I've been the commish of a league going on 10 years. Its had fits and spurts and has always been a redraft league. It has some quirks. 1.25 ppr, return yards and TDs count. We've settled on 12 teams for the last 5-6 years, divided into 3 divisions. We have never had a team win the championship more than once. Our draft is this week.

Last year, we decided that we had a stable enough group of managers to add keepers to the league. We decided to do so in the following manner:

2016 2 keepers

2017 3 keepers, no more than 2 at any position

2018 4, same rule

2019 5- must keep QB/RB/WR/TE/flex of any of those

So basically its a mini-dynasty format.

We also allowed for off-season trades of draft picks. Our draft has always been a snake draft, but we got rid of the snake this year and are doing straight reverse order of finish. We do not have any type of penalty for keeping players- we basically just keep two players this year and start the draft with round 3.

So... what happened? Well, the guy who came in second place and has the 11th pick in the draft had a pretty awesome team. Bell, Dez, David Johnson, Evans, Gurley, Landry, Cooper, etc. Stacked! A couple of the really bad teams didn't have two players worth keeping imo (one team is keeping Luck/Baldwin for example) So it made sense for the stacked guy (let's call him Billy Bean) to make trades of his players since he can only keep 2. Billy traded Gurley for the 3rd overall pick. He traded Cooper for the 7th overall pick (?!) He traded Evans for a 3rd round pick. Note that he gave up a bunch of middle round picks to do so, but the guy is keeping Bell/DJ and will likely pick up 3 of the best WR left (Keenan, Alshon, Hilton) in the first round of our draft. In some ways its a win-win because the teams that had crappy keepers were able to upgrade.

I feel like this format might work as the years progress and there are more keepers and less room to maneuver, but are we looking at a non-parity disaster?

(fwiw, I have the 12th pick and managed to upgrade my draft by trading Jordy and Freeman)

the more players you keep the worse your league will become without some well thought out rules regarding keeping the same player consecutively or something based on draft position

also, people are dumb trading high picks for someones extra keepers because that person has no leverage at all. we keep a flat 2 (have done so for a couple years), and someones third keeper like ingram/marshall level will go for about an 8th rounder