SDMB Dynasty Fantasy Football League (recruiting)

The Game Room
1

A dynasty fantasy football league is a league where players retain their roster from year to year, and the annual draft is only to acquire rookie players. Rosters are typically large, with a deep bench.

You really get a feeling of connection to your team, since you can keep all the same players. You also “develop” talent in a sense - your choices now will grow to become your future starters. The draft strategy changes - older, productive players are still valuable but less so. You have to think in the long term. You hunt for gems, young starters, future stars. Because the avenues you have for improving your team are relatively limited from year to year, trading becomes a bigger factor.

We’ve got several SDMB leagues where most of the same people stay around for years, so I think we can get the right people together to have an enjoyable, long term league.

You don’t have to be a great fantasy football player to join, but I want everyone to give a legitimate attempt at playing from year to year. If you’ve never tried FF before and you don’t know if you’ll like it, this league isn’t for you. If you tend to get bored in midseason and forget about your leagues, same deal. Replacing owners will be difficult because I’m not sure how many people would be anxious to inherit someone else’s team.

We had a thread discussing the various ups and downs of dynasty leagues, proposed alternate systems, etc. But there didn’t seem to be a strong consensus behind any alternate ideas, so I’m proposing we go ahead with our original idea of a dynasty league.

Our draft will be held on Wednesday, Sep 9. The time is currently set for 9pm EST. We have some flexibility in timing, but not really on the date - it has to be after the Sep 5 final cuts because we’re having a very deep league, the 5th-6th are a holiday weekend, and the 7th-8th already have drafts for other SDMB leagues. The season starts on 9/10. So if you can’t make the draft at that time, please do not sign up.

We’re aiming for 12 people, but we could accomodate a different number depending on demand. We’ll be playing on yahoo, unless there are enough people who prefer somewhere else.

Players who I know to be reliable from year to year will get preference over people I don’t know, if we have more recruits than openings.

If you’re interested, please post here. I’ll send out PMs with information with joining information on the league.

2

I’m in.

3

I definitely won’t be able to make the draft, but if you change your mind about pre-ranking I’d definitely be interested.

4

I’m willing to discuss ways to work around your schedule if we can possibly manage it. It seems mandatory to draft after Sep 5 due to the large amounts of cuts on that date. We could, I suppose, draft after the season opener but before the first weekend. I can’t change the schedule in a way that would accomodate you only to alienate others, but we may be able to find something that works for everyone. When are you available?

5

I won’t be able to make that date, too. How does the draft work? I thought it was a ranking system, like the standard Yahoo league that I’m in. Besides, I’ll go out and say it (not to offend anyone): I’m anti-draft. I only like pre-ranking.

6

How does this league actually work? What is the roster makeup, what are the scoring rules, how does keeping work, how do rookies get added to already full rosters, etc…?

7

We’ll have a little time to take suggestions, but I imagine rosters/scoring will be very close to those of the other SDMB leagues – the league is different enough without having to experiment with unusual configurations in those areas.

Your keepers will simply be the players on your roster at the end of the year. We haven’t talked about it, but the only way I can think of for adding rookies is to have a drop declaration deadline shortly before the draft, just like the keeper declaration in the He Hate Me league.

You should join, Ellis. Worst case scenario you wind up with a team that’s not in contention at first (hardly a given, of course), and even then it’s not like you wouldn’t still have the other, more traditional leagues. And, like I said before, even having a bad team in dynasty league isn’t the worst thing in the world. Just a different challenge.

8

I’m on the fence, and want to think about it over the weekend.

If I decide not to join, I would be happy to stand in as a surrogate drafter for someone like Justin if they couldn’t make it at the scheduled time.

9

I’m in.

10

I’m interested and a Wednesday draft works perfectly for me.

11

I don’t know why someone would be anti-draft, it’s the most fun part of fantasy football season.

And since our league is going to be much deeper than typical leagues (typical leagues have maybe a 15 round draft, we may get up around 25) you would either have to very, very extensively prerank your players, or you’d end up doing a significant portion of yahoo default picks.

Good questions. Everything is up for discussion of course.

I’m thinking the roster will be pretty standard, maybe:

QB
RB
RB
WR
WR
WR
TE
D
K

with the difference here of rather than the standard 6 or 7 bench spots, we’d have maybe 16 (which would give a 25 man roster). I’d be fine with different starting positions, maybe a flex spot thrown in there.

As to how the draft works - does anyone have dynasty league experience?

We could expand the league by a certain number of slots every year to make room for rookies, but that would eventually result in huge rosters that could end up being used for free agents rather than rookies.

We could make it so that you had to cut as many players as the rookies you drafted - so that if we had a 5 round rookie draft, you’d either free up 5 spots on your roster in the offseason or lose some picks. Someone with only 3 open slots would only draft in rounds 1, 2, and 3. That seems like the most reasonably approach. I’m not sure how many rookies are typically drafted in a dynasty league.

We wouldn’t necesarily have to have a set number of rounds - we could give people as many draft picks as players they wanted to cut, which they would then get at the end of the rookie draft. The pickings would be getting pretty slim though - if everyone drafted 5 rookies in a 12 man league, then anyone’s 6th pick would be the 61st rookie drafted.

I suppose that we could have an organized waiver distribution of the end of year cuts in the offseason by end of year waiver order (or reverse rankings).

The scoring wouldn’t have to differ from standard yahoo, although we could adopt some of our all pro league rules which are (IMO) superior.

I think ideally the draft would be worst to first, non-serpentining to help teams on the bottom.

Within the season, I don’t see why drop/waiver rules should work any differently. If you pick up someone during the season, they become part of your roster.

I think it would be interesting to be able to trade away future draft picks, but with a commissioner or consensus veto. We’d have to decide if it’s a good idea to let someone trade away a substantial amount of future draft picks to win now, and there’s no trade value chart to help us in this, it’s fairly uncharted territory. As long it’s a good faith, legitimate effort by both teams I think future draft pick trading could be interesting.

What else do we need to cover?

12

In case it’s not clear, the first draft would cover everyone, including rookies. The subsequent drafts would feature only rookies.

13

Just brainstorming; my participation does not hinge on my ideas/preferences being adopted.

I like the roster you detailed.

I agree that expanding rosters is suboptimal.

For subsequent drafts, just let people cut as many players as they like during the offseason. All kept players get set as keepers at the end of their draft. So if you end up with 3 open spots, you draft in rounds 1-3, and the commish sets your round 4-25 picks as keepers. I see no reason to require people have the same number of draft picks, or any draft picks for that matter.

Offseason trading in this league would be the bomb. It would be fairly straightforward: You can’t exceed 25 players+draft picks at any time, and when trading draft picks you have to swap the same quantity.

For the waiver wire I like VarlosZ’s idea (I think it was his) to have a tiered rotating system. Top four, middle four, and bottom four teams would rotate waiver priority within their group of four as claims are made. So if you are the worst team you get #1 priority, and then if you take a guy you rotate to 4th waiver priority. If you are in fourth place in the league and make a successful claim with your 9th position, you get rotated to dead last.

I didn’t understand your point about end of year cuts.

The All-Pro league scoring is definitely superior to yahoo defaults.

Non-serpentine draft is a good idea.

I would strongly recommend against trading future picks. An owner could use this technique to mortgage the future of their team, and if they still crach and burn (due to injuries maybe) and get discouraged, their lack of future picks would make their team even less attractive for new owners to take over. Also, if the above system of draft picks is installed, you don’t technically possess any draft picks until after the season ends and you cut players. Players+picks=25, so while you have a full roster you have no picks.

14

Yeah, trading of future draft picks is somewhat problematic. In dynasty leagues involving money, it’s apparently a standard feature that in order to trade away draft picks from a future season, you must have already paid your entrance fee for that season. That fixes the problem for them, but no such solution seems available to us.

I could see allowing people to trade picks from the upcoming draft only, during the season, perhaps with heightened vigilance when it comes to trade confirmation by the league/commish (which I normally think should be very lax). Once you get into “I’ll give you three 1st Rounders for Peyton Manning” territory, you really do run the risk of having a bad team that’s no fun to try and turn around.

15

Also, Beef: Would you like me to commish the league? I mean, I know you don’t mind doing it, but would your preference be to run it yourself or to have me do it? You’ve already got three leagues to run, so you might want to lighten the load.

OTOH, if your perfect-world preference would be to commish it yourself, then you should; I have no special desire to either take the job or to avoid it, so don’t be shy about making a selfish decision one way or another.

16

That sounds fine with me - we’d essentially have a keeper league where you could keep 0 to everyone on your roster, where you could only use the offseason cuts to draft rookies.

I don’t think you’d necesarily have to swap the same quantity so long as it works out that everyone has 25 picks/keepers. You’d just need a player to trade a draft pick they’d actually have - ie you can’t have someone say “I’ll trade you my 12th through 25th round draft picks” when it’s clear he would never be drafting those in the first place.

Would this get reseeded every week? If not, how would you handle movements among the groups? What if the 8th place guy, with a 6th place priority, moves into the 9-12 group?

What I meant was that everyone could have an offseason deadline for cuts a few weeks before the draft. And then all of those cuts enter a temporary waiver pool for a set amount of time, maybe another week or two, at which point everyone can make waiver claims on the cut players and it’s processed as one big batch waiver claim. Processed normally, where highest priority gets his desired player and moves to the back, and then the second highest priority gets his player (if the player is already taken, then his next priority claim gets processed) and so on.

Yeah, I’m concerned about it. In general, in a perfect world, I think it’s a system that adds even more flexibility in strategy, in future planning vs current benefit. It has the potential to damage a team in the long term. If everyone were guaranteed to be around for a few years, then that would just be part of the game. But someone bailing and leaving us with an ownerless team - with few draft picks - will make it a hard sell to a replacement. We could factor in the likeliness of a player to stick around (ie, we know you and I for example would stick through it through it no matter what) when deciding on the trade.

I agree, it’s definitely an area for concern. I’m inclined to allow it as long as it doesn’t get too nuts. I’m thinking it could give some nice flexibility in balancing out in-season trade. IE “I’m willing to give you this quarterback that you need, and he’s not quite as good as this running back that I want, but I’ll throw in next year’s 2nd round draft pick”

I’m fine either way. Running a league doesn’t take that much work, generally - especially if we use yahoo’s new sunday to tuesday waiver system rather than dealing with it manually. Otherwise most of the work tends to just be starting up discussion and prodding people into participating (which I haven’t been that successful at - even the SDMB high participation leagues haven’t featured that much talk, many trades, etc).

I may end up going nuts running stuff this year. I’ve also wanted to run a yardage pool league (where you pick a QB, WR, and RB every week and whatever their passing/receiving/rushing yardage is that week is your score, and you can’t re-use players) and that’ll take a decent amount of work. Especially since I have an irrational aversion to spreadsheets - many a time I’ve written a custom program or just did manual calculations to a notepad file where spreadsheet usage would be more appropriate).

17

The way I envisioned it was with just two two tiers, bottom third and everybody else. For the everybody else tier, it’s just straight up worst-to-best, reseeded every week on that basis. For the bottom third it’s trickier, and I admit I hadn’t thought through exactly how it would work. You want to keep the worst-to-best format, but you also don’t want just one bad team (which might not be any worse than the other bad teams) sucking up every former scrub who unexpectedly becomes relevant.

So, how exactly do you mix the two approaches to waiver priority? For the bottom four, after the teams are initially entered into that tier and seeded according to record, do we have to have their waiver priority within the tier operate without regard to record, or is their some way to both rotate them according to waiver claims ***and ***make allowances for disparities in their W-L records? I don’t see a way to do the latter, but it may just be a failure of imagination on my part.

In any event, once a team moves out of one bracket and into another, it would be reseeded accordingly.

Also, as I pointed out in the other thread, at least during the first part of the season, the previous year’s results would have to be factored into the waiver seeding (lest a stacked team that happens to start the year poorly winds up with the #1 priority after a week or two and snatches up that year’s Marques Colston). There are a couple of ways to do it. You could tally the results from the last 14 regular season weeks from last year and this year, but that’s probably too tough to do. Alternately, you could just use the previous year’s standings for the first 5-7 weeks, then switch over entirely to the current year’s standings after that (probably a better system, all things considered). Other ideas?
I think we should try to find a way to make the priority tiers work, but if we can’t we should still (IMO) base waiver priority on record instead of rotating it as players are signed.

Ok, just let me if you want me to take over as commish. And, again, make it a selfish decision, because I really have no preference one way or the other.

18

Instead of having a third wideout, can we have a WR/TE/RB flex position?

19

I’m fine with a WR/TE spot, but I’d be kinda leery of a WR/RB slot on top of the two starting RBs. It would pretty much make the RB position the be all and end all of the league, as a team with three quality RBs would have a huge advantage every week over all the teams that have two or fewer – it just grants too much freedom in constructing starting lineups. There’d be very little reason for anybody not to draft (at least) three RBs in the first four rounds. (And, if such a thing matters, starting three RBs would be totally unrealistic.)

20

That’s true, but it would be pretty awesome if the roster system classified fullbacks/H-backs separately from tailbacks… so you could start LeRon McClain or BJ Askew as your third back but not Ray Rice or Earnest Graham.