Just like the lead up to the Super Bowl, we took an extra week to finally get to the Championship Round of our Fantasy Throwdown “For The Heck of It” Tournament series. Our reason for the delay is less elusive to the build up the NFL likes to manufacture prior to its annual showcase event. Simply and understandably, Superstorm Sandy knocked some of our regular players out of commission from fantasy football. We certainly hope they were able to weather the storm well enough and are able to return to some semblance of normalcy, if not entirely yet then soon.

Now the Championship Round is ready to be played. Lets wrap up the tournament – or shall I say, tournaments – this week. We started with three, 12-team tourneys featuring representatives from each of the awesome fantasy football websites, Dynasty League Football, Footballguys and Pro Football Focus. Through Round 1 and Round 2, we’ve dwindled the field to a pair of combatants in each tournament to fight for the A-Side Championship, and four runner-ups competing for the B-Side Championship.

Each A-Side and B-Side Champ wins an official Fantasy Throwdown t-shirt. The A-Side Champ wins 7.5 bonus points towards their Leaderboard ranking. The B-Side Champ wins 5 bonus points towards their Leaderboard ranking. Each wins eternal bragging rights, of course, and if we had one of those fancy websites with badges or medals they’d get one of those too. Maybe some day.

There are our combatants. The A Championship is a best-of-three game head-to-head battle. The B Championship is a three game round robin, winner determined by won-loss record and then tie-breaker procedures as applied in prior rounds if necessary.

Now I’d like to announce a rule change we’re going to try for the tournament championship games. This is the “For The Heck of It” tournament series, so we’re going to implement a “For The Heck of It” rule change. The new rule should equally benefit both competitors and add a little more posturing and cunning for these big games.

Trading. Technically, it is like waivers, but I’d like to call it trading. In each championship game, each Throwdown player can trade in one of the players they drafted in exchange for another player not already drafted (or blocked). The past few weeks we’ve really seen an increase in the number of late reported injuries causing some havoc for those drafting early and taking a zero when a player doesn’t suit up Sunday as expected. I’d like to try this trade rule to counter that. It is going to be a manual process, so take note, here is how it works:

• Each Throwdown player has one trade available per Throwdown game
• Any player in your lineup, including the blocked player, can be exchanged for any other player not already selected or blocked in the challenge
• An active player must be exchanged with a player at the same position
• An active player cannot be exchanged for a player you blocked at the same position, or vice versa
• To trade a player, send an email, tweet or Facebook post to Fantasy Throwdown (a.k.a. Mike and Matt) indicating your username, the challenge name, player to drop and player to add
• Trade requests can only be made from Friday at 3:00 pm Eastern through Monday at 8:30 pm Eastern. Requests received prior to this will be ignored. Requests must be made prior to opening kickoff of both players in the trade request.
• Trade requests will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis
• Trades cannot be combined into a single challenge, it is strictly one trade per challenge
• Once a trade request is made, it cannot be taken back
• Throwdown players are not required to use their trade option

That about covers it, we hope. It could prove interesting if players use the Monday night game in their challenge! Remember, this only applies to tournament games this week. We’ll see how it goes. This should help protect players from late week injury news, and maybe it will get people to take a few more risks in their challenges if a good injured player is truly on the bubble.

The tournament games should already be in your Game Manager. Good luck this week