Fantasy Football articles - Sports Grumblings.com

The NFL defines unrestricted veteran free agents as players who have completed four or more accrued seasons of service and whose contracts have expired.

Players whose contracts have expired but do not have four years in the league are termed restricted free agents.

Clubs are also allowed to name certain players as transitional or franchise free agents as well.

The one thing all these various “types” of free agents have in common is that they are NFL caliber players without a current contract.

To the fantasy player a free agent is any NFL player that is not currently assigned to a fantasy roster.

In fantasy football, as in the NFL, free agency is a means to address deficiencies in your roster. These deficiencies may be due to poor drafting, unforeseen injuries or any of a myriad of possibilities.

Many leagues have what they term “Free Agent Supplemental Drafts” after the season has begun. The problem with handling free agency in this manner is that it could leave a team in dire straits until that “Supplemental” draft and actually cause them to lose enough games to cost them a potential playoff berth.

A better way to handle free agency is to have a weekly session where free agents are awarded and owners are allowed to release players to cleanse their roster.

Teams should never be allowed to exceed Roster limits while acquiring free agents so you should always have owners release a player for every player picked up. To make things fair, these released players should not be available to other owners until a specified amount of time has passed. This allows all owners an equal opportunity to grab the released player. Our recommendation is that you not allow these players to be picked up until the following free agent cycle.

You will find that many leagues also limit the number of free agents any team can acquire each cycle. This eases the burden on the commissioner. It is our experience that when limits are applied, the number two is that which is most often used.

Some leagues prefer to go with a first come, first served approach and while this is acceptable in leagues that feature ultra-competitive owners, in most beginning leagues this serves to make it hard for the average owner to compete.

A better approach is to protect the weaker teams by requiring all free agent requests to be turned in by a specified date/time and then awarding the players one at a time in reverse order of standings using total points as a tie-breaker.

This approach helps promote parity and allows those owners with a weaker team first shot at the more valuable free agents. This in turn allows these owners a chance to stay in the playoff hunt building more excitement as the season winds down.

The more teams in pursuit of a playoff position the last couple weeks of the season, the better it is for your league. Tight competition stokes the competitive fire but it also keeps the interest going. This leads to more people returning in following years and allows for some good natured rivalries to develop.