Welcome, Demo! — Sign out
Season-Long Fantasy Football |
|
 | Home → Rules → Dynasties |
All About Multi-Year Leagues
DataForce offers five different multi-year league options:
- Dynasty leagues
- Keeper leagues
- Legacy leagues (where the league ends after one team wins two Super Bowls and takes home a big prize)
- Salary cap leagues
- Contract leagues
Each of these league types continue from year-to-year, and you can keep players from one year to the next. A full description of these league types can be found in the official fantasy football rulebook.
How deposits work for multi-year leagues
When you join a start-up multi-year league at DataForce, you also pay a deposit, typically equal to the entry fee of the league. This deposit is paid only in the first year of a new start-up league.
Contrary to some fantasy sites, at DataForce the deposit is not an advance entry fee on a future year. It is not a prepayment. You will not be able to apply the deposit to next year's fee. Nor can you withdraw the deposit at a later date. It stays in perpetuity with the team, to be returned only when the league ends, when it is given to whoever owns the team at that time.
You should think of the deposit as the price you pay to own a keeper or dynasty team. You still have to pay the entry fee to play each new year. Yet it's important to understand exactly what the deposit does for the league:
- The deposit gives the team value, making it attractive to orphan buyers in the case that a team gets abandoned. This helps keep your fantasy league alive.
- A reasonable deposit requirement ties the owners to the league, indicating that they are serious about playing for more than one year, rather than trading away all their future picks to try to win in the first year, and then dumping the team. If the deposit is too small, this becomes a strong temptation.
- The promise of a returned deposit if the league folds keeps owners paying entry fees each year even if it looks like the league needs help to survive. Should you pay your entry fee and then find that the league closes rather than runs for the year, then of course you'll receive your entry fee back, as well as the deposit on the team! (Hint: if a league looks like it may close, you may want to buy an orphan in that league just to get the deposit! But it's only fair to warn you that DataForce has never, in its history, had to close a league for lack of interest.)
- If you leave the league, your team is sold (see below) and you typically get the money from the sale. You do not get your deposit returned. It stays with the team, and now belongs to the new owner.
Community (league-wide) deposit money
As mentioned above, when an orphaned team is sold, the sale price usually goes to the prior owner, and the team's deposit transfers to the new owner. But if a team cannot be sold on the marketplace before DataForce's annual auction, and cannot be sold at auction either, DataForce takes over the team and lists it for sale at a huge discount. These are the "reject" teams that nobody will bid even $1 for. At that point, the deposit money is taken from the team and placed in a community fund belonging to the league.
The purpose of the community fund is to help sell orphans that reach this sad state of affairs, so as to keep your league healthy and competitive. Having an emergency fund available to DataForce to cover some of the loss on these sales helps us keep the league going. DataForce may take from the league's community deposit money in order to decrease the price of an orphan (see Buying & Selling Teams below). We may, for example, take $50 from the deposit in order to decrease the price on the marketplace by $50 when an orphan just won't sell. But this is very rare; we try really hard to keep the community deposits intact, so we will first accept a reasonable loss on sales before dipping into the deposit money.
Community deposit money still belongs to the league! If the league folds, all of its community deposit money is divided equally between those teams whose deposit was taken away to fund the community deposit.
Renewing your team
Multi-year leagues are "renewed" each year by paying the new year's entry fee on the Keepers->RenewTeams page. The entry fee will remain the same each new year as you paid in the start-up year, but of course you don't have to pay another deposit.
There is a renewal deadline of early May. Teams that are not renewed by the deadline will become "orphans" (unowned) and sold at auction to keep the league alive.
We encourage early renewal because it shows others that your league is alive and active. Early renewals encourage others to renew as well, and helps any orphans sell.
As soon as your team is paid for, you will have access to the new-year league for trading.
Trading in the off-season
Why renew early? Because you can immediately start trading picks and players in anticipation of the new year! On DataForce, new-year leagues are created as soon as the prior year closes, which is always in early January, so you can start preparing for next season while still knee-deep in snow! The new-year draft order will be set and you'll know which picks are available for drafting or trading. Fantasy Football is a year-round hobby!
And when you renew, draft picks for another future year become available for trading as well. For example, if you just finished a dynasty league for year 2025, you'll have picks for years 2026 and 2027 available for trading!
For games hosted at MyFantasyLeague, it works a little differently. MFL doesn't roll into the new year until a few days after the Super Bowl. This means that until mid-February, you'll have to do your trading on the old year league rather than in the new year.
Required Prepayments
DataForce appreciates owners who are serious about staying with the league. We want you to stick around for at least two years.
Toward that end, in brand new start-up leagues, we charge a nominal non-refundable prepayment for next year. It's a small amount, a token payment, really, just big enough to make sure you feel a little pain if you abandon your league after just one year. This "token prepayment" begins at $15 for Copper leagues, and escalates to $80 for Gold leagues. This prepayment is charged only in year one of a new league, and is applied automatically to the next year's entry fee. If you do not play next year, you forfeit your prepayment.
Another, slightly bigger, prepayment is required in the event you trade away your own future first-round pick. You'll need to make sure you've prepaid at least 50% for that year. In other words, you must put down $25 in a Copper league, $50 in a bronze league, etc. for the year in question.
Drafting after the first year
Your draft in the start-up year can be at any time of year and of any type of draft. It can be a live or email event. It can even be an auction rather than a snake draft! But in future years, the draft type and date is predetermined.
After the first year, Dynasty, Keeper and Legacy leagues will hold a regular draft, and it will not be a snake draft where the order reverses for even rounds. In other words, if you draft first in round 1, you'll draft first in every round.
Keeper league drafts may be a live draft or an email draft, but dynasty and legacy leagues will always be an email draft.
For salary cap and contract leagues, the off-season draft will always be an auction, though again they may be live or email.
DataForce does not run a separate rookie draft. For all leagues, rookies and free agents will be combined into a single draft, held sometime from May through September.
Your draft order in the new year will be determined by your potential points calculation from the year just completed. "Potential points" is a bestball measurement of how many points your team COULD have scored through week 14 (before the playoffs begin) had you selected the optimal lineup each week. It attempts to estimate the true strength of your team.
Take the time to study this calculation so there are no surprises in how your draft position is determined! In particular, make note of the point that it makes no difference how many games you win or lose! NEVER lose a game on purpose, trying to angle for a better draft position in the next year; that will never work and will always be considered cheating or collusion!
Selecting keepers
Before the new-year draft can begin, each team must select the players they wish to retain. These players are called your "keepers" and your decisions are recorded on the Owners->SelectKeepers page at least three days before the draft. This early selection deadline gives the commissioner time to contact you and review and process your selections, and it gives other owners the chance to see who is available for drafting, so they can plan for the draft and perhaps jockey for draft position with trades.
DataForce does not always adhere to a strict keeper deadline, since it's common for one or more teams to just simply forget, or misunderstand the rules, or not get the reminder emails. We believe the impact of dropping potentially-valuable players is too detrimental to the league to be allowed, so we will first make an effort to contact missing owners before processing keepers. If we don't hear back from you within a few hours on the day of the deadline, we'll do our best to make player selections for you.
- In Dynasty and Legacy leagues, you can retain as many players as you wish, up to the roster limit.
- In Keeper leagues, you can keep only five players. A trading frenzy just before the keeper selection deadline is common, as team owners try to offload the players they cannot keep for other consideration, and other owners try to improve their rosters on the cheap.
- For Contract and Salary Cap leagues, you are limited in the players you retain only by the auction money you have available (usually $200).
Then, when the draft begins, you'll draft players until your team is full again. In all of our leagues, you cannot drop players during the draft to open up a draft spot! Drop your unwanted players during keeper selection! It will be too late once keepers are processed.
We are sometimes asked, particularly in Keeper leagues, if the players you retain make any difference to your available draft picks. No, they do not. You'll not lose early draft spots by retaining certain players, so always keep the best players available!
Setting a draft date
The rookie/freeagent draft in future years won't necessarily be on the same date as the initial year. Instead, for start-up multi-year leagues, each owner is polled during the first week of the playing season to ask when they would like future-year drafts to occur.
The commissioner will then set a date for future drafts while trying to satisfy as many owners as much as possible. All rookie/freeagent drafts must begin by early August.
Note that you can request a change of the annual draft date by submitting a league poll. (You can actually change any of the league's rule parameters the same way.) Such a poll must be unanimous among all voting owners before a change can occur.
Buying and selling teams
Suppose you don't want to play anymore. What do you do?
Answer: You list it for sale. You'll never get your deposit back if you leave the league, but you WILL get back whatever the team sells for! That may or may not be more than you initially paid for the team (by paying a deposit), so be sure to keep your team in great shape for its resale value!
Unless your team was auto-renewed in January, you can exit the league by clicking LEAVE instead of PAY on the Keepers->RenewTeams page. This actually removes you from the league, but keeps your name on the team so that you'll get the proceeds from the sale.
DataForce offers two places to buy and sell orphans:
1. The Orphan Marketplace offers sellers a chance to set their own price, and generally offers for-sale-by-owner teams up until the renewal deadine in early May.
2. After the renewal deadline passes, DataForce's annual Orphan Auction gives buyers the chance to bid on still-available orphans. These are sealed bids.
The orphan auction lasts one week, and once it concludes, any remaining orphans go back to the marketplace at a heavily discounted price set by DataForce. The sale price no longer goes to the prior owner. Instead, by this time the sale price typically decreases quite rapidly down to $1 over the coming days, and even lower, to the point where DataForce will pay you to buy a team! In this event, the original owner receives nothing for the sale. DataForce typically takes a loss on the sale.
In all circumstances, when you buy a team off the Marketplace or the Auction, you must simultaneously pay the new-year entry fee. Buying "used" does not save you the cost of the entry fee; it merely gets you into a multi-year league without having to pay a deposit or a prepayment.
When you buy a team from the prior owner--that means you buy an orphan off the marketplace before the annual auction, or buy it at auction--any deposit on the team follows the team to you. Should the league fold, you'd then get the entire deposit--money that somebody else paid when the league began. However, when buying a team off the marketplace after the auction ends (these are the "rejects" nobody would bid for), any deposit on the team is taken away and moved to the league's community deposit. Read more about community deposits near the top of this page.
We recommend that you read the short Orphan Buyer's Guide on the Orphan Marketplace or the Orphan Auction page before buying or bidding on a team.
Feel free to contact the seller with questions (see the CONTACT OWNER link on the buying page). For teams on the Marketplace, you can even negotiate a price with the owner. Sellers can change their price at any time on the Keepers->ChangePrices page
One final note to sellers: We discourage "testing the water" by listing your team for sale, and then keeping it if it doesn't sell for the price you want. When lots of teams are for sale in a league, it gives buyers the impression that there may be something wrong with the league, and may discourage orphan purchases. For this reason, we charge a rebuy fee of $5 to buy your own team back from the marketplace or at auction.
You get the proceeds from the sale even if it's you who buys the team, so it really only costs you $5 extra to keep the team, but the rebuy fee does help decrease frivolous listings.
Viewing prior-year leagues and results
We're often asked how to view prior results in multi-year leagues. Here are some hints:
- If you are an owner in the league, go to your My Leagues page and, at the very bottom, click on the button labeled SHOW PRIOR YEAR LEAGUES. You can click on any league name to re-enter that league and browse its pages.
- If you're NOT already in the league, but wanting to examine the league before buying an orphan (always a good idea!), click on the league name from the Marketplace or Auction page. The MFL button on this page also lets you view the league on MyFantasyLeague if it's hosted there.
- To see a quick summary of past winners, the League→Trophies page will tell all. Be sure to look at this page when deciding to buy into a Legacy league, since one more win by any of these Super Bowl winners will end the league!
How shills work
As mentioned above, DataForce is anxious to keep all leagues alive and will sometimes pay customers to take on orphans! But once in a great while, an orphan is so bad that we can't find a taker even then. When this happens, it may be run that year by a shill assigned by DataForce. This shill cannot win money with the team, and cannot participate in waiver bidding or trading unless approved by the league. The shill's job is to make the team respectible again through savvy free agent moves so that it can sell the team next year, when the shill gets the money for the sale.
Shills have an impact on the prize fund for a league. League prizes are adjusted downward accordingly. For example, if a 12-team league plays with a shill, then all regular prizes (not Bonus Money) will be decreased by 1/12th.
No one is required to play in a league with more than one shill. As you renew your team(s) each year, be sure to indicate the number of shills you are willing to allow in your league(s).
Anyone can volunteer to become a shill, though they are very seldom needed. Learn more about shills in the rulebook.
How long do multi-year leagues last?
- Contract leagues end after ten years. The double-deposit on these leagues pays for years 9 and 10, so no entry fee is required for these years.
- Legacy leagues end as soon as one team wins two Super Bowls. They do not have to be consecutive
- All other leagues end only when we cannot find owners or shills for all of the orphans in a league in any given off-season. DataForce works hard to keep all leagues alive, at times even paying customers to take over orphans. DataForce has never yet had to close a multi-year league in this manner.
