Fantasy Court

Held: A commissioner must recognize and enforce the transfer of dynasty league draft picks wagered and lost in a golf match between two league members, where the wager occurred between the parties themselves as a personal competition and the consideration remained entirely within the fantasy football system.

Held: A fantasy manager who has been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention may not deliberately bench his starting quarterback—leaving the position empty—to throw a matchup and manipulate another team’s playoff qualification. While suboptimal lineup choices remain permissible gamesmanship, leaving roster positions vacant crosses the line into impermissible sabotage. The petition is dismissed as moot where the challenged conduct would have had no practical effect.

Held: In fantasy leagues with punishment systems, “last place” is properly determined by toilet bowl tournament results among non-playoff teams—not by consulting Week 14 standings and calling it a day.

Held: A pattern of egregiously lopsided trade attempts—repeatedly vetoed—combined with disproportionately hostile reactions to good-faith inquiries about obvious roster errors, constitutes sufficient circumstantial evidence to validate a manager’s suspicions that league members are coordinating to undermine his competitive success.

Held: An egregiously lopsided early-morning trade between spouses in a family fantasy league playing for bragging rights only shall not be voided where doing so would risk precipitating inter-familial conflict during the holiday season, though we establish prospectively that such conduct violates principles of good faith dealing and should be prohibited in future seasons.

Held: Coordinated action by multiple managers—including the creation of a separate group chat and the wholesale benching of entire rosters for the express purpose of manipulating playoff standings—constitutes impermissible collusion under league rules requiring managers to field competitive lineups. The appropriate remedy is to reconstruct week ten standings as they would have appeared absent the collusion, using the prior week’s lineups with obvious adjustments for bye weeks and injuries, and then enforce the great rebalancing rule against whoever would have legitimately occupied first place.

Held: A Commissioner who deliberately misrepresents team ownership when directly questioned by a league member violates his fiduciary duty of transparency. The Commissioner must disclose the ownership of all teams in the league, and if investigation reveals he operates multiple teams under the shared pseudonym “Greg,” such conduct would constitute fraud warranting severe sanctions including potential removal from the league.

Held: An emergency trade consummated ten minutes before kickoff and processed immediately by the fantasy platform is valid where the platform’s operational rules permit immediate processing, notwithstanding outdated league rules nominally requiring a 24-hour review period, and where the transaction represents permissible competitive gamesmanship in response to an opponent’s strategic roster move.

Held: A Commissioner’s verbose preemptive disclosure of a routine administrative action—undertaken in the stated interest of transparency—does not constitute misconduct, but neither does it constitute sound judgment where the extensive explanation generates more suspicion than the underlying ministerial act would have occasioned had it been executed quietly and competently.

Held: Where a league punishment draft winner selected “hot ones audition tape” without defining parameters ex ante, the minimum requirements are: (1) a video featuring the punished manager eating ten wings with hot sauce while answering questions from league members in the format of the television show; (2) submission of the completed video to the show’s host; and (3) use of at least one genuinely punishing hot sauce such as Da Bomb, though authentic Hot Ones brand sauces for all wings are not required where cost would exceed reasonable bounds relative to league stakes.