Have you ever faced the following difficult choice on Sunday afternoon? You have a superstar, every-week starter in your lineup scheduled to play Monday night. The only problem is he's on the injury report and appears to be a true game-time decision. Now you have to decide whether you roll the dice and pray he's active or sub him out and risk missing out on a game-winning week.

With this rule change, this decision just got a lot easier. If you want this superstar to be in your lineup if he's active, you can leave him in there and designate a replacement in the event he's ruled out. All you have to do is notify the commissioner who your designated replacement is before his game kicks off and the commissioner will make the lineup change if the Monday night player is inactive.

Any designation is binding once the replacement's game has kicked off and the substitution will only be executed by the commissioner in the event the Monday night player is ruled out.

Managers may not flip this around and place the designated sub into his lineup and ask for the Monday night player to replace him if he is active. Any active player who locks into his team's lineup at kickoff will not be replaced under any circumstance.

While the vote was not quite unanimous, our league was very heavily in favor of adoption this rule change with 11 votes for and only 1 against.

While this rule change does not cover Sunday night players, if things go well in 2025 with the Monday night replacement rule and we feel a Sunday night replacement rule would be beneficial, we can amend this rule with a simple majority vote next offseason.

With a strong majority of 10 votes for and just 2 against, the AFL in 2025 will adopt a strike system to handle instances of managers leaving injured or bye week players in their lineups or leaving starting roster spots empty.

This needed to be addressed after an AFL-record 19 instances of one those three scenarios occurring during the 2024 season, by far a record.

Going forward, managers will be penalized on a strike schedule, with strikes being removed from a manager's record in reverse order after two full seasons (currently 30 regular season weeks).

The strike schedule is as follows:

1. Mulligan - everybody gets busy from time to time and an occasional week where you miss an injury is understandable.

2. FAAB & Tiebreaker Penalty - a second strike within 30 regular season weeks will result in a penalty of $100 FAAB from the current season's budget and a move to the back of all post-season tiebreakers. In the event an offending manager does not have $100 remaining in his current year's free agent budget, his remaining FAAB for the year will be forfeit plus $150 from the following season's budget (minus the amount that remained during the current season)

3. Repeat Penalty 2 & Draft Penalty - a third strike within 30 regular season weeks will result in a repeat of the second penalty and a move to the back of every round of the next year's AFL draft. In the event multiple managers receive their third strike and must serve this penalty in the same season, they will snake the last two or more picks of each round in the same order they would have drafted in relation to each other.

4. Dismissal from the AFL - a fourth strike within 30 regular season weeks suggests that your level of attention to your team is not compatible with the AFL's need to maintain fair competition between all managers.

As an example of how strikes will be removed. If a manager commits his first penalty in Week 1 of the 2025 season and a second penalty in Week 8 of the 2026 season with no further infractions to follow, the second penalty would be removed entering Week 1 of the 2027 season. If a second strike is then earned again in Week 7 of the 2028 season, it would be immediately removed entering Week 8 of the 2028 season and then the first strike would be removed entering Week 1 of the 2029 season.

We had five different combinations of three rule changes available for voting. With six first choice votes, three second choice votes, and three third choice votes, the winning combination was as follows:

1. Defenses may no longer be placed on Injured Reserve

2. Players without an injury designation (minimum: questionable) at the time they are placed on IR must serve an additional two weeks on Injured Reserve beyond the requirement currently enforced.

The third rule change up for a vote, which would have reduced managers' IR allotment from three to two, will not be adopted.

In the past, we've had various layers to breaking ties between more than two teams by looking at H2H records. First we'd look to see if any manager involved in the tie had swept all other involved managers. If that was not the case, we'd then look at winning percentages in games against other managers involved in the tie. If that eliminated a manager, we would restart the process with the remaining managers.

With this revision to the tiebreaker process, we will only consider H2H in ties between more than two managers if one manager swept all others invovled in the tie. If that is not the case, we will immediately move to the next step in the tiebreaker process, which is points scored.

Since we instituted the ability to keep a second player every year in the form of a TAXI keeper, the main requirement was that these players be rookies who were kept out of starting lineups and on the TAXI squad over the second half of the season.

The idea of a rookie keeper is a popular one, but the implementation has been less than ideal with several excellent rookie players who would have been hugely beneficial to their teams essentially being 'redshirted' without the benefit that a redshirt gives college players.

Enter our new system for rookie keeper eligibility.

Rookie keeper value will now be determined by a point schedule, with increased value given to any rookie who is in his manager's starting lineup every week of the fantasy regular season when healthy. Here are the two schedules for rookie keeper value:

For rookies who do not start every fantasy regular season game when healthy, the schedule is determined by the number of points he scored in and out of starting fantasy lineups:

• 250.00+ points - Round 4

• 225.00-249.99 points - Round 5

• 200.00-224.99 points - Round 6

• 175.00-199.99 points - Round 7

• 150.00-174.99 points - Round 8

• 137.50-149.99 points - Round 9

• 125.00-137.49 points - Round 10

• 112.50-124.99 points - Round 11

• 100.00-112.49 points - Round 12

• 87.50-99.99 points - Round 13

• 75.00-87.49 points - Round 14

• 62.50-74.99 points - Round 15

• 50.00-62.49 points - Round 16

• <50.00 points - ineligible as rookie keeper but eligible as traditional keeper

For rookies who do start every fantasy regular season game when healthy, the schedule is as follows:

• 200.00+ points - Round 12

• 175.00-199.99 points - Round 13

• 150.00-174.99 points - Round 14

• 125.00-149.99 points - Round 15

• <125.00 points - Round 16

With this change, the TAXI squad will be reduced from 2 available spots to 1 available spot. This will continue to allow managers to utilize the spot to roster one additional rookie beyond the active roster allotment. The TAXI squad will, however, no longer serve any other purpose, so rookies may be moved on and off the TAXI squad without impacting their rookie keeper eligibility status.

Before we get to the last change for 2025, here are the ballot items that did not pass:

Replace TE with WR/TE Flex

By a narrow margin of 7-5, our managers have voted against replacing the starting tight end spot with a pass catching flex.

This was the second time this lineup change has been put to a vote, but the first time it stood by itself. After the 2022 season, three possible lineup changes were proposed and while one person gave this his first choice vote, eight first choice votes went toward keeping the current lineup. This suggests there is a growing interest in implementing a receiver flex in place of being required to start a tight end. Perhaps a few years down the line this will come to a vote once more.

Remove Best-in-Division Tiebreaker Step

With a tie vote of 6 in favor and 6 against, we will keep our current best-in-division tiebreaker as a part of determining the wild card.

This step in the tiebreaker process takes place if three or more teams are tied for the wild card playoff spot and two or more of them share a division. Ties must first be broken within the division before breaking ties between teams across divisions.

End Injury Stashing

With 7 first choice votes and 5 second choice votes, managers chose to keep the current system enabling them to stash an injured player as a traditional keeper option for the following season regardless of whether they met a minimum requirement for games started.

Other options were to institute a minimum of 4 starts, 8 starts, or 10 starts for a player to be eligible as a traditional keeper. A minimum of 4 starts garnered the most support among those options, but not enough to change our current system.

And that brings us to the final ballot item each offseason. In the event there is a league dispute over an issue involving both Cory Puffett and Eric Meyer, such as a trade, we elect a new Assistant to the Commissioners each offseason to settle those disputes.

The Assistant to the Commissioners must have been in the league for the past three consecutive seasons and cannot serve in the role in consecutive years. We introduced this position in 2021, and thus far the position has been filled by the following:

• 2021 -  Evan Ash

• 2022 - Stephen April

• 2023 - Evan Ash

• 2024 - Brandon Saunders

Since he served in the role last year, Brandon Saunders is not eligible as ATTC this year. Jeffery McDonald just completed his first season in the AFL and must play two more seasons before he would be eligible for the position.

Here are the results of this year's vote, where a first-choice vote was worth 2 points and a second-choice vote was worth 1 point:

Alex Kincaid - 1 first-choice vote (2 points)
Alex Mayo - 1 first-choice vote (2 points)
Sean Kennedy - 3 second-choice votes (3 points)
William Battle - 4 second-choice votes (4 points)
Evan Ash - 2 first-choice votes (4 points)
Stephen April - 2 first-choice votes & 4 second-choice votes (8 points)
Will Massimini - 6 first-choice votes & 1 second-choice vote (13 points)

Will Massimini will be appointed to the position of Assistant to the Commissioners in 2025.