Rules for Keepers

There’s been a lot of talk about keeper rules for the upcoming season (okay, so not really) and rightly so, the rules are still a bit murky and unformed. Here, I’ll try to bring some clarity to the confusion

What’s a keeper?

A keeper is a player from your roster last year who you want to keep on your team for the next season.

How do keepers work?

You select keepers by sending me an email with the players you want to keep

What is the purpose of keepers?

For our league, I want to give people a reason to keep playing even if they don't have a realistic shot at winning this season. Keepers allow players to trade for next year and allows everyone to think of their team as a multi-season investment.

What are the rules for keepers?

I want to make the game fun for everyone involved and so I want to reward players for picking up good, but latent talent, yet at the same time I don't want one team to dominate the league year after year. To this end I came up with this rule last year:

3 keepers can be chosen with any Yahoo O-Rank. These players will be added to your team during the first 3 rounds of the draft. 4 additional keepers can be selected with an O-Rank of 100 or less and would be added to your team for rounds 9 through 12. If you choose not to have keepers, you will receive draft picks in these slots instead.

However, after thinking about it some more, I see that a major weakness of this strategy is that for some players, it is far more advantageous to select no keepers and take the draft picks instead. I want the keepers to have value for everyone, so I have changed the rule to the following:

Each team may keep up to 5 players from their last roster. Each keeper will be added to your new team during the round where they were drafted last season. If they went un-drafted last season, the player will be added as your last pick. If two or more of your keepers were not drafted last season, they will be added as your last picks.

Also, take a look at last year's roster and last year's draft results to start preparing your team for this year's draft.