Trade Dispute: Manning and Gore for Manning and Taylor

Q: A trade of Eli Manning and Frank Gore for Peyton Manning and Fred Taylor. Just wondering if you think this is a fair trade. The scoring is very standard for a Yahoo league. A side note, this is a trade between the first and last place team. The last place team is giving up Peyton Manning.

A: Well its that time of the season again. The true integrity of fantasy football owners – or more accurately the lack of integrity is coming to a head as an endless number of playoff contenders cut dishonest deals in bars, back rooms and chat rooms with those owners who’ve already starting thinking about April and fantasy baseball.

It’s collusion and as we’ve said before it’s presence needs to alter the way we evaluate the fairness of trades. In this scenario, based on the scoring you’ve included, one team is receiving on marginally more value in this trade:

Peyton and Taylor = 205.72 points
Eli and Gore = 197.32 points

We think this trade is very suspicious since the team trading Peyton is in last place. Unfortunately, that’s a difference of only 8.39 points or less than 1 point per week. We’d probably rather have the Peyton side of this trade but the Eli/Gore is clearly upgrading at RB (while also coming out of the trade with two starters as opposed to 1.5 starters since Taylor splits time). The team is definitely gaining value from the trade.

For this reason, and we don’t like it either, the trade has to stand. If this trade is vetoed, than based on the stats, you are setting a precedent to veto almost any trade offered. You should work immediately to set a rule that prevents any team mathematically
eliminated from playoff contention from participating in a trade in the future. But for now, this trade needs to be allowed.