This can be the thread where we discuss general fantasy football topics before we all spread out into our seperate FF threads for each league. You can discuss anything here - from your regular league, to who should be the #1 pick this year, to proposing leagues and scoring systems, whatever.
I usually run a lot of NFL-related SDMB threads and leagues and this year will be no different. I plan to continue our invite only/high participation SDMB All-Pro league (last year’s thread) for the fourth year. Last year’s players are automatically invited back - if we have any openings I’ll post about it.
There’s the salary cap league which was a little different - each player has a dollar value associated with their performance and you fill all your positions with a set amount of salary space trying to get the best value. If your player rises in value, you get to keep him for the low price, so finding sleepers is critical. Since multiple people can own the same players you can have as many players in this one as you want.
Then there are of course the pick 'em and survival leagues(thread). We had 3 pick 'em leagues - straight up, confidence, and spread. I’ll be doing the same again this year.
I posted this in last year’s thread but never got around to starting a new league. I’ll look into doing it this year:
I also wanted to try a new kind of FF league of some sort that’s different and challenging in some way. For example - an extreme depth league with 16-20 teams where every team has a significant amount of starting slots so that you might be facing the decision of whether to start Tampa Bay’s third down back or Houston’s 4th receiver in your flex spot. Not sure if we can get 16-20 people interested in that idea though. Or perhaps an efficiency league where you subtract points for every pass/rush attempt/etc thereby rewarding the best per-play performance from players rather than the raw numbers. Or maybe a zero bench league where if you want to switch what starter you have on your roster, you’ll have to cut your current one. I’m open to ideas.
I may also run some sort of open pool competition. Something related to sports betting (where we get X in monpoly dollars and bet them according to some agreed-upon sports book/bet types). Or perhaps a yardage pool, where you pick the player you think will have the most yardage in passing/receiving/rushing categories that week, but you can only use each player once. Then your score for that week becomes whatever the yardage numbers are for those players.
So let’s get this ball rolling. Any FF topic is fair game.
I’ve done a few mock drafts on ESPN.com recently. I want both Fitzgerald and Brees. In one draft, I was the #1 pick and I took Fitz. Immediately, I got a lot of people telling me I ruined their mock draft. I know, you’re supposed to take a top running back in that position. Ideally, I’d pick late enough in the first round to get Fitz and then turn around and get Brees.
On another topic, anyone do auction drafts for fantasy football? I’ve done them for baseball, especially keeper leagues. I’m not sure auction adds as much with the NFL as you have a much shorter season.
Finally, fantasy football discussion time! That means the league won’t be too far away now.
I’ve tried for two seasons now to get in the auction league here on the Dope and both times had an emergency come up and couldn’t make the draft. I’m definitely making it this year.
I did a few mock drafts on ESPN. This season is definitely going to be a turning point in the way fantasy football is traditionally played. The game has changed so much that this will probably be the last season where traditional draft strategies work and those that can adapt will start winning more often in the future. When the least talented half of a backfield tandem is being drafted in the top 5 on average, the game has changed.
I won’t discuss specifics though, too much competition lurking. I’m very disappointed I let myself fall out of a medal spot in last year’s league. I’m gunning for a repeat of '07.
I forgot to add that Yahoo is apparently adding live stat tracker (live scoring) for free. Great.
Last year for the auction league we ended up cramming ourselves into an ESPN mock draft and then transferring the data over to yahoo. Should we just all sign up for ESPN this year and do it there? I have no experience with ESPN’s fantasy system… I prefer keeping it all on one site… but what we ended up doing last year was pretty awkward.
As I recall, much of the awkwardness was from the commish failing to get the draft room squared away in time, forcing us to scramble to find an available mock room.
The actual transfer from ESPN to Yahoo is relatively painless, if a bit tedious for the commish.
Why do you have to be a bitter ass about every little thing? You’re lucky “the commish” bothers to find a place for you after all your snide little comments.
I wasn’t able to “square away” a draft room. We didn’t have an ESPN league, so we agreed to show up at the same time and enter the same mock draft to use their mechanisms. There wasn’t a reservation process. But not everyone got there on time, and we had some difficulty working out the logistics.
I was also trying to do it from the wifi on a crappy laptop from a coffee house when I had internet access maybe a half hour a day since I was out of town
I was trying to bust your chops, you know like how fantasy football works, but if you want to be all butthurt about it don’t feel you have to “make room” for me.
We did have an ESPN draft room. As I recall the commish was supposed to show up no later than an hour before to activate or reserve it or whatever, but you misread it and thought that meant to wait until less than an hour before. Thus we lost the ESPN draft room, forcing us to scramble for a mock room.
Not a big deal and it worked out fine, which is exactly the kind of situation where trash talk is appropriate. God forbid you should ever have a sense of humor about anything.
You’re right, I forgot about that. This post explains what happened. I still say that ESPN’s instructions were, at best, poorly worded. “The scheduled time” sure sounds like the time of the draft to me, rather than an hour before. But you’re right though in that we had a scheduled time and I screwed it up. So we can do the same thing this year, knowing about that particular pitfall ahead of time.
I think you’re really bad at the whole friendly ribbing thing. Maybe it’s just me, but you almost no humor and a large percentage of your posts are dripping with hostility and/or condescension. So when you attempt to sound light hearted, it sounds to me like hostile.
I think we’ve had this conversation before, and I said I’d try to lighten up and read less hostility into your posts, but the tone of your post instantly pushed my buttons. Maybe it’s me - maybe I just don’t get you. Or it may be that you don’t do the switch from your default hostile posting style to light hearted ribbing well.
Anyway, I probably overreacted and I’m sorry. For whatever reason, you seem to be the only person on the boards that gets that consistent reaction out of me.
"Set weekly matchups for your Head-to-Head league
Create a balanced division-weighted schedule
Step up the competition by choosing a Rivalry Week
Additional Divisions
Choose up to four divisions in your Head-to-Head league and assign division winners the top playoff seeds."
Anyone ever played with a divison-based league? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
“New Waivers Options
Try Acquisition Budgets for a fairer waiver claims process
Place blind bids on waived players-- highest bid wins!
Choose Sunday-Tuesday or first game-Tuesday waiver claim periods”
This could be interesting. If they have an automated way to do the gametime till Tuesday waiver system we have, that’d be great. It’s a good system but it’s a minor pain to do manually.
I’m not sure if these are seperate features, or if it’s only attached to the new auction-style waiver system they mention. Could be a nice feature if it’s designed well.
Yeah, I definitely overreacted. My bad. I forgot about the screwup I had made, and I thought I was getting blamed for coordinating a hard-to-arrange mock draft in a public room where anyone could join, when the SDMB was slow/timing out that day and it was hard to get the word out.
SeniorBeef (or anyone for that matter), I’d love to join a league where an on-line real-time draft is the only way to go. I am commissioner of a league that just won’t commit to a real draft, so I have to let the computer do it. It sucks, but I’ve been running the league for 9 years now, so it’s kind of like a tradition of sorts.
With the free stuff out there, there’s no reason not to hold a real-time draft. In person is the most fun, but to connect with hi-speed internet and get a guy to slide down to you, or ruin a draft by picking Fitzgerald no 1. (I like that pick, btw) is the best!
Just PM me, anyone looking for a player. I don’t follow these threads on a daily basis, and I’d hate to miss out on something good.
About the league ideas, I think a super deep league would be fun and interesting. I personally wouldn’t get involved in an efficiency league set up in that matter, nor a league with no bench. Don’t appeal to me, personally.
I actually really want to join a keeper league. I’ve never found one that lasted two seasons.
No kidding. And no worries; I’m comfortable with my asshole-ness.
I’m a yahoo guy all the way, and I expect another 3 leagues again this year. If I can do three fantasy leagues plus a salary cap, I’d be willing to give the salary cap thing a second shot. As I recall I was consistently dead last, and by no small margin. But hey, beginner’s luck, right?
If I only get three leagues, I plan on the keeper league (which I desperately need to create this year’s thread for,) the main SDMB non-keeper league and the auction league.
I really wish we could find a better auction site if only because the ESPN auction draft is soooooooooooooo slooooooooooooooooooooow. Didn’t it take almost 4 hours last year? They desperately need a “not interested” button that if everyone clicks the current bid wins and you move on to the next player. Minimum 30 seconds per bid (or whatever it was) was brutal. Still, even with that hassle it was fun enough to be worth it and (probably) better than the manual auction we did two years ago.
Just a heads up: The He Hate Me keeper league is once again drafting in its traditional Labor Day (Monday) 10:15pm time slot. With a dozen FF dopers involved, it would be good to avoid scheduling another draft at the same time.
Though you guys might have enough people interesting in starting a second keeper league, at which point I’d recommend using that same timeslot.
Yeah, salary cap is a seperate game from the regular FF so it doesn’t take up one of your league slots.
I don’t know any other sites for auction drafts. It was on the slow side but not horribly… if people would speed up with their intentions a bit instead of trying to play ebay sniper by waiting till it ticked down to .5 seconds (since that reset the counter anyway) it’d go more quickly.
I actually liked the first year we did it even though it was a hectic mess - it had a sort of authenticity to it when we were all a bit clueless and basically worked together with the equivelant of a notepad and paper to get it done.
In other news, I think I saw a yahoo fantasy sports app for the ipod touch/iphone a few weeks ago. If that integrates well with the live scoring I’ll be happy. I really love the information overload of being surrounded by 15 or 20 TVs in a sports bar with the internet at my fingertips too.
I reserved a couple league draft spots on Yahoo because I was thinking about setting up a league a bit like one I did a few years ago:
efficiency-oriented, with high yards-per-attempt and avoidance of turnover trumping raw yard totals and vultured TDs.
point-scoring set so that game scores resembled real-life NFL scores: i.e. winning 34 to 26, not 107.98 to 84.86.
I think Ellis was in that league, so he can comment on whether it worked.
But I also want to add:
11 individual defenders. This does NOT need to be a lot of work – the way the scoring is set up, most of your defenders would probably score 0 or 1 point anyway, so if you have an empty slot because of an injury or whatever, it’s not a killer. But if a defender has a 2-sack, 10-tackle, fumble recovery for TD game, he can make a huge difference, just like in real life.
Anybody interested in this?
I’ll probably open it for registration and we’ll see how many people we can get. I think you can have a max of 20, but if only X people show up we can just run with that many.
How many positions should we be looking at?
Something like:
QB
RB
RB
WR
WR
WR
RB/WR
TE
TE
K
DEF
If we get 16 or fewer players, we could do double QB or def. If we had a 20 man league with those rosters you’d have to really be scraping up talent from the bottom of the barrel for some of your slots, but I like the idea… it’d be different enough from my other leagues that it would be a unique challenge in itself.
I think it looks good except for the double TE. If you’re looking at between 16-20 teams I can’t imagine everyone would even have one decent TE, let alone two.
ETA: Eh, I was just looking up some stats, I guess two TEs could work.