Deep keeper - what it took to win

[Sticky Spice]

here is how many category points it took to win my 20-21 team league (standard 5x5) the last three years with the number of teams in parentheses. If you were to sweep all 10 categories (assuming 20 teams), you would have 200 pts, of course.

2001 (21)
177 pts

2002 (20)
156.5 pts

2003 (20)
162 pts

I know that's not a very interesting stat, but I was looking at this to see what effect having 21 teams had on our league. We usually vote every year whether to add a 21st team, and I think each owner has pretty much just gone with his gut instinct as to what he thinks is right for our league. I think standard roto rules say that our league can have even as many as 22 or 23 teams, if I remember correctly.

This time I wanted to have some actual numbers for people to look at to make an educated decision. When we had that 21st team in 2001, of course more category points were out there to be had. But what was weird is that they all seemed to rise to the top.

Bottom 1/3 of the league - no effect here:

2001: 59 avg category pts
2002: 56 avg
2003: 62 avg

Middle 1/3 of the league - even less effect here:

2001: 109 avg
2002: 108 avg
2003: 106 avg

Top 1/3 of the league - there's your difference:

2001: 162 avg <~~
2002: 145 avg
2003: 141 avg


Isn't that weird?! Despite the extra category points out there the bottom 2/3 of the league were relatively unaffected in 2001. All the points went to the teams in the top 1/3 of the league.

On the surface, this may be an argument against 21 teams because it looks like when we add a team we are just adding points to the best teams in the league making our league top-heavy and less competitive for the league as a whole.

My philosophy is usually once we start adding teams past a certain point, we are likely just adding to the number of teams that fall out of the race - possibly causing more rebuilders and dump trades.

But also to keep in mind, we've had some anti-dump rules (tighter in-season salary cap restrictions) come down since 2001 that could be as much the reason for us having less dumping the last couple years as us dropping the one team. Considering this study is just looking at three years, and just one year with 21 teams, 2001 could have also been a coincidence I suppose.

What do you guys make of this? If you were an owner in this league would you vote for 20 or 21 teams?

[Madison]

I haven't played a league that deep in quite some time, but looking at your assessment, I'd say that 20 teams is adequate. Obviously, adding another team could make things interesting and that team could end up competing for the title, but 20 teams seems fine. Also, if people are complaining that the league is unbalanced, then something needs to be done to ensure that you don't lose the members that you have. If that means sticking with 20 teams, then stick with 20 teams.