The confounding case of having a 16 team league

I have a league that I do every year with a bunch of work people.

Most of the owners are quite competitive and know their NFL stuff. However, there are a couple (as I suppose there always are) that typically mess up their season quite early - with the draft.

But the last couple of years - there has been an interesting trend.

We had expanded to 16 teams in the league two years ago. Last year was the first "keeper" year.

Owners that did not draft well the last couple of years have found themselves in a quandry.

They can either keep a lower ceiling player that is unlikely to score a lot but won't cost them anything. OR they can try and trade for a player that is on another team that has a lot of talent.

Typically this may mean trading for a valuable keeper by giving up a draft pick (via swap of rounds and places within a round).

Even though we try and "penalize" the owners that finish at the top of our league in total points - these 4 owners draft at the bottom of each round. Meaning that the 4th place finisher drafts 13th, 3rd place drafts 14th, 2nd place drafts 15th, and 1st place drafts 16th. These owners have drafted well. One owner had Brian Westbrook, Ronnie Brown, Travis Henry, and Reggie Bush as his top backs. He traded Westbrook and Brown.

Brown gained him the most value - a swap of his 5th and 7th round for the other guys 2nd and 5th.

Westbrook only went for a 2nd round swap (2.02 for 2.14) and 6th round swap (6.02 for 6.14).

I traded Terrell Owens for a swap of the 10th pick in the 2nd round for my 4th pick in the 3rd round. One could argue that TO came on the cheap.

Other owners have seen these higher prices and have decided that they want no part of that.

As a result, we have owners keeping a low ceiling player - including positions that do not have that much difference between available and late drafted players.

Jay Cutler, QB Broncos
Matt Leinart, QB Cardinals
Matt Hasselbeck, QB Seahawks
Eli Manning, QB Giants

Other questionable choices:

Ravens Defense
Bears Defense
Chris Chambers, WR Dolphins
Jamal Lewis, RB Browns

I had not voted to go to 16 teams (under a previous administration) - which has raised a number of issues. Not only do we have this keeper issue above, finding a free agent during the regular season that will make an impact is near impossible.

So just with the couple of issues above, it seems that a 16 team league will only work if every member of the league is quite active and well informed.