SDMB Auction fantasy football league

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

At this point this thread is just a guage of interest in running an auction-style FF draft league. I know some people in the other league we’re making are interested in trying it.

Feel free to try this as a 2nd or 3rd league because you’re curious about auction leagues… or for any reason for that matter. You don’t have to be super hardcore or anything, although you must show up for the draft - there’s no autodraft in auction FF.

How it works is that instead of a set draft order, players go up for auction. Each team has a set amount of money (usually $100 but it’s arbitrary). Everyone bids until someone the highest price is finally settled. The player is awarded to the highest bidder, who has the amount of the bid subtracted from their total. You can try paying big premiums for elite players, or you can try to make a team by getting more value out of mid-level players, or anything in between. There’s a lot more strategy and interactivity involved in the drafting process.

Which is why it’s usually done in person, rather than online. Most fantasy football providers don’t support an auction-based draft. But… what most do support is draft results manually entered by the commissioner.

So what I’m thinking is that we’d all get on some sort of live chat, IRC probably being the best candidate (something like Ventrilo would be even cooler, although I doubt everyone will have a headset), and have a live, interactive auction draft. Someone (probably me) will function as the auctioneer and keep track of players and money, and eventually enter the results of the draft into a yahoo fantasy football league.

Right now, I just want to see if there’s enough interest in this to be viable. Please list what times you’d be available for a draft, keeping in mind that they probably run a few hours I’m guessing because the draft process is more involved.

2

Gonna give one bump a try. I know there are two others interested who haven’t posted to the thread for some reason, and maybe there are others. We could play a smaller league, maybe with 8 people, if it comes to that - or maybe it just isn’t going to work out. Either way, it’s worth one more try.

By the way, this isn’t asking for a commitment at this stage - it’s just an interest list - so don’t be afraid to post here if you’re unsure.

3

I’ll give this a bump and indicate that I’m very interested in doing an auction league, so long as the competition level is elevated. I’d also be very interested in a dynasty league. very, very interested. I have ventrilo and a headset too.

I’d like to point out that an auction draft is loads more fun than a regular draft because of the inherent increased communication and strategy involved. I’d really recommend it to any player with experience drafting fantasy.

4

Sorry, I have been stupidly busy at work recently and have missed this until now. I would also be interested in joining if we can get the people together and make it work. Come on, more interest!

5

Very little experience in fantasy(football that is),but would give it a go if ya need me.

6

How would this work logistically?

7

As I understand it, real life auction drafts work by having a certain bidding order. The first player in the order starts the process by bidding on a player. It then goes around in a circle with each player in turn given a chance to up the bid. When a circle is completed without an additional bid, the last bidder wins the player.

How we’d do that online, I guess, is that we’d either use a voice comm program like ventrilo (unlikely that everyone interested will have a microphone) or a real time chat program of some sort (public IRC server seems like the easiest route here). Or a combination of both - those who could talk on voice chat would to speed things up, and those who couldn’t would type.

We could either use the around-the-table format, or just let people bid openly, the highest bid winning. In the event that two people bid the same amount, but were unwilling to go higher, I guess the first person to say/enter it would win.

We would have as many rounds as we had positions (and bench).

I’m open to suggestions, I’ve never done anything like this before. Sounds like it could be fun, though. How many players would we need to have a reasonable league? 6? 8? 10? We could offset a small number of players by giving more starting roster positions to work with, so that people wouldn’t just bid ridiculously high for the top few players.

Edit: I just remembered that Ventrilo has a text chat function built in, so that would probably be the best way to handle it all around. Not everyone will have a mic, but I’m guessing everyone will have speakers, so we could do a hybrid voice/text draft. If that idea is unpopular for some reason, we could just do a straight text communication draft.

8

I’m willing to give it a try. I’m already involved in an embarrassing number of leagues, so at this point, whats one more?

9

Well we’ve got a little over a week to still do this, if people want to.
As of now, we have an interest list of:

Myself
EsotericEnigma
Kiros
MadTheSwine
Omni

I’m not sure if Ellis Dee is interested or not.

6 players would be quite a small league, but 8 might be decent. Then again, 6 might work. I’d be willing to try it even with fewer people because it’s different and interesting. But maybe we could get a few more people to sign on in the next few days and do this.

Could those people who were interested, if they still are interested, please list the times they’d be available between now and next Wednesday (inclusive), to see if we could work out a time when 6+ people would be available?

I should be available anytime between this Wednesday and next, so long as I have a day’s notice.

10

I’ll give it a shot. I can’t do weekdays before 7:30pm Eastern.

11

Does anyone have experience with smaller leagues? What’s the fewest amount of players one could have where the game is still interesting and fun? If you have a few players, do you typically make each player have a large roster with lots of starting positions? Does the auction draft aspect change any of that?

Personally, I’m up for anything, but I’m wondering how many people we’d need for everyone to be happy with trying it.

12

I’d definitely be interested. We don’t have long to get a firm number of players and a draft time that everyone can agree on, but it’s not impossible, and a draft after Week 1 wouldn’t be a terrible option if it came to that.

I’ve been in 8-man leagues, and they seemed just fine as far as size goes. In a way there’s an upside: there’s less need to rely on backups or marginal starters who might hardly get any playing time in a given week. I think standard roster sizes would be best.

13

Possibly futile <bump>.

14

Well, let’s try this. Let’s set a date of Wednesday September 5th at 8pm eastern as our draft time, and if enough people show up to form a league - great.

If anyone wants to chime in and say “Wednesday isn’t good for me, but I can do Tuesday” or something, feel free, we’ll try to accomodate people.

Does anyone object to the ventrilo idea? It’s free software, those with microphones can talk, those without can listen, and everyone can use the built-in text chat feature. I can run a server.

I propose that we use default yahoo scoring rules, as the auction part will be different enough as it is.

We’ll also have to figure out rosters. We’ll probably want to have big, deep rosters if we’re only expecting to have like 6-8 people in the league.

If you’re still interested, please chime in and say if Wedesday at 8 EST is good for you, if ventrilo is good for you, roster size preferences, whatever.

15

Does anyone know if you can draft on Wednesday the 5th and still be eligible to be scored week 1? I recall some yahoo sports page saying something to the extent of “drafts must be completed by ______ to be eligible to be scored for week 1”, but I can’t remember what that date is, and I’m not finding it in any yahoo sports help page.
We’re still accepting people into this, by the way, so if you’re interested feel free to post and show up. We can adjust league and roster sizes by how many people are interested.

16

I would be interested, I can do Wednesday but would prefer to start later. I have ventrilo already, but no working mic so I could only listen to the conversation.

17

As far as the later thing - I’ll keep that in mind as a preference - but never having done one of these things, I’m not sure how long it’ll take, which is why I was thinking that if it worked for everyone, earlier was preferable to later.

18

How typically this works is that the owners all sit around a table. Someone is chosen to bid on a player. I’m not sure if it typically starts at $1, or an arbitrary number of the owner’s choice… the latter is probably superior to speed things up - no need for us to go in 50+ increments for elite players. Anyway… from the owner who bid on the player, it goes around the table - and as it’s each peron’s turn, they have the option to bid a higher increment or pass, until a full circle is done when no one increases the bid, then the last bidder wins the player.

I figure doing this online it would be speedier if players just openly bid on the player until we reach a point where we have no more bids. Now… we’ll have an actual “circle” order of people who are choosing who the next player up for bid is, and to solve the issue of what happens when multiple people bid the same amount, but none are willing to go higher then the person closest to the original bidder in terms of their order in the rotation will win the player. This way the order of tie priority is rotated every time a new player is up for grabs, and it should be fair to everyone, but still lets us speed up the process by not requiring everyone to wait their turn to place a bid. Sound reasonable?

The best way to conduct this, I think, will be the ventrilo software. It’s a popular, free software with no spyware and supports simultaneous text chat and voice chat. I can run the server. If anyone objects to this for some reason, we can consider another option like using a public IRC network.

I’ll be running the auctions, writing down who wins what at what price, telling people how much money they have left, etc. After that, I’ll enter all the data into a yahoo manual/offline draft and from that point on we adjust our rosters on yahoo like a normal FF league.

Since we probably won’t have a league bigger than 8 people, although it’d be nice if we did, we should consider having a lot of starting roster postions to keep it interesting. (If we had only 8 players and only a few starting spots, starting decisions would be easy because everyone’s roster could look like an all star game roster). Something like QB QB RB RB WR WR WR W/R TE K DEF DEF perhaps? Maybe that’s too many, I don’t know, I haven’t really done the small league thing. We might have to plan for only having 6, although I hope we can get at least 8.

Any questions/suggestions/confirming of interest/whatever would be welcome.

19

I really think a standard number of positions would be best: QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR, TE, K, DEF. Maybe you could add a RB/WR flex spot.

20

I’m in, gents.