Preventing Collusion & Throwing Games in Your Fantasy Football League

The subject of “throwing games” or collusion is a difficult one to approach. Whether it’s trying to cover the section in your league rulebook, or deal with an incident in your season. Many leagues have blanket rules that state something like this:

“Collusion and Throwing Games will not be tolerated and is subject to penalty of [insert your penalty here”]

While having something in your rules is a good idea, a better path to take is to simply incentivize alternative paths to take. Why collude or throw games, if a different path will pay better rewards.

This can be done by including rules and processes in your league that motivate everyone to stay involved all year, and thus distract owners from even considering a negative course of action.

1. Set the Next Year’s Draft Order by Standings & Include a Loser Bracket
   It’s all about incentive. If you reward owners with high draft picks for being bad, they will throw games. Instead, if you incentivize the bad teams with a motivation to keep trying, they will usually keep trying. For this reason, we are very against the idea of ordering your next year’s draft order based on end of year standings.
   Instead, try using a “The Loser Bracket”. Losers Brackets take place at the end of the season, for all of the teams who didn’t make the playoffs. The better the team performs in this bracket, the higher their draft pick will be the next season.
   
   
   

2. Double-Headers during the last two weeks

   Some league management platforms allow you to have double-headers. This means that two games take place in a single week. Our league stacks two double-headers at the end of the season. Having four games that take place in the final two weeks, limits the teams that are completely out of playoff contention. The reasoning: The more teams that have the slightest hair of playoff hope, the fewer owners that will consider throwing games.
   
   
   

3. Early Trade Deadlines

   There are some league’s out there that foolishly allow trading into the last week, and sometimes even into the playoffs. Instead, set your trade deadline somewhere between weeks 8-10. Nearly all teams still have hope of playoff contention by this time, so they aren’t thinking about dumping off players.
   
   
   

4. Deposit for Future Seasons

   This is an especially good idea for keeper/dynasty leagues. Nobody wants some chump joining your dynasty league, only to give by season one’s end. Having owners invested in the future will incentivize them to not throw in the towel so easily.
   
   
   

5. Weekly Prizes

   Even the smallest of prizes is incentive enough for most to always try. Something as simple as “$5 for the weekly high scorer” may be enough reason for even the last-place team to continue turning in a solid lineup.