The folks who volunteer to be our league commissioners deserve a little more of our respect.

No, Gary Bettman does not have a lower-body injury. Some would argue about a possible upper-body one though. Alas, this is not about his health.

This is about all those commissioners out there that take charge to organize their fantasy leagues. It is a thankless job so others can play a game.

They love the competition, so they do it because no one else wants the responsibility, have the time to do so, or willing to receive the evil eyes from other GMs.

Setting up a league's rules and settings can be irritating. Commissioners often get challenged and have to defend the configurations simply because they cannot satisfy the expectations of every owner. It is inevitable.

Too stringent, and owners complain that they cannot do enough to win, so they say they will fade out.

Too lenient, and owners argue that free agent trolls and heavy transaction GMs ruin the spirit of the competition, so their level of participation wanes.

How many players per team? Are there breakdowns by specific positions (RW/C/LW/D/G), by general positions (F/D/G), or no restrictions at all? Do you allow for utility spots? How large a bench? How many IR (and now IR+) slots? Maximum games played and transaction limits?

We have not even started on what stat categories to use.

Sometimes the arguments break down to the level of "letter of the law" vs. "spirit of the law" factions when deciding if there should be rule changes midseason.

How did we get here, and is it any better than where we started from?

Before the Internet produced sites like Yahoo that would run fantasy leagues, we were stuck with doing our calculations manually.

If you were lucky, you had a geek setup a custom piece of computer code or build a mega spreadsheet. Even at that, there still was some sort of laborious process that had to be executed in order to determine who was leading and by how many the other teams were behind.

Because this process was intensive and required a source for player statistics, it was executed once a week or even monthly.

Your league may have allowed for two or three roster changes and only on specific points in time. Why? Well aside from how difficult it would have been to allow changes on a daily basis back then, there was also the challenge to the accuracy of the stats. Usually these stats were compiled from the Tuesday edition of a local paper.

The stats were not always accurate and sometimes different papers had different values. Yes, this could have been very contentious for some owners. A point is a point and could have meant the difference between winning or losing.

To kind of alleviate that pressure, some leagues offered up bench spots or calculations that took the top 10 out of 13 players as the team total. This was in case owners incurred injuries, they still had a chance to win. The solution is passive though, and owners want to feel like they are in control.

Then sites like Yahoo come about and offer unprecedented abilities for leagues and GMS. No longer will we be stuck if our players were hurt during a season.

The irony is that the trolls came out of the shadows and made matters worse. Sure we could fix our lineups by picking up a free agent, provided that a troll was not up at 2:41 a.m. having first crack at what was available. This is an advantage for people that live on the west coast if others in the league live on the eastern side of the continent.

Thus limitations to games played or transactions were implemented. That still did not fix everything though.

My star player is injured and will come back in four weeks. I should not have to drop him to pick up some scraps only to have my star get scooped up by someone else later… so IR spots were created to augment the bench.

Still, there were more problems. Players that were listed as day-to-day but were clearly going to be hurt for a much longer period could not be placed on IR. We could not possibly compete with such irrational systems in place. I am going to lose because the system prevents me from making the changes I want to make.

Now we have IR+ spots that allow GMs to put day-to-day players somewhere without losing them. We are still at the mercy of the providers with regards to the position assessments of players… Phil Kessel is a center?

Do not get me started on the ability to roll back the stats, originally built for those leagues that did not run their draft before the start of the season. Tisk, tisk.

Hardly irradiant or irriguous solutions. It is like peeling an onion. The layers to the problem never end.

What will happen when our leagues allow in-game changes? Technology is moving so fast it could happen earlier than people expect.

Commissioners these days have so many setting to configure that it can be a little like cooking where you adjust the recipe as you make your meal. The problem is, are those tastes suited for everyone?

Any challenge of the settings mid-season leads to two things:

First, owners will devolve to "letter of the law" vs "spirit of the law". This is not exclusive to novice fantasy leagues. It can happen within the experts as well.

Second, nothing will change for the current season. At least one GM will be vehemently opposed to the change and thus nothing will be altered for the current season.

The damage from the rule change debate will be that some GMs come out hurt that their thoughts and ideas were not considered or that the other GMs appear as stubborn stick-in-the-muds who are unwilling to compromise. Neither is good.

Commissioners look bad too in these situations, if it appears they have a league where the owners do not get along.

What they can do if they should face a mid-season scenario like this is to:

A) Clearly state that they will listen to the GMs with the complaint.

B) Work with them to develop a proposal that is defined.

C) Clearly state that nothing will change for the season that is already in progress. All changes are to be implemented in the next one.

D) Determine what is the minimum level of acceptance needed to pass the change. Half plus one or unanimity?

E) Address all owners with the final proposal.

F) Take a vote and proceed as needed.

Or they can be like Mom when it was dinner time. Make all the decisions and if anyone did not like the meal there were no alternatives. Grumble all you like. We still had to eat what was made.

I would support any commissioner implementing either process and so should the other owners too.

It is a thankless job and we put it on someone else's shoulders.

It is not as grand as saying the “Wrath of Khan”, but would you want to face the Commissioner's Ire?