Théoden’s Coding Tips

Here’s the scenario: player A has two QBs on a bye in Week 8, and player B has two QBs on a bye in Week 9. Both players want to keep their QBs, but they also need to cover their respective bye weeks. To solve the problem, they work a temporary trade where they swap one of their quarterbacks before Week 8, then swap back after Week 9. Is this collusion? Is this a legal trade?

Intuition says that something fishy is going on, but producing a rational argument is difficult. The arguments I found on the web were frustrating, boiling down to nothing-statements like, “It’s illegal because it’s unfair.” The problem is that the classical example of collusion involves a lopsided trade, where Team A becomes weaker in order to make Team B stronger. But in the case where the teams are borrowing from each other at equal value, the balance of the trade is even.

So I was left trying find a logical reason behind the following two assertions:

• ALLOWED: a permanent trade that is mutually beneficial to both owners.
• NOT ALLOWED: a temporary trade that is mutually beneficial to both owners.

For me, the key was to view the trade graphically. Consider two teams, each having a roster of 9 players. Here are what the teams look like before a trade:

When dealing with a permanent trade, any number of players move from one team to the other, but the teams are still separate entities:

But when we deal with a temporary trade, then during the time period in question, the two teams are overlapping their rosters:

By performing a temporary trade, these two teams have effectively done the following:

• circumvented the roster limit by storing a player on each other’s bench.
• gained access to quality players at no cost.
• formed an alliance that, while acceptable in a game like Risk, really is not in the spirit of fantasy football.

I think those reasons are sufficient to nullify any temporary/mutual borrowing trades.

If you’re curious, I originally began exploring this idea when commenting on this blog entry.