1st time Commish

[CraigMasbruch]

i have played in a friends league for the past five years, and it has become less competitive every year as consistently losing owners lose interest. The problem is that it's a daily transaction H2H league, so a lot rides on spending time with your team every single day. This is impossible for some of the guys, so it's pretty imbalanced. Next year, I'm planning on starting a new league, taking the most active (and smartest) owners from this league and adding some new guys. I want to do a weekly transaction league, auction draft, FAAB, the whole deal. Rules will be similar to those of Tout Wars. So I have a couple questions for you guys:

1) What site is the best for this? We have used Yahoo! in the past. Is ESPN more suited for this type of league? I would prefer a free league, but I don't want to sacrifice quality to save a few bucks.

2) How much should be automated, and how much done by email through the commish?

3) Do any of you have an "official constitution" or list of rules for this type of league?

Thanks everyone

[talan37]

My league does all of those things, although we do daily lineups, we only do weekly free-agents, via an open bidding process.

Mon-Thursday-Anyone can "open" bidding on a player in the minors or majors who isn't on a team.
Before Sunday at noon you submit a faab bid on whatever players you want that have had bidding opened-whoever wins gets the guy on monday.

This prevents streaming and people doing fickle roster changes, while still allowing you to carry a useful bench and get some value out of platoon guys, but the entire FA agent pool isn't available to you on a daily add/drop basis.

We use rotowire and like it, it does cost money, but its not much(I wasn't commish so i don't know for sure, but i believe around 5-10$ a person for a 12 man league).

[koondog]

CBS has had FAAB for about 2 years now and its awesome. I use it in my baseball and football leagues.
Its all automatic. you decide how much $ each team starts with and which days the FAAB runs.

yahoo currently doesn't have faab, and I don't espn has it either.
allstar stats has it, but very $$. Other then CBS, i don't think there is a cheaper host. Its $130/yr, so it cheap for the owners to chip in a few bucks. plus you get live scoring, minors, keepers, and some other extras.

[Diamond Miners]

Make sure the owners that you want to take would be interested in a weekly transaction league. I know I love my daily and get bored with my weekly team.

[CraigMasbruch]

Make sure the owners that you want to take would be interested in a weekly transaction league. I know I love my daily and get bored with my weekly team.

A bunch of us are in a daily league currently, and it has become non-competitive, because certain owners don't have the time or ability to check their rosters every day. I want to do a weekly to level the playing field a bit, as 3 or 4 of us have been at the top of our league every year, just because we spend more time with our teams than the others. It should even it out if these guys just have to make a decision once a week.