Dynasty League — Expansion

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the expansion of our dynasty league and I have made the following conclusions:

The expansion should be:

• Fair; no team should be unequally affected by it.
• Simple; everyone should understand the process.
• Consistent; should not disrupt the league and how it operates.

In order to obtain those goals, I have laid out the following format for a potential expansion system.

Expansion Draft

Two teams will participate in an exclusive expansion draft where they select players from other rosters. They will flip a coin to decide how goes first, and then alternate every round. The draft will last 15 rounds, and 30 players will be selected.

Every existing team gets to protect ten players, the size of a starting roster. This leaves 180 available players for the expansion teams to draft from. No team can have more than 3 players selected off of their roster.

This leaves the two expansion teams with 13 empty slots each. In order to not adversely affect the waiver wire, the two teams will also take part in the rookie draft. They will be placed at the end of each round, and will pick in reverse order of the expansion draft (i.e., whoever picked first in expansion, will pick second in rookie).

This leaves every existing team with three empty slots, and expansion teams with 9 empty slots. After the cut day, at least 10 more players will end up on the waiver wire (40 rookies, 30 empty slots). So while the waiver wire pool will be cut down, it shouldn’t be too egregious.

Timing

The expansion draft will need to take place before the rookie draft. However, the two should happen relatively close together so that every team is still aware of the initial outcome of the expansion draft.

Voting

This is only a potential solution to expanding the league. There’s almost guaranteed to be push-back. But I’m open to changing different parts of this system if it works for everyone.