Two issues to clear up that I forgot to mention up until now.
I’m making a very similar post in the other leagues, so if you’ve read one you’ve read them all.
Are you guys cool with using the free agent aquisition budgets instead of a normal waiver system? We tried that in 3 of the other SDMB leagues last year and it worked well. It’s an auction style process every week to bid on players. Each team starts with $100 (or customizable) that they use for the rest of the year. Unsigned/free agent players go on waivers during the football weekend, and everyone has a shot at bidding on them.
It just gives more control than a standard waiver system and is generally preferable.
This is two seperate points though - the automatic period where free agents go on waivers (which you can have with either a standard waiver system or FAAB) and whether to do FAAB or not.
To clarify the waiver system thing, I posted this in one of the league messages last year:
"
Yahoo now supports automatically putting all players on waivers from Sunday to Tuesday to do what we did manually - prevent the first person to their computer when a player goes down from getting their backup and instead giving everyone a chance to make a claim. The difference in this case is that it’s built in to the yahoo system, and we’re using a silent auction style bidding system for players. You start with $100 + whatever money you had left at the end of the draft. In the event that there’s a tie, there’s also a rolling waiver list that works like a standard list where you get sent to the back every time it resolves an issue. Having no other real criteria, I also set the initial waiver priority list by the amount of money people had left after the draft, and in the case of a tie, reverse nomination order. The issue should rarely come up, though as there won’t be that many ties.
There’s one catch with this system. Since Thursday and Saturday night games fall outside of the Sunday 1pm-EST till Tuesday night automatic waiver period, a player could conceivably pick up a breakout performer from the those games before the Sunday till Tuesday waiver period. This goes against our system, so I’m creating a rule regarding this: If you want to pick up a free agent from a Thursday or Saturday night game after that game has begun, you have to wait until Sunday at 1pm EST and put in a waiver claim like the rest of the free agents. Premature pickups will be reverted. "
We could compensate a bit for the disadvantage of a bad draft position by giving people a bit of extra waiver/FAAB money, say $2 or $3 per slot after the top slot.
The other issue is… last year I took my leagues off trading with a league veto period and went to commissioner approval. The reason I did that was because essentially no one was willing to veto any trades anyway, and that we’re all serious players and we’re not gonna do some goofy Randy Moss + MJD for John Carlson deals at the end of the year as part of some weird griefing.
And a benefit to this system was that I could fast-track non-controversial trades. You could negotiate saturday afternoon and still get the trade processed before the games sunday morning, whereas with the vote system, no matter what the trade will take 24 hours to process. If there was something fishy going on, I could choose not to fast track it, and get league discussion on the issue and allow people to vote on it. But that never came up.
There was an issue last year when someone was pissed that I fast-tracked a trade that ended up working against that person (the team they faced benefitted from the guy they received that week). IIRC, I ended up pushing every single trade made before Sunday through before the games on Sunday, so everything made it through. I think it’s a better way to do it because you can still do trade negotiations later in the week and still have them count, or it’s possible some injury situation may occur less than 48 hours from the game of the player you want to trade for to replace the guy, etc.
Anyway, unless there’s objection, I want to make it clear that I plan to do it again this year, and any reasonable trades will be pushed through before the games of the players involved. If there’s some sort of controversy I can slow the process down and allow the group to discuss and even veto.
So - in summary: I propose the gameday free agent->waiver system we used last year - and that we used in previous years, only manually. Furthermore, I propose that we use Free Agent Aquisition Budgets rather than straight waivers. I also plan to run the league trades on commissioner approval and quickly approve all routine trades. Strange trades will take longer and come up for discussion.
Any issues?