For our tenth season we’ve decided to added an exciting change to the league, Keepers! Did you make a great pick-up week three of the waiver wire or hit on a late round draft pick? Now you’ll be able to keep the momentum going into the next year by keeping those players.
Keeper Basics
The keeper basics are pretty simple. Each year you’ll get to look at your team from the previous year and decide which players you’d like to keep. Each player will have an assigned “price” that will impact the upcoming draft. Their price will be based on what they cost in the previous years draft, plus some amount of inflation. Let’s look at some examples.
Last year I drafted James Conner for a measly $1. Looking at FantasyPros I can see that this year he’s going for around $40. No matter what the inflation is I know he’ll be a great keeper at that price. Let’s say after inflation (if we just used +$10 a year) his price is $11. I get to keep him on my 2019 roster, but I now only have $189 to spend in the upcoming auction.
A player on the opposite spectrum would be someone like Le’Veon Bell who was drafted for $73. After inflation his price would be $80-90 and is obviously not worth. A team would decide not to keep this player and “release” them back to the draft pool so that teams could bid on him in the upcoming draft. Even if the original team wanted Le’Veon Bell on their team again, it would be smart to release him back to the pool and re-bid on him, likely landing him at a much cheaper price.
Waiver wire picks will also be eligible to be kept. A player picked up from the waiver wire will have a price of $1 (plus inflation).
If we were allowed unlimited keepers, I might look at my team and decide I want to keep six players: $20, $30, $10 drafted players, and three waiver wire players. Let’s say the total of these players comes out to $110 after inflation. That means I would have $90 to fill the remaining 12 spots on my roster.
Keeper Options
A lot of the voting boils down to how long you can keep keepers. How many players you can keep, how long you can keep them, and how much inflation should be. These are all control measure to determine how many keepers are kept per year, and how many go back to the pool. You can limit how many keepers teams have by having a hard limit, having high inflation, or limit how many years they can be kept. They’re all means to the same end. There’s a lot of different combinations to get to the same thing. I could allow for unlimited keepers per team, but want aggressive inflation ($10 + 20%) to make sure that players are too expensive to keep. Or I could want low inflation (flat $5 increase) so that it’s easy to keep players, but I vote so we’re only allowed to keep a player for three years so that top talent gets returned periodically.
Personally I’m a fan of using inflation to control how many players are kept per team because it simplifies things, but you could make an argument for any combination.
How many players should you be able to keep?
We’ll have to decide if we want a set number of keepers, or if you’re only limited by the amount of salary that you have. If you had an entire roster of deals, you might be able to keep your whole team for $140 as an example.
The pros of having a limited amount of keepers is that it keeps the player pool for draft day full. Teams will likely just keep their very best keeper values (cheap guys) and release their more expensive player. The cons mean that you may have a lot of guys that you like at great values, but are unable to keep them due to the restrictions. This means you’ll have to return some of them to pool either way.
On the opposite spectrum we could allow unlimited keepers and you would only be limited by the cost of your total keepers. You would just need to keep enough money open to spend $1 per open position on your team for the draft. The pros of this option are that you can keep as many guys as you’re comfortable with if you had a really good draft or a good waiver wire pick-up. The cons are a much smaller draft pool for those who maybe didn’t keep so many players.
How many years can you keep a player?
There’s a lot of overlap with the pros and cons from above, but this is about how long can you keep a guy. Inflation will help return guys to the draft pool as as their prices increase, but someone like James Conner could be kept for maybe 4-5 years before his price would be too much to keep. The NFL is very volatile so a lot of players will be returning to the pool any way because of injury, price, and down years so there are some natural limitations. There are a few gems that may slip through (like Shittysauruses draft Alvin Kamara for $1 his rookie season).
How much inflation?
There are potentially two different components to inflation. The first is a flat increase from year to year. Say inflation is a flat $10. If you draft a guy for $1, he’ll then be $11 the next year and $21 the next, etc. A $50 pick will be $60 the next year.
The second potential component is a percent based increase. This would likely be combined with a flat increase to make sure $1 guys and waiver picks see some kind of uptick in their first few years. The percent component would make sure that guys on the top end saw heavy inflation to return them to the pool. From some of the previous examples, the James Conner pick would go from $1 to ($5 + %10) $7 to keep the next year. Le’Veon Bell would go from $73 to ($5 + %10) $86. A $6 increase for the cheap player but a $13 increase for the expensive player.
A flat increase keeps things even across the board and makes inflation across the board easy to calculate, but it means that cheap players are seeing the same increase as expensive players who would barely be seeing an increase at all.
A percent increase means that players see a more fair increase in price from cheap to expensive but also means that expensive players will see very high increases from year to year and will be unlikely to be kept.
You’ll also need to decide how you feel about higher and lower inflation. Higher priced inflation means that players will be unable to be kept as long, and will create a more dynamic player pool as expensive players are kicked back to the draft pool each year. Lower priced inflation means you’ll be able to keep the players you like for longer, but it also means more teams will likely keep more players for longer and the draft pool will be a little smaller.
How long before draft should you have to declare your keepers?
This one is a lot more straightforward. The earlier you declare your keepers, the more time the rest of the league has to know who is going to be available for the draft. The downside of this is that your keeper may get injured before the season starts and you’ll wish you had kept someone else, or a situation may change. A late declare date means you’ll have all the information you need to make smart keeper choices, but you won’t know who’s available to draft until right up until the draft.
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