Seems to me that closing leagues is part of the answer to the Unmanaged Team problem. Barring a wave of new owners suddenly, eliminating leagues will help fill remaining existing leagues. Those owners (active or not) who are displaced get first shot at available unmanaged teams. Perhaps their ranking can be based on length of ownership in the closed leagues.

In quickly looking at some stats, there currently are 37 leagues with 151 unmanaged teams. That's around a 20% average vacancy over all of PB. So having about 4 UNM teams per league is what you can expect. I propose closing leagues that have 6 or more vacancies (that's 13 leagues) and moving those owners into the 24 remaining leagues. I know that affects alot of owners (I would be one of them). But it seems like it is the solution to numerous problems.

The benefits I see are that many leagues will have few vacancies. This encourages active trading, good competition, and successful leagues with active participants. It reduces the stress on Mike and Tech to manage UNM trades, play UNM games, and helps speed play up in the remaining leagues during the regular season and the playoffs to some extent (fewer UNM teams = fewer delays).

The drawbacks are that some owners will have to relinquish teams that they may have had for a long time. Given the fact that it will improve PB in the long run, I think most would be willing to do so. I won a Championship in a RT league last season that had 11 unmanaged teams. To be honest it sucked all year in trying to do trades and winning it all felt a little hollow.

Is there anything that I'm seriously missing with this post or does it mostly make sense?