking except for starting defensive players who just are not starters.

Dude, you just laid out the best argument for Potential Points so far!

Lol.

[stoneghost28]

no, I wouldn't do anything like that, but what I have in most my leagues is a committee, the commish, alt commish, and a League player that discuss and judge on rules on a case by case basis .. so something like that the committee would vote and all decisions are final, so effectively you would have 3 people agreeing its tanking or some kind of split ..

I would not want to define it, somethings should stay subjective .. like, I dunno.. what is a catch.

Honestly. I've never had an issue with it to begin with, and there are so many subtle ways to do it that don't break rules anyway. This year of my 14 squads, 4 were productive struggle tanking teams. Two in year 1, 2 in year 2 of the process. Typically my ways of getting around the rules so I could lock in my tanks in good draft years like this one were both standard and not so standard:

#1 Trade away all veteran assets of any value for young players and picks. That tends to artificially tamp down point totals.
#2 On tanking teams eschew QB until you're ready to win. Stream crappy ones. You aren't breaking rules, and you're also naturally pushing down scoring from QB, the one position that usually produced consistently high fantasy points.
#3 Draft and stream prospect TE's so you add long term value, but likely short term erratic and poor production at the position to tamp down scoring.

This approach has helped me consistently land top picks in loaded classes ('17, '18 and '19) and I've managed to turn virtually all of those teams into champions or finalists by year 2-3 of rebuilds or productive struggles. It got me Saquon and Chubb on 6 of my 10 dynasty teams at the time each, and the year before it helped me land Mixon, Cook, and McCaffrey on 3, 2 and 3 of my teams respectively (back then I was just operating 7 dynasty teams).

I can understand having a problem w/teams that deliberately start inferior players, players on bye, injured players, that kind of thing. But beyond that, I don't have an issue with any aspect of tanking. People build as they see fit, as long as you're playing within the rules, to me, it's just one way to build a team.

[Cult of Dionysus]

Think most of us call that aggressive rebuilding rather than tanking.