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A lot of people are jealous of me when they hear what I do for a living. They can't believe that I can be "working" while doing little more than sitting in front of the TV watching football. What an easy gig, they muse. And while they don't see the toil of the hours spent hunched over the computer keyboard, writing and rewriting thousands of words each week, I am certainly not complaining. I am quite thankful that my job doesn't involve the lifting of heavy objects or daily life-threatening situations. But after reading about this consultant in Sweden, I realize my job could be even easier.

Anders Larsson's job for the past few months has been to figure out where Santa Claus lives. Evidently, a number of towns close to the Arctic Circle who consider themselves "in the neighborhood" of the North Pole have all claimed to be the true home of one Kris Kringle. So Larsson set out to discover the exact starting point of a man who steers a reindeer-powered sleigh to deliver presents to children -- and settle this controversy once and for all.

He calculated that jolly old Saint Nick must be a resident of Kyrgyzstan if he were to have any chance at all of successfully completing his worldwide jaunt. Unfortunately, he also determined that even traveling against the earth's rotation while traveling at 3,604 miles per second, he would need to do the whole "slide down the chimney, drop off the gifts, fill the stockings and drink the milk and cookies, put Cindy Lou Who back to bed and get back up the chimney to the sleigh" routine in only 34 microseconds at each stop. And that defies the laws of physics.

So basically Mr. Larsson, in his efforts to find Santa's workshop, also indirectly disproved Santa's existence. As such, he has made the fact that no dry cleaners in Kyrgyzstan have ever had a customer drop off a sooty red suit irrelevant to his claim that Santa lives there, since according to his data, there could be no Santa Claus. So with no possible way to contradict his findings, he collects a nice big paycheck and calls it a day. Piece of cake!

You know what else should be an easy job? Fantasy football commissioner, once the playoffs get under way. You've set up your brackets (according to the predetermined criteria), and now all you must do is watch the matchups unfold and crown the champion. Easy enough, right? Well, some leagues still have their share of controversy, which can be so easily avoided. For instance, take this typical query: "I am the commissioner for my league, and a person has come to me with a complaint about a team that is not in the playoffs making roster moves. Is this fair?"

This kind of complaint comes to me every season. A player like Reggie Bush gets hurt. The owner who is now stuck at running back wants to claim Aaron Stecker to fill the void left in his lineup. He puts in a waiver claim, only to discover that Stecker has been picked up by the league's last-place team. To compound the matter, this league has no consolation bracket. They have no games left. This is not a keeper league. What kind of nonsense is this?!

The reason this problem occurs more often than not is the way most leagues write their rules. They provide details for a waiver-wire procedure, and it gets locked into place for the remainder of the season. Once the fantasy playoffs get underway, those rules don't change, and therefore there is nothing to prevent a team from "playing spoiler" and making roster moves when clearly they have no business doing so. And there's nothing from stopping a nefarious commish from logging in as a dead team and making such a claim so his opponent doesn't get a key free agent pickup ... but we'll dispense with the discussion of pure evil for today. I think by now we all know that's wrong on so many levels.

Clearly this type of "no-gain pickup" shouldn't happen. But the problem also occurs in good leagues with legitimate intentions. Some owners get upset when they are in their playoffs and a team in the consolation bracket makes a waiver claim of a guy they wanted. Well, why shouldn't they be able to? They're still playing for something. Why don't they also have a right to improve their team? If you want to argue that since they're out of the playoffs, they should have no opportunity to make waiver claims, then you should freeze their rosters once your regular season is over. But if the rules don't prevent that, you can't hate on an owner who is trying to win games.

But now we've arrived at the main point: All rosters should be frozen once your playoffs start.

The point of the playoffs is to determine which team is the best. Every owner has had week after week of opportunities to build a roster and put together the deepest team possible. The time has come to let the chips fall where they may. If an owner suddenly finds himself with some of his usual starters (Jason Campbell, Anquan Boldin and Jesse Chatman, for example) hurt, then he must go to his backups. He should not be able to simply grab Sage Rosenfels off the wire and throw him into his lineup. That rewards owners who react quickly over owners who have taken the time and planned ahead.

If you want to play in a league in which the owner who makes the most moves over the course of the year is the winner, then by all means, continue to play the way you do. But if you allow your owners to have a bench, then make that mean something. Let's see what kind of bench they have. If Brett Favre gets hurt in practice the day before the Packers play their playoff game, Green Bay throws Aaron Rodgers to the wolves. The same thing should happen to your team when your studs go down. If you thought you were in the clear and sitting pretty, and decided to use your roster to hoard running backs instead of having a second quarterback, then you should pay the price.

Look, it's bad enough when a fantasy team during the regular season finds out on Monday night that the tight end they started is out, so they go pick up the second-string tight end from the other team playing that night and wins by one point. Now you're going to let your league title be decided the same way? Not by who has the best players, but by whether this owner can get to the computer fast enough to make the move, or whether his opponent in the title game can summon the magical speed of Santa and quickly drop his scrubs to claim all the available free agents playing in that game first?

A lump of coal to all who can't see the forest through the trees in Kyrgyzstan.

All rise, The Court is adjourned!

A.J. Mass is a fantasy football, baseball and college basketball analyst for ESPN.com. You can e-mail him here.