Could Fans of One FCFL Team Sabotage Another Team?

Given the opportunity, do you think fans of the Redskins would choose to sabotage the Cowboys?  Me too.  How about what fans of most teams would like to do to the Patriots?

Given the control that fans will have in the FCFL, it isn’t far-fetched to think that fans of one team may attempt to sabotage another team with bad decisions.  Who wouldn’t want their rival to hire an incompetent coach, cut their worst player from the team, or make a bad play call on the field?

The basic mechanism of the FCFL would seem to make this possible, although somewhat unlikely, to happen.  Before the season, fans will be able to choose which team to support. That will be the only team that they can use their tokens to influence.  While it seems fairly unlikely that anyone would allocate their tokens to a team other than their favorite prior to the season, it seems very possible that someone who hadn’t allocated tokens yet might be willing to sacrifice the other benefits of allocating tokens to their favorite team, and instead choose to give a rival team a push in the wrong direction.

Since the FCFL is being run by smart guys, I suspect that they’ll take steps to prevent this from happening, but it’s definitely something for them to keep an eye on.  A few measures that I’d recommend in order to mitigate the risk:

• Be aggressive monitoring for (and banning) users from having multiple accounts (which would allow influencing more than one team).
• Never give any one user too great a percentage of the voting power, regardless of how many tokens they hold.
• Limit the voting choices to reasonably good options, rather than including anything that would clearly hurt the team.
• For fans who allocate their tokens after the mid-point of a season, lock their tokens for the entire following season as well as the current one.