Amused to Death said:
Adam Harstad said:
zamboni said:
Yeah, that's pretty silly as well. There's no way to truly avoid tanking, but I've always thought an NBA-like weighted draft lottery may be as close as you can get to prevent full-scale tanking.
Assign draft position based on Potential Points, which is how much your team would have scored if you'd started the optimum lineup every week. You might still get a tiny bit of tanking at the fringes of the playoffs (say, the team in line for the #6 seed might decide he'd rather tank to miss the playoffs entirely if his potential points total is low enough), but by and large the best way to game the system is "get rid of all your good players", which mostly defeats the purpose of tanking in the first place. You get bad teams being more proactive about cutting or trading aging veterans, which is good. You'll get bad teams unloading players for future draft picks, which is also good. Also, of all of the stats I've measured, Potential Points has the highest correlation from year-to-year, which means it's going to be one of the best and most consistent measures of team quality.
Not saying it's a perfect system. Just saying I've yet to see any other that comes as close to solving the problem.
Or just put it in your rules that you're expected to start a competitive lineup each week. However you want to word it, just like I'm sure everyone's rules address collusion.
Having good rules is very important, although it's a balancing act. If your rulebook is very specific and detailed, designed to cover every conceivable situation, it creates the suggestion that anything that is not explicitly disallowed is implicitly allowed. It encourages rule-lawyering and loophole-seeking.
Another approach- and one I prefer- is to have a slimmer rulebook with broader / vaguer rules that establish expectations and then empower a trustworthy commissioner to use his judgement. With this approach, you're mostly spelling out the specifics of what happens in the case of ties and other such procedural matters, and then you'll have a few deliberately vague sportsmanship rules saying "all owners are expected to act with integrity. Acting without integrity includes, but is not limited to: collusion, tanking, deliberately upsetting the competitive balance, etc. Should an owner be in violation of the sportsmanship rule, the Commissioner is empowered to take what action he deems necessary." Obviously the drawback of this approach is you really need a commissioner who is beyond reproach. The advantage is there's no real loopholes to try to find our exploit, and your league is quick and nimble enough to respond to unanticipated situations.
With all of that said, while good rules are imperative, it's often far better to make poor behavior unpalatable instead of illegal. Instead of legislating against it, work on changing motivations so that owners are never tempted to engage in that behavior in the first place. Instead of making tanking illegal, make it undesirable, (and feel free to make it illegal afterwards, just in case, but if you do a good enough job at making it undesirable you'll find the rules never actually get put into practice).
If you've got a rule against collusion, an owner can make decisions he believes are suboptimal, but which he could credibly justify. For instance, he could have started Martavis Bryant over Julio Jones last week, and if called on it, could have gone on about how hot Bryant was and how Julio was drawing Peterson. In that situation, everyone knows he was probably tanking, but nobody can really prove it. More importantly, it shouldn't be the league's job to try to divine internal motivations. That way lie dragons. It builds an atmosphere of mistrust. Far better, in my opinion, to make it so that it is of no benefit whatsoever for an owner to start Bryant over Jones, and then if an owner does start Bryant over Jones, you can probably rest assured that he really thought that was the best way to go, (as silly as most others might have found that decision).
