Hi! I am in a 12 team PPR 3 player keeper league. Right now there are no rules or costs for keepers. This is making it so that teams that are dominant stay that way. I want to suggest that we change our keeper rules so that there are costs for keeping the best players. What do you suggest?
Usually each team forfeits the corresponding draft pick with the player. i.e they keep CMC, they don’t have a first round pick and so on and so forth. The strategy comes in when you draft a stud in the late rounds. That’s typically how it’s done.
The only “fair” way to run a keeper league is to use an auction draft so draft order doesn’t determine who gets the top players, then keep players at their auction values, deducting it from your draft capital. If you want more depth to it, institute some of the rules my league has been using for 20+ Years:
-$100 draft pool, keep up to $50 each year
-Limit players to be kept at each position, we currently allow franchises to keep up to 2 QB, 3 RB, 3 WR/TE(it’s an old league, WR/TE are together), 1 D(no K, too random & they’re not really football players)
-Players are kept at their draft salary for up to 3 years, after that you have to “franchise” a player where his salary escalates rapidly each season based on a predetermined scale
-If you do franchise players, you should limit to allowing only 2 total and they cannot be at the same position so the draft pool never gets too shallow at a position
-You can keep waivers/FA acquisitions at the higher of highest bid amount they were acquired at during the season or a minimum amount(our league currently has the minimum at $3)
It took us several years to get this where we wanted, we also prefer a brief draft(2-2.5 hours max) and an active trade market(so prefer more players being owned, forcing you to trade instead of always being able to fill holes on waivers. But structure it to suit the type of league you want.
Good luck.