"Deuce McAllister and Reggie Bush a formidable tandem once again in 2008?"

Want to run your own league this year? Good. It’s a thankless, difficult task that involves a remarkable amount of babysitting and crisis management, and no matter what you do, half the owners in your league will think you’re the second coming of Emperor Nero. Other than that, it’s pretty much clear sailing.

I’m exaggerating, of course…maybe a third of the owners will think you’re Emperor Nero. In any event, here are some tips on successfully running your own league.

Don’t make the league too small – A 6 or 8 team league may be appealing from the standpoint that everyone will have a good team. Unfortunately, that tends to discourage trades and make any given week a complete crapshoot, since everyone with more than three brain cells has a loaded roster.

Don’t make the league too big – Don’t go too far the other way, though. 14 and 16 teams aren’t much fun, either. You’re picking over scraps by round 8 and most weeks, you’ll be reliant on hoping that some scrub comes up huge for you. 10 and 12 team leagues are typically the best way to go to ensure a balanced league that’s fun for all concerned.

Discourage multiple-owner teams – Nothing, I repeat NOTHING, is a bigger pain in the butt than teams that are jointly owned. If I were starting a league from scratch, I would ban them immediately, in fact. The only way these things work is if one owner is totally apathetic and defers all decisions to the senior partner. For one thing, they’re easily the most difficult to trade with. Think about how difficult it is to make a trade with one owner, then multiply that by a factor of five. Each owner is going to have his own idea about his teams strengths and weaknesses, and that’s assuming they can get together right away to talk about a trade. Second, unless the two owners are really good at working together, they will take longer than anyone else to make their draft pick. And as much as we all enjoy our fantasy draft, no one wants it to drag on longer than necessary, especially when you’ve got a couple guys bickering like they’ve been married for 20 years. Finally, you can have a situation like we had at one of my drafts last year. We had a two-owner team that had been working together for a couple years. One of the co-owners was running a couple hours late and wouldn’t let us start without him. That was bad enough. When he arrived, heated words were exchanged over his tardiness, and finally he stormed out in a huff. His co-owner felt jilted, we all were upset that we had waited about two and a half hours for nothing, and that we had to witness that uncomfortable exchange. Nothing like a black cloud hanging over your draft.

Have a mechanism to deal with owners who miss the draft –No matter how hard you work to come up with a draft time that’s acceptable to all, at least one owner will inevitably miss the draft for one reason or another. Make sure you’ve got a good way to handle this. One good way is in my next point. You can also have a pre-ranked list of players (which you can generate right here on the Dr. Stats website), and just go for the highest ranked guy on the list, which is usually a good solution. Try to have a chat room or something available if someone has to join the chat from out of state or wherever; it’s a lot easier than the old “pass the phone around the room” stuff that everyone hates. Also, when setting the draft in the first place, come up with three or four options and let owners vote. Don't send out an email that says "tell me when you're available for the draft". Getting a draft together is like herding cats, and if you leave it to people to suggest their draft times to you, you'll get a variety of answers, almost none of which are useful.

Consider a Yahoo! League – Or a similar internet-based league with a live draft capacity. If you’ve got a bunch of guys in the area for your draft and it’s as much about getting together and hanging out as it is about drafting, great. But a Yahoo! League (I mention Yahoo because it’s free; other sites require you to pay) has the advantage of setting a time for the draft and auto-picking for teams that don’t show up. Believe me, it’s hard enough to get a dozen guys together at one time. There’s always a very good chance that one won’t show up. You don’t want that to submarine your draft, so something with an auto-pick capability is a big help. Plus, if there’s human picking involved, the guy who doesn’t show up will often feel you screwed his team over intentionally. Skip that whole problem with the auto-pick feature. And it goes without saying that you’ll want some kind of service that automatically tabulates the statistics. If you’re compiling those yourself, you’ll go crazy by week 4.

Have a year-end party and a trophy –It’s worth bumping up the entry fee by $10 or $20 per person to finance a year-end party. Make sure you have a trophy of some kind, too; it will really increase the sense of pride in your league and make it feel like a much bigger deal when you win. You want owners to stay in your league and think it’s fun.

Make it a keeper league – Keeper leagues are more fun and require more strategy. Plus, it gives the crappy teams something to look forward to next year. You might see some interesting deadline trades of useful old vets for young prospects. That brings up another important point…

Have the power to veto trades – Whether you hold an all-encompassing, commish-has-the-hammer, Dark Lord of the Sith-like veto, or one where the league can simply overturn trades by majority vote, this is an absolute necessity. Nothing will kill the harmony and enjoyment of your league like someone swapping Brian Westbrook for a bag of chips. This sort of thing would be ten times worse in a money league, where an unscrupulous owner might make a deal in return for a cut of any prize money. It doesn’t happen much, but if it does, your league will fall apart almost instantly.

Make every rule clear right up front – Make sure all your owners are clear on all the rules coming in. You don’t want to have a league with a $150 entry fee, and then on draft day have someone say, “wait, I thought this was free? I don’t have the money for this stuff!”

Understand that unforeseen things will come up during the season – There will always be things you didn’t anticipate when coming up with the rules. Be sure you have the ability to make rulings on the fly. For instance, a few years ago, Ricky Williams fumbled the ball, and it was recovered by Randy McMichael in the end zone. We weren’t sure at first how to rule this; recovered fumbles for a TD are seldom a fantasy stat. As commissioner, I ruled that McMichael would be awarded a rushing touchdown. Have a mechanism to deal with these things during the year.

Try to schedule the draft at a time when you can all hang out afterwards - Drinking beers and talking smack about your respective teams is one of the best parts of any fantasy draft. Obviously, you have to try to work around everyone's schedule, but if you can set it at a time when a bunch of guys can go out afterwards, it'll feel much more like a real league and less like a bunch of strangers getting together.

Have an annual rules meeting - Presumably, you'd do this over email, but every year, you should allow owners to suggest new rules for the betterment of the league, and put those to vote. Even the best commissioner isn't going to have all the right ideas. Maybe you set it up as a TE-mandatory league, and the other 9 guys in the league think tight ends are a pain.