Fantasy Football Trades

It's inevitable that there's some sort of disagreement regarding a trade every year in my league. In almost every case, it smells fishy. Sometimes, though, it's just the asshole of the league sticking it to the person who clearly has no clue which way is up. In either case, it drives me mad.

This year, however, Player A swings a blockbuster with his brother-in-law. I have no idea of the details, but it involved L.T. It was blatantly obvious that Player A was either shafting his brother-in-law or had worked out some sort of monetary compensation. I haven't followed the league since. Now, though, people are whining about the trade, which happened months ago.

My position is simple: Trading is an over-hyped pain in the ass. It's always somebody trying to take your two best players in exchange for four mediocre guys or some such thing. It insults my intelligence every time I get a trade offer, and I get tons. People must have lots of free time to analyze these things. I don't, and I don't trade. I also don't believe in the commissioner system of approving trades or a league vote on trades. That just bogs down the process and sucks the fun out of it.

I've heard all kinds of horror stories from people who lost first place when the second-place team picked up the top players from the cellar-dwellers in trades that appeared suspect. But I've never been able to prove anything like that in the league I'm in.

So, just curious about what you think of trades and whether you have them in your league...

 

My league created a pair of rules to prevent things I'd done or had mentioned I might do.

-- One year early in the league's existence, I noticed that both my QBs had the same bye week. Found another guy with the same deal in different weeks and told him to pick the guy he wanted to play and trade me the other so I'd have somebody to play, and did the same for him the week he had two guys off. So they made a rule that you couldn't trade a guy and get him back that season.
-- One year (might have been same one), I joked that if I was at the bottom of the playoff ladder or would be eliminated, I might trade my studs to a team low on the ladder to form an uberteam. They made a rule against that.

My league also used to vote on proposed trades and they would never approve any trade I proposed. We had a clause that said you could trade draft picks, and I nearly quit after they voted down a trade that included a pick-swap in the next season's draft. Shortly thereafter, the commissioner got tired of listening to people bitch and did away with that rule.

 

I used to be in a league that traded draft picks as well. I hated that (as well as some other things with the league). The draft pick thing was way too much to try and keep track of.

 

One guy had Daunte Culpepper, who we learned got benched about 30 minutes before game time, and his other quarterbacks were on byes. So I traded him Jake Delhomme for Willie Parker and managed to get Torry Holt, too, seeing as to how he had no leverage to go anywhere else just 10 minutes before kickoff of the first games.

I liked that trade.

 

Earlier this year, I needed a RB because LT2 and Jordan were on bye. My wife needed a kicker. So I sent her Musa Smith and Robbie Gould for Brandon Jacobs and Drunk Bastard Janikowski.

Gould then hit something like 11teen field goals as my wife beat her opponent by about six and I lost to my opponent by about six. I was so mad that I swore never to trade again the day of a game. I'll go with what I have. A few weeks later, when my only QB option was Harrington, I swung a big deal to get David Carr...and lost by 10. Woudl have lost even with Harrington, but it was still frustrating.

This week, I'd been trying to get Favre and Kevin Jones from one of the deadbeat teams in exchange for Carr, Jacobs and others (it's a keeper league and Favre is priced too high and Jones is in his option year). The guy never got back to me. Finally, he trades with someone else Sunday but still has Favre and Jones if I'm interested. I say fuck it, I'll go with what I have.

Thank goodness.

As for collussion, it's happened at least two times in our baseball league. Dipshit deadbeat wanted to help out his buddy and screw the people who were contending for the title, whom he was still mad at from college (true story). So he traded all his good players for complete shit. Both times, his buddy won it. The second time it happened, the buddy shot from like 30 pts back in the last two months and won on the last day. The guy that lost quit the league and we tried to boot out the colluding dipshit, but we didn't get the votes.

He won the league last year fair and square but his deal with the devil lapsed on Dec. 31, 2005. Guess who finishes last this year? And guess who sends all his good players to his buddy at the trade deadline...after telling me and others we'd get the chance to top all offers. He was happy because he got Jose Contreras and Shannon Stewart in exchange for his good players. Nice work turd.

Fortunately, I beat him by about 80 pts in football this week, which was as satisfying a win as I've ever had. [/complete and total looooooooooooooser]