Expansion is fun, but don't sweat too much helping the new teams out the first year. They are meant to struggle...thats part of the process. It'll be their privelege to join your league and take their lumps and getting beat up every week the first year or two will make it all the more rewarding when they finally start to win.....so give them the hard sell on that if you havent already. To pass along some experience as to how we did it with our league 5 or 6 years ago, and I was one of the expansion teams, we kept it simple. Ours is not a full blown 'dynasty', but rather a large keeper. We keep either 6, 7 or 8 players every year, and rotate the number from season to season. So the year I came in, each team just had to decide 1 week before the draft which 7 players theyd be keeping, and everyone one else was left unprotected. The two expansion owners flipped a coin, and the winner got to choose WHICH #1 pick he'd have....either expansion draft top pick, or top overall in the real draft. The week before, in the expansion draft, the two teams loaded up their 7 keeper rosters, and readied for the real draft. Like I said, it was rather simple. In your case, I think Id make a one year exception with the # of players you keep on your dynasties, which would obviously need to be voted on for approval, and reduce your total keepers to something like 12 or 15 and make everyone else unprotected with no exception. It would be a nice change for your league probably to each throw some of your lesser players back in the pool for a draft anyway. But it would give the 2 expansion owners a fighting chance to alteast pick up some prospects or decent veterans that can help them right away, and it would force your other owners to make some hard line calls and who they deem most valuable. This is a simple and easy way to approach it, but you and your boys may like things a little more complex and you can set up 'groups' or 'tiers' of unprotected guys or obviously fly in any direction you want with it, but Ive found over the years it's much easier to get a large group of guys to buy into something thats laid out rather simply, than to overcomplicate the process. Any way you slice it and dice and set up the system to break in the newbies, theyre going to struggle early. I did make the playoffs my first year as an expansion owner, but like I said that was with the other 10 owners only keeping 7, and I was leaning on some undervalued veterans like Leroy Hoard, Terry Allen and James Stewart. Ah, how sweet it was to win those guys. It took me two years to bring along guys like Shaun Alexander and Daunte Culpepper, but they'll do the same. Anyway, I hope this little bit helps, and if I can throw any other feedback your way, Ill check back on your post here and be interested to see how it works out.
