How to Keep Fantasy Football Losers Interested in Finishing the Season

If you are a fantasy football commissioner, keeping owners in your league interested throughout the season can sometimes be a difficult task. Owners with teams that have performed poorly oftentimes stop paying attention and fail to keep the league competitive. However, by following a few tips, you can learn how to keep fantasy football losers interested in finishing the season.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Find players with a major interest in fantasy football. If everyone in your league is serious from the beginning of the season, that is the best way to ensure that your league stays competitive throughout. A player new to the game or not overly interested in fantasy football is the type of player who tends to lose interest as the season progresses.
2. Reward weekly high scores. This is especially effective if you are playing in a money league. By rewarding weekly high scores, all owners are still eligible until the very end of the season. If you aren't playing for money, you can instead give weekly point bonuses that keep teams alive who seem to be out of contention.
3. Allow teams who don't make the playoffs to still compete. To do this, you can hold what is sometimes called a fantasy football "toilet bowl." In the toilet bowl, teams who miss the playoffs enter a second-tier playoff format that runs just like the regular playoffs. Rewarding the winner of the toilet bowl can help the poor teams in your league stay interested.
4. Encourage the teams at the bottom of the standings. If you contact those teams and inform them that they need to keep trying so that the integrity of the league isn't lost, that can surprisingly go a long way in coaxing the lesser teams to finish the season. Sending out weekly newsletters with information about all the teams keeps rivalries alive even if a couple owners find themselves eliminated from the playoffs.