Hmmm.....

This is where we had a problem and a big debate in football, where we had two guys drop out in the middle of the season.

The problem is, everyone who got to play the guys in our league who weren't playing during the time that these guys weren't playing have a big advantage now if you're gonna have these guys start "playing" again by you changing their lineups for them.

Plus, what are you going to do about his lineup in the weeks that you play him?

Not to suggest in any way that you would do anything to benefit yourself in setting his lineup, but the only fair way to do it would be to have someone else set his lineup for the weeks that you play him.

And even if you do that, there are other problems involved. After all, there's some judgement and strategy involved in whether to play goalies or not, and when to play them or who to play them against. The same thing for forwads and defensemen; suppose you have three centers playing the same day, and one has worse scoring statistics than the other two, but is going against an easier goalie? Which two do you play? It's not always cut and dried what to do, there's a lot of opinion and judgement involved.

If you are going to change their lineups for them, you need to set down in advance the exact criteria that you will use; for example you will always play the guys with the most goals, or the guys with the highest rankings, or whatever.

Problem is, and we discussed it a lot in the Yahoo football thread, and sort of came to the conclusion that there was no 100% fair way to handle the situation without jumping through a million hoops.

What we wound up doing was just locking them out for the rest of the season, and if you happened to have played them early in the season in a week when they were trying and you lost to them, it was just tough shit.

This is different though. In football we had a balanced schedule, with everyone playing everyone else only once, and only one win per week at stake. Here we have 10 wins and losses at stake every week, and we play everyone else multiple times during the course of the season.

Here's what I think is the fairest solution, altho it involves quite a bit of work:

1- Decide exactly who you want to kick out of the league.

2- Take all of that player's W-L records for all of the weeks of the season - whether he played and was "trying" or not - and subtract them from everyone else's totals. This is the only fair way, because otherwise those of us who played these guys when they were "trying" are at a big disadvantage to those of us who played them when they weren't.

In other words, for the purposes of our League Standings, you'll be treating them as if they never existed.

4- Going forward, lock the rosters of the non-players, and every time one of us plays one of them, treat it as a bye week.

So at the end of the season, everyone's W-L record will reflect only weeks during which they were playing other players who were participating.