Fortifying the SPFL’s Legacy

In 1999, I was living in Manassas, VA and had recently accepted a new job in Fairfax, VA, after working in downtown DC for nearly two years. The 90 minute train commute proved to be too much with a newborn daughter, so I opted for a 15-90 minute (depending on the day’s traffic report) white knuckle car commute instead. Looking back, I can definitely tell you, a VRE train car was much less stressful than a drive on I-66 in the morning. Lesson learned.

At my new job, I was, as you would expect, the quiet, unassuming guy just trying to learn the job and not get noticed.

But I did get noticed.

I got noticed by the office’s most gregarious, extroverted, carefree guy. I mean, he was an over the top character who made everyone laugh. He took over whatever room he walked into. Completely magnetic, somehow without being obnoxious. One day, we had an after-work Cinco de Mayo celebration in the office conference room and as I quietly sipped my Corona in the corner, he, for some unknown reason, decided today was the day he was going to crack my facade. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I actually made HIM laugh with something I said. A genuine, heartfelt laugh. And from that moment on, he and I became good friends. I’m not sure if he just wanted to prove to the office that he could bring me out of my shell or he simply liked hanging out. I think/hope it was the latter. (Unrelated to the story, but he taught me how to be a good adult friend. I regret that I wasn’t a better one for him. Of course, he has dozens of others, me, not so much.)

We golfed together, ate lunch together, made each other laugh all day long, obsessed over the USA Women’s World Cup victory … and talked sports. He loved sports, especially football, almost as much as me. Admittedly, he was a Washington fan, but I was used to that. My family is riddled with them. And as summer neared an end and fall approached, he invited me to co-manage a fantasy football team with him.

I had heard of fantasy football, but didn’t know much about it. But I was intrigued and flattered. And I accepted.

Our commissioner was a thirty-something single guy living in a small, stinky house/commissioner headquarters in Arlington, VA. When I walked in for the draft I was immediately confronted with the skunky smell of Mary Jane. It was also bring your own beer and snacks. (Yeah, he didn’t provide much beyond a poster board and some questionable couches to sit on). There were no cell phones. This was the old paper notebooks and pen days. You shouted out your draft picks for immediate public ridicule. But this group of guys, most of which were my buddy’s high school friends, LOVED football. And they knew what they were talking about — players, teams, etc. I was in my element. I loved being surrounded by genuine football fans who openly cheered or jeered your draft selections with some real thought behind it. As my buddy partook of the passed around medicinal heater, I skipped it and focused in on our fantasy team. As I recall, we were contenders that season, but didn’t win it all.

And despite me moving back to SWVA the next year, my buddy kept in touch and invited me to co-manage again the next two years. Which I readily accepted, because I loved it. He couldn’t make the draft that third year, so I drove back up to Arlington to do the honors on my own. That was on September 8, 2001. I stayed with my aunt and uncle, who also lived in Arlington and for some reason, I remember I was driving toward Crystal City while I was there and I found myself in the parking lot of the Pentagon and had to do a U-turn. I vividly remembered that moment the following week when “the world stopped turning” as Alan Jackson sang. Just one of those moments you remember.

Anyway, the following summer, I decided that I was no longer interested in co-managing a team based 400 miles away, but I was interested in continuing to play fantasy football. But who had a league? …

And with that, the SPFL was born.

I say all that to say this. Then and now, I aim for the SPFL to be special. Back in the day, we had actual in-person drafts and I wanted owners to walk into headquarters and realize it was a big day and we were going to have some fun. And even as time went on, and drafts became an online affair, I still wanted the SPFL to be a little different. A little better than your usual neighborhood fantasy league. I wanted it to be more than just a hobby. I wanted it to be therapeutic. A lifestyle. I wanted NFL fans to feel a personal connection to the game that they never had before. Most of all, I wanted you all to love the SPFL I wanted you to brag about it to your friends. To be protective of it. I wanted you to look forward to it every year. Hopefully, I have achieved that to some degree.

I think I have, given that going into this, our 24th year, we still have six original owners and the other five have been mainstays for quite some time. We seem to keep some frequent turnover in that 12th spot, but that’s okay, we’ll find the long term solution eventually. (Anyone have any prospects?)

So … I feel the time has come to throw some wrinkles at you. We’ve all been doing this long enough to handle it. To embrace it. A couple of these may sound daunting, but trust me, they’re not. My only aim is to keep the SPFL fresh, your interest piqued, and something you start look forward to as July staggers toward a close and the calendar flips to August.

Now, take a deep breath after reading my ramblings, and proceed slowly to peruse my “improvements” to the SPFL experience. (I really did read that 400+ page book I showed in my last post. I do want the SPFL to have a legacy as the cover reads.) I honestly believe these changes will enhance our fun and are not being made just as “noise”. I hope you will agree after you ponder them. Or at least after the season.

DRAFT: Sunday, August 30th, 2pm in the Yahoo Live Draft Room

KEEPER DEADLINE: Friday, August 28th, 2pm. You can either email/text me your keepers or enter them on your team page — but if you do it that way, make sure I know because I have to enter the draft “cost” for each keeper via the Commissioner link. Here is the Keeper List for the 2026 season in Excel form.

SPFL 2026 Draft keeper list

ENTRY FEE: $100 per team, same as last year.

TOILET BOWL TOURNAMENT: This is new and a little change from past years. The top six teams via our usual playoff format, will play in the SPFL Super Bowl Tournament, as always. However, there will be no third place game. HOWEVER, the six teams that did not make the playoffs, will play their own tournament, when the playoff season begins. Consider it like the NIT Tournament during March Madness. And the winner of that “Toilet Bowl Tournament” will be the crowned the season’s best of the worst — and will win $100 to re-coup their entry fee. My rationale: I want to keep fantasy football and the SPFL alive in everyone’s heart for as long as possible, even after the playoffs begin.  

PRIZES: $1200 pot.

• $100 to the Toilet Bowl Champion.
• $100 to the team with the most points scored during the regular season.
• $250 to the SPFL Super Bowl Runner Up.
• $750 to the SPFL Super Bowl Champion.

ROSTER LIMITS: This season, every team will be restricted to only having two (2) quarterbacks and two (2) tight ends on their roster. We had limits a few years ago and I softened in my old age and eliminated them. However, given the importance of finding a QB and a TE that actually contributes to your lineup, coupled with the scarcity of decent ones in the NFL, I believe we should limit the ability to hoard these unicorns to the detriment of those of us who may be struck by the injury bug or show poor drafting skills. The overall roster size remains the same, but again, you can never have more than 2 QBs and 2 TEs on your team. I will set a limit on the Yahoo settings that will prevent you from accidentally doing so. 

SCORING CHANGE: I intend to keep the same basic scoring system with one major change. Quarterbacks will be awarded five points per TD pass this season, as opposed to four points, as in recent years. Many fantasy leagues award six points, but I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the position just yet. I do feel, especially given the roster limit above, that giving a little more importance to having a decent QB is a worthwhile endeavor. In addition, the 0.5 point per reception bonus to TEs will come back this season.  EDIT: I spoke too soon. Yahoo surprisingly does not allow TE premium scoring, so I would have to go in and manually add the 0.5 point TE bonuses each week to each team. Yeah, … no. My goal was to make the TE position deeper and more relevant, not to highlight star TEs, so maybe for the 2027 season we think about eliminating a FLEX position and requiring 2 TE starters? Hmmmm. That might be interesting. Anyway, no TE changes this year except for the two TE roster limit). 

HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE: I have always awarded the tiebreaker in the event of a tie in a playoff game to the higher seeded (“home”) team. I am sure that has never come into play since we started utilizing decimal point scoring. But I think excellence in the regular season and gaining “home field advantage” should be at least a little factor in the playoffs. So … this season, the home team in a playoff game will be awarded a 3 point overall scoring bonus. Before anyone panics, according to my research this would not have changed the outcome of any SPFL playoff game over the past three seasons … but you never know … and it makes earning that home field advantage worth a little something. 

FREE AGENTS/WAIVER WIRE: Alright, here’s the big one. I know some of you old timers will say, “what in tarnation?”. But trust ye old commish, will you? I’ve played in dozens and dozens of leagues and it has been years since any have used the old SPFL-style weighted blind waiver wire system. Instead, they use something called FAAB, or Free Agent Acquisition Budget. If you’re not familiar with this, each team is awarded $1000 in FAAB at the start of the season. [Note: This is not real money. Consider it like a “Schrute Buck”. (see, The Office, season 3, episode 23).]

And each week throughout the season, the waiver wire will run twice (Wednesday and Saturday nights) and if you want to pick up a player, you simply select/prioritize them like always, but you also enter your monetary “bid” (from your FAAB budget) to acquire that player. And the team with the highest bid for said player, gets said player.

Rationale behind this decision: The old system was for beginners. We’re not beginners. And it sanctioned owner inactivity. Sucky teams got first dibs no matter how engaged they were. And active managers on the other hand could get locked out of picking up good players by being sniped week after week by sucky, uninvolved owners. With FAAB, hoarding hot free agents is a thing of the past because you will have a limited budget to manage. It is a much fairer way to manage the free agent process. You will agree once you experience it. It can be frustrating … but it’s fair.

Questions that I had when I first joined a league with FAAB:

• “How do I know how much to bid?” (In my best Nate Bargatze voice as Gen. Washington, “nobody knows.”) I’m kidding. You can find references online each week, all over the Internet, that SUGGEST a budget to bid for the hot free agents each week. As for me, I simply paid attention to what other owners bid to get a sense of what the going rate in that league was for an A+ free agent was, and a B free agent, and a D free agent, etc. You’ll get the hang of it, I promise. It’s not hard at all. It will be exactly the same as past years except you just have to enter a money value for a bid. I will tell you, I see defenses (and kickers, but not applicable for us) usually be acquired for $1-2. On the other hand, a promising young RB stepping in for a star RB who just had an ACL tear, usually takes a couple hundred bucks to get.
• “What if I run out of money?” You probably will if you have a good, long season. But even when you are out of money, you can still submit $0 free agent bids to ensure you have a player to fill out your lineup if you find yourself in a pinch. Heck, you can even submit $0 bids regardless of your FAAB balance, anytime you want, if you think you can get the player you want for zero bucks.
• “What if I don’t get the free agent I need to fill a lineup?” You can enter multiple bids for multiple players. For example, I need a RB. I bid $100 for RB A, $99 for RB B, $98 for RB C, and $10 for RB D. Chances are, you’re going to be the winning bidder on one of those RBs.

That’s it for substantive changes this season to the venerable old gal known as the SPFL. I have a few more in the slow cooker to consider for future years. And, as I say every year, if any of you have any ideas for improvements or fun wrinkles to consider, send them my way. Or throw them out to all of us for talk about. Which brings me to one more thing I’d like to start this year.

I want to start an SPFL GroupMe chat. GroupMe is an app (similar to WhatsApp or Discord) and it is totally voluntary if you want to join. From what I understand, you technically don’t even have to download the app to participate. You only have to give me a cell phone number and I can send you an invite. I have cell #s for most of you, but I won’t invite you unless you give me permission. How do I envision this GroupMe chat? I want it to be the “clubhouse” for the SPFL. Our community center. One of the few shortcomings that the SPFL has, I think, is more frequent league-wide owner interaction. We used to have some at our draft parties, but now that’s just online. Yahoo has a chat function, but it’s about as useful as a lead balloon. The blog site takes comments but only a handful of us ever use that. So I want to offer up the GroupMe as a place to … trash talk, throw out trade bait/rumors, discuss the league or The League, just get to know each other a little more throughout each season.

I have also re-written the League Constitution. It incorporates all these changes and is easier to read. I can email/text it to anyone who requests it, but I will also post it under a tab on this site for easy reference (Yahoo doesn’t let you link a document, for some reason).

The draft order this year? My commissioner textbook tipped me off to a neat little website called 100yardrush.com and it allows you to enter the names of each team in your league and it’s a 100 yard dash across a football field to determine the draft order. I will use that and post the video on this site as we get closer to the draft. And speaking of the draft, I plan to turn on my video chat feature this year, so that you all can see ye old commish in person as we draft. It’s as close as I can get to the good old days. I hope some of you consider doing the same.

And finally, if I can find the time, I hope to preserve our league lore and history on a website called League Legacy. I don’t want us to lose our history, going all the way back to the myfootballleague.com days. Like I said, I want to leave a legacy.

I think that’s it for now. If you made it this far, you’ve read over 2,600 words. Congratulations and thanks. And sorry for trying your patience. But I get excited about this every year and this year, for some reason, I am more excited than ever. I hope it’s catching and all of you get excited. And involved. And have a good time. Let me know if you have any questions. Don’t forget to be considering your keepers (spreadsheet linked above) and I’ll send out the draft order post in a few weeks.

NFL Training Camps open up next week!!!! Can’t you just feel it in the air?

The Commish