This article is the first in a series that will attempt to give all dynasty players an understanding of the perspective of a league commissioner. I also hopes this series encourages others to be willing to take on the thankless job.
My experience as commissioner, while at times frustrating, has actually been very rewarding and an overall great time. Here’s how it all started for me.
In the spring of 2006, I was wasting time perusing a well known fantasy message board. I clicked on a topic that was asking about dynasty league activity during the off-season. The thread poster was complaining about something I could easily relate to at the time- the inactivity of his dynasty leagues during the off-season.
Now, at this point, I had only played in dynasty leagues for two seasons, and I was far from an expert. But, I did have one thing going for me. I was the most active owner in my league. I constantly made trades offers, scoured the waiver wire for sleepers and read as much as I could from trusted experts and active participants on a variety of fantasy football sites.
As I read the original poster’s comments and the multiple responses that echoed his sentiment, I found myself wanting more and more to be part of an active league like the one being described. The problem was, no one seemed to know of a league like this to join. Finally, someone suggested what most of us were thinking…”let’s just start our own league!” Being dynasty addicts, you know what happened next…a bevy of replies calling “IN!!” Soon, one of the involved parties started a private group on Yahoo for the dozen or so guys who had shown interest. Rules, settings, lineups and scoring were all being randomly discussed, yet the discussion seemed to lead nowhere. Someone asked who would take on the role of commissioner. That garnered little response from anyone. I’m not sure what came over me. After all, I had never been in charge of a league and had relatively little dynasty experience overall. Nonetheless, I volunteered and all of the other participants, not wanting to take on the additional work, sighed with relief. The HyperActive leagues were born.
I quickly took the bull by the horns and began creating a detailed rules document. To aide myself in this, I read as much as I could on forums and also looked at the rules of some established successful dynasty leagues. I also gathered the input from all league members via message board discussions and league polls. Based on how this new league had started, I wanted it to be “for the people, by the people.” All owners had a hand in creating and forming what this league would become. We debated ideal starting lineups, scoring systems, roster size, followed by more specific settings, such as injured reserve spots, developmental players and more. The molding of this league was intricate and time consuming, but I knew it would pay off in the long run.
While the twelve of us were busy laying down the law of the league, the original forum topic that brought us together continued to be very active. As I went back to catch up, I noticed several other well known fantasy footballers were also interested in joining the league. After mentioning this to some of the owners already in the league, it was suggested that our HyperActive could be turned into a SuperLeague, or one that was formed from two separate twelve team leagues. The more, the merrier was my thought and everyone agreed. Now our league, designed to be an active, year round league for twelve guys, had quickly turned into a 24 team league before we had really even gotten started.
From this point, the details are sometimes sketchy, although I do have many specific memories from that inaugural season. I had no idea that this league would eventually grow and even lead to a spot for me in this industry we enjoy so much.
After the first season of the HyperActive Dynasty League, many people in my fantasy football circle were talking about the leagues and were even reaching out to me requesting I start a second version. So, that is just what I did. HyperActive 2 was quickly filled and this time we had even more fantasy experts involved. Deserved or not, this led to credibility and a strong reputation for the pair of new leagues. The following off-season led to a third installment and more of the best of the best in the dynasty world. In the years that have followed, I have started two more HyperActive Dynasty Leagues, meaning there are now 120 teams across the five leagues, many of those filled by writers and experts from DynastyLeagueFootball, FootballGuys, ProFootballFocus and many other terrific sites producing quality fantasy football content on a daily basis.
I don’t tell this story to pound my chest about these leagues, but rather to encourage any dynasty owners out there considering starting their own leagues to go for it. Who knows where it could lead?
During this series, I will share some of the insight I have gained from acting as commissioner to hundreds of active fantasy-crazy owners spread across nearly ten leagues. I will discuss important rules and league settings, strategies for finding quality owners and how to handle controversies that might arise. All of these, and more, are very important in building a successful league. If you have a question about a specific aspect of the job of commish, please post it below or contact me via Twitter.
Here are some links to the HyperActive leagues in case you want to take a look for yourself.
Follow @RyanMc23 on Twitter
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Hey Ryan, I checked out your HyperActive1 league, pretty cool. Who is your website provider? I do I get my Dynasty league signed up. I am commish of my 13 year dynasty league as well as my 20yr old 6 player keeper league. Being commish of two leagues for so long has had it’s challenges. I look forward to reading your column to learn new things as commish that I might input into my two leagues.
Thanks.
Hey Swids,
All of the HA sites are designed by MFLAddons. They have different price points and do a great job.
http://www.mfladdons.com
Thanks Ryan for the MFLaddons link. It’s a pretty decent looking service and their templates look nice, though the $100 price per template seems expensive. I thought my $55 cost per year per league website (FanStar) was a lot, but not compared to MFLaddons! It is nice though to be able to compare website services to make sure that your league is getting the most “bang for your buck” possible.
Just to let you know, that $100 is a one off payment for the league template and comes with lifetime support. $100 split between 12 owners is only a one off payment of $8 each and well worth it.
But you pay the $100 fee every year, correct? How else do does the league get lifetime support and weekly stats service if the league does not re-up every year? Or am I misisng something here? What exactly is the yearly cost for this website template & service?
Thanks Ryan!
Some of the templates really look great
I’ve been in MFL.com leagues for way long and never really knew how some of the other MLF leagues out there modified their pages to look so fancy… I’ve always been turned off by MFL’s defaults skins – just so ugly and low quality IMO.
as a commish of 2 leagues I look forward to reading your advice. God knows I could use it. One thing tho, whats the buy in if you’re paying mfladdons $100 bucks for the template?….damn thats expensive! haha
That IS cool. McDynasty! Rock on, Ryan.
Nice doin’ lineups from the FF penthouse, eh?
Now explain to me how to run several leagues where all your buddies think their credit should be good, you do all the work, and THEY want everything put to a vote! Welcome to the the FF streets! lol
There are definitely some challenges and those will be addressed throughout the series. I do well to keep up with my teams and commishing, yet I’ve joined more leagues this offseason (and have a son due in June). I’m really asking for it this time.
I can see it now…
It’s 2018, and managing HyperActive Leagues 20-23, is The Guinness Book of World Records’ Youngest EVER fantasy football league commissioner–(wait for it)–JUNIOR MCDOWELL! Congrats, Sir (even if he takes a little longer than that lol)!
Kind of a rhetorical question, really, but I’m sure your series will spare many new commishes (and fantasy owners) the difficulties that some of we trial-by-fire adventurers are learning as we go. Looking forward to it.
Ryan,
Question for you sir. How many fantasy football leagues, Dynasties, Keeper leagues or re-draft leagues have the entire history of their leagues written down for each year and a total year to date history for the league, including every team history? I’m asking because I have a yearly discussion with my wife about this. As Commish of my two leagues, I keep the yearly league stats & history as well as the year to date league history & stats, including winning percentages, overall prize money winners, playoff appearnaces with playoff records and a few other catagories to boot. I also keep a written team history for every team that’s been in the league and their yearly results. I also have an update win/loss matrix for both leagues so that at a glance and team can see how many times that they beaten an opponent or lost to them. It takes me about 3-4 weeks after the NFL super bowl to update both leagues that I run and save all the information and then e-mail the updated league history to both league members.
My wife says that it is a total waste of time and that no one reads what I put out except 1-2 guys. She also contends that almost all other fantasy leagues do not keep a written history mainly because no one really cares. I disagree with her. I say that having a written league history from day 1 gives my two leagues a unique niche. And after 13 years in the Dynasty league & 20 years in the 6 player keeper league, that the history of both leagues is worth reading & looking at. It also definitely settles A LOT of debates about who beat whom 6 years ago or who scored the most total points 10 years ago.
As commish of 5 Hyperactive leagues, what are your thoughts on this topic? I appreciate your response. Thanks Ryan.
I have often wished I had kept better records of the results, owners and other league happenings, but sadly, I have not. MFL does a good job of archiving much of the data, but not all of it.
Whether others in your league are enjoying your hard work or not, it sounds like you are, and that’s part of the fun for you. Keep it up!
I commish a keeper league and we’ve been around since 1999. Been on MFL since 2005. I have full league history all the way back to 2000 and scores and schedules only for 99. All are hosted on MFL and full league history reports are there. So I can see who the highest scoring TE was for the past 13 years if I want. All the guys in my league love this history and we highlight it every week. For example we’ll highlight a particular matchup where one team is say 12-2 lifetime against the other and it sparks great smack talk. I’ll also highlight in my weekly article any league records that were broken the previous week (high scores, low scores, streaks, player score, total lifetime points and so on). And this is all with just what is built in to MFL which can be extended with other 3rd party services.
Anyway, it’s to say that in my league the history is a very important part of it.
But you pay the $100 fee every year, correct? How else do does the league get lifetime support and weekly stats service if the league does not re-up every year? Or am I misisng something here? What exactly is the yearly cost for this website template & service?
MFL is MyFantasty League so you just pay your yearly fee of $60 or whatever, nothing extra or anything. Your previous seasons stay in tact forever, no charge. I believe this is different then CBS and other sites, every year you get a new league page and the past leagues stay as they were.
*AND* you can create historical seasons for free all the way back to the 80s. So if you have paper records and the time you can enter in all your data into historical leagues for free.
So I started with MFL in 2005. I used their PC only program before that called FFLM from 2000-04 which allowed some import into historical leagues which took care of a lot of the work but it still needed manual work. I had paper records for our 1999 season and manually inputted the data for that year.
This is all included in the MFL service. There are 3rd party sites like MFLHistory which you can pay for which will take all that data and do some pretty amazing things with it. I did that for a while but MFL really increased the amount of historical reports lately so I felt it wasn’t needed anymore.
Someone above mentioned MFL Addons which is another 3rd party service. But they don’t do anything with data, they design templates and skins for MFL leagues so if you don’t like the default options or don’t know CSS/HTML to do it yourself you can pay them to do a skin for you. I personally just use one of the default MFL skins and do a bit of CSS and HTML to adjust to my liking at no extra cost to me. But then I have the skill to do it.
Very nice Bonscott! I like a website that automatically tracks the league’s history. It’s what I am doing manually now.
Question, what do you think the percentage is of fantasy leagues keeping a detail written history for their leagues? Just curious…. tahnks.
No clue. One of the other leagues I’m in has been around for 20+ years. He has records of the league champs going back that far and we have imported that information into MFL so the league champs display. He does have paper records somewhere for back in the 90s but he can’t find them. If he ever does we can import into MFL should we find the time.
Every other league I’m in is newer and always been one some sort of electronic site (MFL mostly).