INFO ABOUT PARITY 

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Who should play Parity?
Parity is a faster and more competitive level of play. It is not recommended for beginners. If you are unsure whether you should try Parity, please email us BEFORE registration opens for a detailed explanation of this style of play.

What is a parity league? A parity league is an individual signup league designed to create teams that are balanced and periodically rebalanced, to have relatively even games (i.e., parity) throughout the season.

Why should I play Parity League? Parity league is attractive to players for a number of reasons. Some of the attractions include:

• Relatively balanced games every week, with no blowouts

• Opportunity to play with, and get to know, different players; even greater variety than a typical hat league, due to trades

• Tracking of statistics provides opportunity for quantitative feedback on your game

How are teams initially formed? Initially teams are chosen during a Draft Auction Night, where the General Managers are given an amount of money (half a million dollars!) to purchase their players. Because each GM has a limited amount of money, and each GM can outbid the other GMs—assuming they have enough money left and are willing to offer a higher bid for that player, of course—the teams will (read: should) organically start out relatively balanced, resulting in teams with a mix of experience and skill. Even if one GM ends up with a super power squad because of mastery during the auction draft, this over-powered team will be forced to trade away some of its strength through the rebalancing process.

How are teams rebalanced? Once the season begins all players have statistics tracked throughout games. Players are assigned a “salary” based on their accumulated stats. Teams will thus have a total salary based on the total for all players on that team. Periodically teams will be assessed against a “salary cap”, and any team that is over this cap will need to make trades for lower-salaried players to get back under the cap. This helps ensure that teams that have a number of strong players will need to trade some away to teams that are doing less well statistically, which over the course of the season helps keep all teams balanced.

How do trades work? Each team will have a general manager (GM) who is responsible for making trades each week as needed. GMs receive all statistics and salary calculations, so that when they are assessed over the salary cap, they are able to make trades that will keep them under cap. Teams may make additional trades (even where cap room is not a problem) as long as they are under cap at the end of trades.

How are statistics tracked? What are the statistics tracked? How is the salary calculated from these? Statistics are tracked through a standard statsheet all teams receive before games (and which are collected for entry following games). Any player on the sideline can enter stats on play as it occurs. Statistics tracked are:

• goals, assists, second assists, Ds (i.e., passes defended by a player), throwaways (including turfed throws, throws into D, and stalls), and receiver drops. For those not familiar with the terms, “goal” is the person who caught the point, “assist” is the person that threw for the goal, and “second assist” is the person that threw to the assist person.

Salary is calculated as:

• $100,000 (the initial value)

• PLUS $5,000*(total goals + total assists)

• PLUS $3,500*(total second assists + total Ds)

• MINUS $2,500*(total throwaways + throws into D + turnovers on stall count + drops)

• PLUS $10,000 bonus for each team win.

A player that misses a game will be assigned an in absentia salary increase value for that week to represent what their value change may have been if they had played - so that a very strong player with less-than-perfect attendance doesn't hold an unrealistically lower relative value, which often causes unfair team balance issues. This in absentia value will be based on the relative strength of that particular player.

Taking stats requires volunteers, and we all want to play. If you help with taking stats for any part of a week, you get a ballot into the season-end “volunteer draw” for some sweet prizes. If you help each week, even for just a few points, that’s 10 ballots for this draw, because you will have helped 10 weeks. So please donate a small amount of your time (for example when resting after subbing off the field) and everyone will benefit.

How does the salary cap work? Team salaries are the total of all players on the team. To start, all players will have a salary of $100,000 so a team/pod with 7 roster slots will have a starting salary of $700,000 (7 x $100,000 players); this will increase each week as players accumulate stats. At each trading period the salary cap is calculated. This cap is calculated as the average team salary (sum of all team salaries divided by number of teams), plus a buffer of $50,000. Continuing with the example above, at the start, with 4 teams of 7 players of $100k each ($700k total salary per team), the cap would be set at $750,000 ($700k + $50k buffer), and so all 4 teams are under the cap.

As noted earlier, any team that is over this calculated cap MUST trade one or more players with one or more other teams to get back under the cap. If no teams agree to a trade, and the over-cap team cannot get under the cap, the League will impose a trade after a reasonable period of discussion among the GMs to try to get trade agreement.

If there are one or more weeks of no trade activity, because all teams miraculously just happen to stay under the cap each week, then one or more events may happen, including but not limited to:

• reducing the buffer from $50,000 to $25,000 for the salary cap calculation; or

• an "assassin" event, where each team can "assassinate" another team's player, and each team can designate one player on their team that cannot be assassinated (no-one will know who has been selected for assassination or for protection until all teams have chosen both; or

• any other creative mechanism suggested or chosen.