Ten teams, 15 rounds, snake. One keeper each, optional. A synthetic league — every manager and every number here is generated.
Keepers occupy real picks, so those slots are gone before anyone sits down. Four of them land at 61, 62, 69 and 78 — right on top of your seventh and eighth rounders.
A positive number means the player is being had later than the field drafts him.
| Manager | Keeper | Cost | Origin | ADP | Value |
|---|
Pick minus ADP only measures how far down the board a player is being taken, so anything kept late scores well whether or not he's good. This ranks on a more useful question: how many more points a keeper returns than the best player still available at that same pick. Each player is measured against replacement level at his own position — necessary in a one-QB league, where a waiver quarterback already projects near 292 and would otherwise outscore every receiver on the board.
| # | Keeper | Manager | Cost | Proj | Edge | Best alternative at that pick |
|---|
Nothing to grade yet — the draft hasn't happened. Once it does, every pick gets measured against the best player who was still available when it came up, and each team is scored on how much of that value it actually captured.
Same VORP basis as the rankings above
A manager who took the best player left every time scores 0. Reaching costs you; letting value slide costs whoever passed on it. Letters are set against the league's own spread rather than an absolute scale — somebody drafts best in every ten-team room, and the grade names who, not whether the room was any good.
Each team also gets its biggest reach called out: the pick where the most value was left sitting on the board, and who was still there.
Your ruling: the limit follows the team. A player who runs out his two years with one manager is fresh again for anybody else. Eight managers each start a final year in 2027; one is already done.
| Player | Manager | Years kept | Status | 2027 cost |
|---|
The whole system, in two lines
Rule 5 isn't separate math. Charging two rounds earlier on a second straight year is the same as applying rule 3 twice — year one already moved him a round. A 2024 R4 goes R4 → R3 → R2 either way.
On the real league this reproduces 21 of 22 keepers on record; the single exception was a commissioner call made under an earlier wording of rule 4.
The case that forces the question
Two years max follows the manager, not the player. If one manager keeps someone in 2024 and another keeps him in 2025 and 2026, that's two separate runs — only the second manager's clock has expired.
A player another manager burned through is a clean slate for you.
Live until the draft · timing still unwritten
If your keeper gets hurt you may swap in a different player off your roster. “All of the same rules apply” settles the price: the replacement is costed against his own history — flat R7 if he went undrafted, otherwise his draft round minus one — and must clear rule 2. The injured player's round is irrelevant, so a swap can cost more than what it replaces.
On the clock: the injured player accrues no year, and the replacement starts his own year 1. A swap doesn't inherit a clock.
Unwritten: when a swap is allowed. Up to the draft is the sensible line — preseason injuries mostly land after the deadline, and keepers are entered by hand anyway. No swap has been recorded since 2023.
Settled Aug 2026; rule 4 rewritten
How a player reached your roster is irrelevant. Only whether anyone drafted him that year. Waivers, free agency, a trade — if he was drafted, his cost comes off that round.
The old wording read as though any waiver pickup paid a flat R7, which priced backwards: it made a late-round wire find more expensive, not less.
47 spots across ten teams. Finishing last is worth fourteen of them; the consolation bracket winner adds five more. Odds below are 200,000 simulated sequential draws. Two wording notes remain for the next rules post — whether the penalty is 2 spots per bad week or per bad slot, and that the spot table is written for exactly ten teams.
Spots → probability → average pick landed
Ruling R3 · the app is the authority
No manual tiebreak step. Sleeper ranks tied records itself, on total points for, so a finishing position is just read off the standings page — nobody has to agree on a method first.
2025 proved it out: a three-way tie at 9–5, another at 8–6, and a two-way at 4–10. Half the league tied, and the app sorted all of it.
40 points separates 6th from 7th — and under the wheel that gap is worth four spots, 1 versus 5.
Both look like flaws until you check the bracket
The cliff sits on the playoff line. The jump from 1 spot to 5 falls between 6th and 7th — and the field is the top 6 of 10. So 6th is the last berth, 7th is the first team out. Nobody drops a place on purpose: it trades a playoff berth and a live shot at the prize money to move first-pick odds from 2.1% to about 10.6%. The reward only switches on once a season is already over.
The penalty only covers facts. Empty slot, IR, OUT, BYE — four conditions readable straight off the box score. It deliberately says nothing about lineup quality, because intent is unknowable: a manager starting a low-projection player may think he's a sleeper, and may be right. Judging that would mean ruling on whether someone's opinion was sincere.
So a bad-but-legal lineup carries no penalty. That's accepted, not overlooked — neglect is punishable because it's visible, tanking isn't because it isn't.
The real league tracks who has paid on a page that persists its own state. Figures are omitted here.
Keeper leagues accumulate rules, exceptions and one-off commissioner calls. Three things this catches that a manual process misses.
Or at least incomplete
Leagues write rules in chat and then apply them by feel. Modelling the rules and replaying them against every historical keeper shows where text and practice diverge — and which of the two everyone actually believes.
On the real league this reduced five written rules to two lines that reproduce 21 of 22 keepers, and identified the single outlier from transaction logs.
is_keeper is not the whole truth
When a commissioner enters a keeper by drafting the player manually, the pick carries no keeper flag. Anything counting keepers off that flag undercounts, and every two-year clock downstream is wrong.
The fix is an override layer that the audit and the ledger both read, so a hand-entered keeper still counts.
The pre-draft check
Keeper flags survive between seasons, and survive a manager leaving the league. A flag with no matching board pick pulls that player out of the draft pool entirely — he ends up belonging to nobody.
Running the stranded-flag check before the draft turns a post-draft mess into a two-minute fix.