The No Fun Episode

have fun with it here either. But it's awfully important to do some COVID planning now in the preseason. And that's part of the reason that I'm here alone today. Normally I've got my crew, some of my guys here, but nobody wants to talk COVID. Everybody wants to have fun. We want to talk about breaking down a DPS and our mock drafts and all the news around the league.

This one is about the important steps that your league needs to take to make sure that you've got an action plan in place in the preseason for a variety of COVID related items. Now, it's so important to get this done in the preseason. If you wait until the regular season to try to figure things out on the fly. It's going to be a disaster. Friendships will end, leagues

will dissolve. I'll give you an example. Let's say it's Week six and Bruce has no COVID players, and your league is trying to decide what to do when there's an outbreak of COVID. Bruce, who has no COVID players, is gonna be like, well, they shouldn't get any special consideration at all. But Becky's got four COVID players on her roster and she's gonna want all kinds of special consideration because she's going through a lot of difficulty with COVID. You can't do it in the middle of the season.

Even worse, let's say it's like we twelve and the NFL cancels the whole rest of the season. One person, let's say Emma has got the best record. She's tending too, and she's lobbying hard that a twelve game season, twelve weeks season should be considered a full season and that she should be the champion. Meanwhile, there might be another guy, Eric.

He's got a surging bubble team and he's convinced that if the season hadn't been canceled, he'd a roarred through the playoffs and he would have beat Emma and he would have been the champion. And you can't just give the championship to Emma. You have to decide some of these key things, like what constitutes a full season for your league? Right now? What are you gonna do when your some of your players get COVID and they're going to what are you going to do? You have to

decide now in the preseason, not today. We sent a little time as a recording this it's July, but you need to do it very important. Let's start here with the draft or the auction. This part is really easy. Just you may want to have an online plan ready. Normally you're having your draft in person. For many of you, maybe in person drafts just not possible. You know, you might not. You may find that you can't get twelve people that are all willing to sit in the same

room together. That's the case. You need to have an online online plan ready. Many sites let you draft online for free, and you could certainly use those sites if you want to. You may have to change the starting date of your draft or auction as well. So be ready for that as well. The NFL. And I say that because the NFL could end up pushing one of its season start the start of the season back a couple of could be weeks, maybe Monts who knows that

start of the season could move. And if the start of the season removed six weeks, you'd probably want to move your draft with it. So just be just be ready to be flexible on the date for the start of your drafter auction as well. One of the things that I'll mention as a quick piece of draft or auction strategy here to to think about with COVID. And we're not gonna spend much time here on on strategy

around COVID, but I want to mention this. It's possible that a whole team could get COVID, could like run through the locker room of a whole team. You might be like, man, I want Bucks. I want to have Brady, and I want to have Chris Godwin and I want to have Gronk. But what happens if what happens if your your Buck heavy team gets swarmed under with COVID and you know there's a real scenario where the Bucks get shut down, the league continues playing, but the Bucks

get shut down for a week or two. So you may want to give some thought to diversifying your roster a little bit as well, something that I think would make sense this year more than other years. Okay, now let's talk about what to do when a player test positive for COVID and your and your league needs to make a decision. So first, when a player does test positive for COVID, player probably gets quarantined. So when that happens, I think most likely scenario is that player is going

to be unavailable for two or three weeks. While that player is presumably alone in a bedroom someplace chilling out for a couple of weeks. Now that player will not practice, so the team obviously will have no chance of playing. I think you you'd really accept in very large rostered leagues. I think you need to create, and by large roster I mean at least twenty plus where you've got most of all the depth anybody you want to pick up

already in a roster. I think you need to create a not necessarily an I are spot, because I are is one thing. This isn't quite I R some other spot that you use, and you might have to designate it in your league manager as I are, but I'm gonna call it a a COVID slot. You need to create a COVID slot that your league can use to just slop people in who've got COVID, and those guys are off to the side, and that opens up a spot that you can go you can go fill up.

You're already punished enough that a starting player has COVID and can't play for two to three weeks, So why are you gonna double down on that and not let that owner go pick up a free agent and fill that spot. I think you should. You should treat it just like you probably do. I R. Right now, player goes on I R, he shelved until he comes back. When he comes back, you take him off. I R.

Same thing you should do with your COVID slot. Now, keep in mind, some teams so many new weeks gonna be unlucky here, and it's gonna have three or four players get COVID at one time. I mean, yeah, that's why you need to have this COVID slot. You don't want those teams to be in a spot where they

have They're in a a brutally tough position. With the three or four players that have COVID and that they either have to drop those presumably good players and pick up some dregs or or or you know, or even worse, you don't want to have that player who's already stuck with COVID players having to then become a default win and wreck the integrity of the league because they can't they can't roster anybody. So really important to create the COVID slot. Now, how many players can you put on COVID.

I've had some people on Twitter asking me how many COVID slots should we create. In my mind it's unlimited number. So if you do get struck with the three, four or five COVID players, god forbid, but it could really could happen. You need to just be able to use as many as you need to use. Okay, next topic for COVID, and this one I think is even more important, and this one is gonna be thorny for a lot

of leagues. Your league needs to decide if you and your co owners need to have a six team game season to be considered a valid season, because the NFL could end up torpedoing the season at some point. Maybe it's eight weeks, maybe it's ten weeks, twelve weeks, whatever. At what point have you played enough of the NFL season for your league to consider it a valid season where you're gonna crown a champion, where you're going to award the prize money, where you're gonna send that traveling trophy.

How many games does it have to be? Does it have to be a full sixteen game season? Bear in mind, if you went twelve twelve weeks kind of a long time. It's three months of play out of four months. You're early December. Twelve weeks is kind of a lot. I think to me, it's my personal recommendation. Twelve weeks is about the right number to be considered a valid season. Now where it gets thorny is playoffs. You have a twelve week season. You know, if the NFL cancels it

after twelve weeks, you will not have had playoff. But I think that's just, you know, it's just unfortunate. We'd all prefer to have playoffs, but you just you can't know that it's going to happen that way. And if you play three out of four months and you hate to have it be worth nothing. You know, all the epic victories, the Monday nights when you were crossing your fingers hoping your tight end is going to get that

fourth quarter touchdown that you needed. All that stuff is totally invalidated because you needed a sixteen game regular season when it just wasn't possible. So my recommendation, I feel like twelve ish games is about right to be considered a valid season. But let's um, let's talk it through a little bit some scenarios where the season could be interrupted, shortened, modified, altered, aborted, canceled, whatever. Number one, if they delay the start of the season,

that's pretty easy. You'll start when the NFL season starts. So a delayed season really is not a big deal for fantasy owners yet. Now, if there's an interrupted season, so let's say they play four or five six games, then they pause for a month to get everybody through some COVID problems, and then they come back and play the rest of them. They play a remaining sixteen game schedule,

however long. You just stop when they stop, you start when they start, and you continue when the season comes back. I think that's really easy for everybody to understand too. So delayed starts not a problem. Interrupted starts, not a problem. Canceled seasons where it starts to get dicey for the reasons we just talked about how many weeks do you need for your league to consider it a valid season. So let's say you take my recommendation you go twelve

weeks for a valid season. You will not have started the playoffs in twelve weeks, so you're gonna have to come up in advance with what are our what are our criteria for crowning a champion after twelve weeks? Is it by best record, with a tiebreaker being most points scored? I think that's what it is, and that's what I would recommend doing. Is you would after twelve weeks, you just give it to over Scott or whatever you know,

twelve weeks or beyond. If you say you gotta have a minimum of twelve weeks, could go four team weeks whatever best record. What if it's uh week fifteen, you're halfway into the halfway into the playoffs, then I think you would shorten it down to just the teams that are still alive. Every team that's still alive, then who had the best who had the best record, who had

the most points? So really important that you talked through how many weeks of play you need to have to have a valid season if we get to a canceled season scenario where there's fewer than the number of weeks that you want played. So let's say you do believe the bar at twelve weeks, but they only play ten weeks. Now, what seasons canceled? What does your league do in some very important situations, like what happens all the money? I

recommend you roll it forward to the next year. All right, you paid in twenty twenty, it didn't work out, they canceled the season, and you know, we're just gonna roll everybody's money to next year. You could refund it to everybody if you want, and you have to recollect it again in the spring. I think you should just roll it forward. Now, this last part is specific to Dynasty

and Empire league owners. Now, if you're not in a nice your Empire league and you just don't care about COVID stuff, hanging up, this podcast effectively over for you. This is only for Dynasty Empire League players commissioners. You need to think about if you have a canceled season that is not a valid season, what do you do about the draft order next year. That's now we're really future thinking. But this could be a huge problem later.

So again you get it squared away. Now, how are you going to figure out the one draft order if you didn't have a valid twenty season. The temptation maybe to just say we're gonna roll over last year's draft order. So the team that picked first in is also going to get to pick first in one. Same thing. Whoever picked second in would pick second in one. I think it's a terrible idea. First of all, you've double rewarded failure.

These are the worst teams in your league last year, they're going to get to draft at the beginning in and in. I like it. Here's what I would do instead, for those of you in dynasty or empire leagues thinking about how to set the draft order if you have an invalidated season, in I would have a reverse weighted lottery, meaning that team that did finish last. Let's say it's a twelve team league, the team that did finish last

would have twelve ping pong balls. In a twelve team league in a lottery, the team that finished second to last would have eleven, so on and fourth so forth down to the champion who only gets one ping pong ball in, and then I would pull draft order randomly. That's how I would do it, and I think that feels fair random enough that you're gonna get You're gonna

shake some things up. Gives everybody a chance at the first pick and the second pick in the third pick, and won't be identical as last year, so you're not exactly rewarding failure the same way you would have been previously. So there you have it. All the things that you need to think about related to COVID, and that's a lot, and it's not very fun being made it to the end of the podcast, the No Fun Podcast of Fantasy Football Weekly. I'm very impressed. All things to think about.

We'll look forward to more fun stuff next week. My co host will be back. We'll talk about news you don't at the things that really I'm excited to talk about next week. Can you have a starting backfield that is the two chiefs runners, Clyde Edwards A Laire and Damian Williams. As you're starting running backs and that's it. You go to war with those guys every week except there by week. Is that a viable strategy. I'm excited to talk to you about that next week as well.

So a lot to get to next week. Thanks for making to the end of the special COVID edition of Fantasy Football Weekly on Paul Charchie and talk to you next week. Fantasy Football Weekly is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.