I respect Mike's comment that money isn't the driving force behind PB but a love of this interactive SIM game.

That being the case...

In order to solve the problem of unmanaged teams, why not have a lottery of interested parties who are currently paying with an option to take over up to the number of teams you currently own. Then you would be given a draft order and would chose which team(s) to take over based on the order of your lottery pick. A low lottery pick and you may not have a choice of teams...but many of us like the challenge of developing a winner (maybe?). My guess is you could fill up the empty franchises with no problems.

Then to keep MONEY as part of the issue, these temporary managed teams would still be listed as available to be taken over by paying customers and the manager taking over the team would go into it knowing that to be the case. It might put pressure on some guys to trade for NOW instead of building for the future, but that isn't always a negative strategy. Still, the COMMISH would need to watch the trades carefully and use his veto power when he felt it necessary. My guess is most of us would manage the team appropriately and it would definitely free up the trade mill.

It would definitely increase the competitive nature of some leagues.

In addition, my guess is that it is more effort for the COMMISH to run games for the unmanaged teams than it is to supervise games between managed teams, so his workload might even be reduced.

Thoughts...?