Does anyone have a rule for this?

[Pauly]

In both of my leagues, several bottom teams dumped all their good players (for the most part) for keepers (most of them just middle-of-the-road value guys at best) and now I have been informed that those teams are now quitting the league.

This means that in addition to replacing those teams, we would have to convince the incoming owner to take on a bottom team that is rebuilding...which wont be easy and could threaten to cripple the leagues altogether.

Does anyone have a rule (or an idea for one) to prevent dumping and then jumping ship? Or is this just, as they said in Full Metal Jacket, "a big sh#t sandwich and we all have to take a bite."

Thanks.

[Grinch]

It depends how many keepers you allow. If you allow 10 or more you could run it like an expansion draft, allow all returning teams protect their top (3-5 depending on the league), let the new guys 'steal' a protect until there is a more favorable balance. Make it so when you lose one, you can protect 3 more so the pain gets spread out, nobody loses any of their top guys.

[B-Fly]

Yeah, there's no way to enforce a penalty on someone who dumps and jumps ship, so as Grinch noted, the best you can probably do is give the new owners an expansion draft option rather than compelling them to take on a lousy team as is.

[mjl]

another option that I have negotiated in a couple leagues is to give new managers a discount on their first season if the team is obviously noncompetitive. but yeah, not much you can do to the departing owners.

[madducks]

It depends how many keepers you allow. If you allow 10 or more you could run it like an expansion draft, allow all returning teams protect their top (3-5 depending on the league), let the new guys 'steal' a protect until there is a more favorable balance. Make it so when you lose one, you can protect 3 more so the pain gets spread out, nobody loses any of their top guys.

Agree with this.

[Fresno Bob]

we ran an expansion draft when we had to replace three teams one year, we keep up to 8 normally, so we let every existing team keep 5, and if one of the new teams picked a player off of an existing roster, the existing owner got to protect up to two more players.