I could be wrong......but I think the reason there are no rules is because Keeper leagues don't have rules per se rather they are what the League want them to be.

Some sites have guidelines such as https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasybball/comments/6n82s7/simple_keeper_league_rules/

but in the end I think its more about what everyone is happy with.

We started ours about 5 years ago with a 10 team 9 cat league using a snake draft (in retrospect we should have done the initial draft as a auction imo).

We keep 6 players each season (no restrictions on salary etc) and can trade those players along with the following years draft picks (1 - 6) during the season.

Yeah, I think that's correct. Most systems just let you 'turn on' keeper format, but beyond that, the commish basically just has a bunch of extra work based on whatever rules the league decides upon.

One of the pretty simple sets to follow is:

UP TO 3 players kept with a 2-round penalty from where they were drafted or kept the previous year. All players can be traded throughout the offseason. Kept players must be rostered before X date (to prevent people from picking up a bunch of rookies on the last day of the season).

Hey ameenkreidieh,

I am LM of a couple of keeper leagues in ESPN, I guess we have those rolling for a while now and that's the only reason we keep them there. You basically have to do everything manually if you want to set some rules (like trade picks during regular season; pick penalty for the next draft as mentioned above), the Keeper leagues on ESPN basically allow you to keep the number of players you decide from season to season and trade picks during the off season.

If you want to start a keeper league I would recommend you to do it on Fantrax since you have a much larger option of settings over there, and you can have your league more automatize and not so LM activity dependent.

Hope it was helpful.