Commissioner Speak: Injuries

The Problem
Injuries are a bitch. Injuries that occur to you during the week can be a double bitch. Right now, we are set up for weekly lineup changes, so that means if say, Baron gets hurt for a few games on a Tuesday during his first game of the week, you are stuck with his big fat zeros for the rest of the scoring period. That can really hurt. With daily lineup changes, you can just sub the injured guy out and roll right along. With weekly lineup changes, that's a bit tougher.

Analysis
We have a few solutions for this problem, none of which we've implemented yet because we're not sure what the best solution is.

(1) "The Substitution Method" -- Allow one sub per week.

The details of how this would work could get a bit murky but it would essentially allow an owner to pull out a player at any time during the week for a player from his bench. There are two ways to do this:

(a) You can only pull out an injured player mid-week. They have to leave the game they were playing and can't re-enter that game to be considered injured.

(b) You can pull out any player mid-week even if they're not injured. This then allows you to take out an under-performing player for a hot one on the bench. This option is clean, neat, and could add an interesting strategic dynamic.

The problem with this solution is that the Commish(es) would have to re-set the scoring when a person is pulled. And currently, with weekly lineup sets, you can only take out a player's entire scores, not just say, his scores from Monday and Wednesday, and then add in the scores from another player for Friday and Sunday.


(2) "The Trust Method" -- Just set the system to daily changes but only allow non-injury related lineup changes on the pre-set date (Monday).

Then if a player gets hurt, the owner can just take him out and insert the sub for the rest of the week without messing up the current (or historical) scoring.

The tremendous downside of this is that owners must be aware of what is going on with their opponent (even if the IR switch is declared publicly) and stay up to date on both of their lineups.

Plus, owners have to remember to set their lineups ONLY on Monday. We're not sure this can be enforced the whole season. It depends on how active and attentive we are as a group.

(3) "The Half and Half Method" -- Allow an IR substitution only early in the week.

Owners can sub in for an IR player only on injuries that occur during the early part of the week (Monday-Wednesday?). This will eliminate missing an entire week's worth of games while still giving owners a chance to make up for some of those IR games.

The question is, what do we do with the sub's stats from the early games? I say we just let all of the new player's stats count, and eliminate the old player's. This kinda sucks, but it's the easiest way to do it.

Or we can fill out depth charts and designate, say, one or two players each week as subs, and the owner can only put in that pre-determined player. Thus we don't have the "benefit" of hindsight when choosing subs from the bench.

We're not considering allowing owners to use an injury sub for every injury during the week, just one substitution at most.


Conclusion
The thing we need is a way to deal with the mid-week injuries that can really cripple a team. We want the solution to be easy to enforce, easy to update, won't allow for lineup "cheating," and will allow for an injured player to leave while getting a useful sub in from the bench. Since no elegant solution has presented itself, we're currently leaving the injury situation at status quo. If your guy gets hurt, too bad.

We are considering any of the aforementioned options, while leaving the door open for suggestions. Keep in mind that we need simplicity and fairness. If we don't settle this issue soon, we're just gonna ride with weekly lineup changes with no substitutions -- for better or for worse. So speak up if you have an opinion.

Here's my two cents: I'm personally of the opinion that you do have to factor propensity for injury into a player's value. It's obviously very harmful if you consistently lose players each week, especially mid-week. That can just kill your team and your record.

Nobody can predict or control injuries, and being unable to swap an ailing player out (on a mid-week or daily basis) is a bit unfair. So some sort of solution would be nice. For now though, we go status quo just because we're not sure where to lay the responsiblity for manual IR-related moves -- onto the commissioners or the owners.

If we leave this unsettled, we're gonna have some issues with teams losing because a fourth of their roster got hurt during the week. Can we live with that?