Fantasy football general discussion 2010

The Game Room
1

“Isn’t it a little early to start fantasy football discussion?” you might be asking yourself. Well screw you hippy, no it is not. Yahoo opened their fantasy football section today, which makes this a national holiday as far as I’m concerned.

We use the general discussion threads to discuss the various leagues and competitions we run up until they split off into their own threads, and then after that this remains a general FF discussion throughout the season.

I went ahead and renewed the three FF leagues I run, and everyone is welcome back. With the big league (20 players) there was inconsistent participation, but no one quit. I’m not going to disinvite anyone - rather I just ask you to police yourself, if you’ll commit to trying to make the draft and at least making bare minimum adjustments each week (injuries, bye weeks etc) you’re ok. Obviosuly the All-pro and auction leagues have higher standards of participation, but I’m confident in everyone already in those leagues.

Various threads from last year covering our leagues:

General FF discussion
All pro league
Auction league
Big League
Playoff fantasy league
Dynasty league - preseason and during season
He Hate Me keeper league
Yardage pool competition
Pick 'em, survival, and salary cap
Playoff crediction contest
Nfl.com ff playoff challenge
Nfl Prop bet extravaganza

I plan to run everything that I commish again this year. The various fantasy leagues will probably be refilled by previous participants, but if they come up short everyone will get a shot at participating.

The other competitions are open to as many people as want to play. We run 3 pick 'em leagues, straight up, against the spread, and confidence. A survival league where you can only pick each team once, but that team has to win that week or you’re eliminated (last year we used 2 strikes and it seemed successful though). The salary cap league places a price on every player in the league and you need to fill out your positions without going over the salary cap, and the prices for each player change from week to week. The yardage pool involved picking one QB/RB/WR and taking their adding their passing/rushing/receiving yardage to your total score, using each player only once.

I usually try to do something new every year (last year it was the 20 man big league and the yardage competition) but we’ve got so much stuff going right now I’m not sure that will be practical. Still, I’d be open to suggestions as to what sort of other competitions we could run.

Yahoo now supports auction drafts, which is fantastic. We used to have to do our draft over at ESPN, and then import the results into yahoo, but now we can save that step. In fact, I’m considering lobbying for all my leagues to turn into auction leagues - it’s just a better, more interesting way to draft. You participate in every pick and you have more control over picking your team. I realize that the main thing that seperates the all-pro and auction leagues is the different types of drafts, but we’d still have different scoring and somewhat different players. The big league may have to remain regular serpentine style for practical reason - not sure how smoothly a 20 man auction draft would run.

Anyway, use this thread for whatever you want - discuss upcoming leagues, talk about draft boards, etc. I figure the discussion won’t pick up too much until late July, but I was so starved for FF that I’m letting it start early.

2

Woohoo!

I’ll cast an early vote for keeping the All-Pro league with a conventional snake draft. My three main leagues are keeper, standard draft, and auction, and I like the nuances of each.

I’m down with switching the dynasty league over to auction if you like.

For those in the keeper league, I’ll try to get that thread up and running soon.

3

Have the invites and will join up this weekend - but seriously, it’s not even the All-Star break, I’m trying to three-peat in baseball, here!

I hope I get the right Steve Smith this year. Or do I?

4

Ah, I figured I’d have you on my side since the auction draft went so smoothly last year and IMO auction drafts are pretty much superior across the board from serpentine.

I originally said auction wouldn’t work well for the big league, but I’m rethinking that. There’s such a disparity between high and low picks with a 20 man draft, plus if you get stuck on either end of the draft you can wait 35+ picks until your next one which is kinda boring. So on second thought maybe a big league auction would work well.

Dynasty I’m not so sure. I’m kinda biased since I have the #1 overall pick to give up, but since the draft is the primary parity in the league, we’d have to tweak how much money everyone had heavily to account for that. The other issue is that people will be drafting different numbers of players, so you’d have people doing the max bid and done thing a lot.

I did a mock yahoo auction draft. Looks like they basically just copied ESPN, which is fine since ESPN’s draft app is good. Looks like the league commish has more control over stuff like nomination time, bid time, etc.

This is yahoo’s May 24 Big Board. The top few picks will be more tricky than the last few years I think, with AP, MJD, Chris Johnson and Ray Rice. Especially in PPR leagues.

Btw, when you sign up for teams against this year I’d appreciate if you either used the same name, or a similar name, or one that indicates your SDMB name. It just gets confusing (especially in the big league) when people use totally new team names every year. It’s hard to build a sense of community when you have to look up who everyone is from year to year.

We need to think about setting the draft dates soonish, since there are limited draft slots to fill - we can get the premium slots if we register early.

5

I joined for the both the big league and the dynasty league.

I am in favor of auction for the big league, but is there a draft time that works well for everyone? Right now, I can draft anytime on weekends. Weeknights are tough for me being in the Pacific time zone and not getting home from work until 7 Pacific. Of course, I can never give a 100% guarantee I’ll be able to get home from work at a particular time, but I could schedule an hour of vacation or so if the draft must be on a weekday night.

I’d be interested in trying a touchdown only league. Anyone played in one?

6

Speaking of which, thankfully it does let you start the draft later in the evening from commish tools after you create the league. Weird that when creating the league the latest live draft time you can pick is 8:45pm, but whatever.

As usual, the keeper league live draft is set for 10:15pm Eastern on Labor Day. (Monday September 6th.)

Yeah, exactly. That’s why I always recommend starting fantasy drafts at or after 10pm Eastern. 10:15pm is ideal, IMO. East coasters staying up a little late is well worth it to allow West coasters a chance to get home from work.

7

Oh yeah, and hopefully this year I won’t sleep through all my drafts. That was incredibly annoying last year.

8

Are you sure it wasn’t some sort of time zone screwup? I got options through 8:45, but all times were listed in PDT, so the option of an 11:45ET draft was available to me during league creation.

So, about draft times…

The big league benefits the most from drafting late, because the rosters run so deep that you need to know who didn’t make the final preseason cuts. Do those cuts usually happen before week 4 of the preseason? I forget the exact timing.

Preseason ends Sep 2 and the regular season opens Sep 9. I’m thinking the best time to draft in the big league would be the weekend after sep 2, probably saturday sep 4. But that’s the Saturday of labor day weekend, so I don’t know what that poses in the way of problems for people.

I have the auction league set for Tuesday August 31, right after week 3, and the all pro league for the following Thursday, Sep 2. These aren’t hard dates - I just had to put something in when creating the league and that seemed reasonable.

This spaces those 3 leagues out for every other night after the third week of preseason, but I can change it depending on what works for people.

9

Not sure about final cuts, but week 3 the starters play into the second half, while week 4 they only play one possession, so after week 3 gives you the best info to draft with.

10

After week 3 is definitely important for most leagues - the big league is unusual in that there are a whole lot of drafted players, and those guys that don’t quite make the final cut would probably get drafted if the draft was held before the final roster date.

11

WOO! I’m in the Big League!

I’m hoping you will review all the scoring settings. I’m still not very good at this, but I’m not sure whether or not we had touchdown passes scoring 4 points last year?

I’m looking forward to this.

12

So this has some fantasy football implications but it’s mostly just a football rant.

I’ve been pimping Browns RB Jerome Harrison for years now. He’s immensely talented and every time he’s ever seen the field he’s been great. But for some reason the coaching staff that drafted him wouldn’t give him a chance - he’d get 2 carries, rip off a 9 and 17 yard run and then he’d be pulled out of the game and even inactive the next week. It was just bizarre and unexplainable.

There was a medium sized but very vocal fan contingent who saw this and couldn’t understand why why kept trotting out a washed up Jamal Lewis who clearly lost it. Figured he must’ve done something to piss off Crennel to always be in the dog house. So we were hopeful that when Mangini came around, he’d recognize the talent and he wouldn’t have whatever bias Crennel had against him. Nope… Mangini treated him the same way. It wasn’t until he was forced to start Harrison due to 2 other injuries that Harrison got a shot.

But he immediately ran with it. I’ve been saying for years now if he just had the chance to start he’d shine, and he ran for about 600 yards in the last 3 games of the year, including the 3rd best single performance in NFL history. Finally, I thought - despite two coaching staffs doing everything they can to keep the kid from succeeding, he got his chance and made an unmistakable statement and proved his worth.

So… where does that leave us? He’s back in the doghouse just as he was before. Not only did the Browns trade up in the 2nd round to draft an RB, they seem to have no regard for Harrison whatsoever. No attempts to resign him (he’s RFA) have been made. Mangini has talked about lots of different players in a positive light in various press conferences and has yet to say one nice thing about Harrison. The rookie RB seems to be getting all the chances to be the starter in minicamp. At this rate it looks like Harrison may be third string this year and gone without an attempt to resign him next year.

What the fuck? What could the kid possibly be doing that despite showing obvious talent at every opportunity they don’t care to use him? This whole situation is utterly baffling to me.

13

It’s that time of year again? How long until Yahoo just leaves the fantasy football leagues open all year? The offseason is really just from like mid-February to NFL Draft Day, anyway.

I’m holding back on renewing any of my teams at the moment. I’m going to drastically pare down my fantasy sports involvement this year and I’m not sure what I’m going to play as of yet.

14

I really like the idea of an auction draft in the big league. It seems like it would work best in terms of bridging the gap and dealing with the timing issue. I’m indifferent in the All-Pro league though because it is not as big. I do think it would be interesting to see how the bidding goes for certain players considering how many seasons we’ve played together. In the auction league I played in, I had some very interesting bidding stand offs with my two close friends because we knew each others tendencies and trends.

Even though I am in EST I prefer later draft times as well.

15

I’d like to beat you in all my leagues, but I hope at least you stick with the all-pro league.

I was thinking of getting us all together in one of the mock auction draft rooms if anyone is interested, both to get the hang of the yahoo software (it doesn’t take much, it’s pretty simple), for people who’ve never done an auction draft to see if they like it, and because what the hell, I’m football starved.

In the past it’s been a little tricky getting ourselves into one room in the past (you can’t reserve or anything), but we were doing that in the middle of prime fantasy drafting season so the rooms filled up fast - currently they fill up extremely slowly so I don’t think we’d have any problem setting a time and all getting our own mock.

16

I like doing mock drafts, so I’m up for it.

17

I’m game for whatever.

18

I hear you, and share your confusion. The only thing I could come up with – and this would be total WAG – is that he’s bad in practice and/or meetings. Like a bad work ethic and bad attitude or something.

19

That has to be it, though in my defense it’s a problem on their end. I just noticed this in the transaction log:

Ellis Dee (New York Fanboys) Draft Time changed from ‘Mon Sep 6 8:45pm EDT’ to ‘Mon Sep 6 10:15pm EDT’

So I did originally select 8:45pm Eastern, which was the latest time available in their little dropdown. You may want to verify your draft times.

20

That’s as good a guess as any. But the thing is that he was a 6th round pick, he was third string for a few years. No big expectations or hype. If he’s such a terrible person that he’s benched no matter how well he performs, why not just cut him? The idea that you’d keep around this 6th round pick malcontent that’s such a bad apple that you refused to play him is pretty weird too. Or at least - his trade value has to be at least something at this point, right?

My faint hope is that Mangini and crew are trying to downplay him so they can resign him at a lower contract and that he’s going to be the starter this year, or at least get half the carries. Trading up in the 2nd to get a new RB sort of suggests against that, but then again it’s a two back league nowadays, so maybe.

And here I was thinking that maybe one of my dynasty league picks would work out :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe when he gets to his next team…