They’re not actual picks in a normal keeper setup where you just give up your first round pick to keep one player, and so on. They are actual picks in this setup, where the player is tied to a particular round.
IIRC (I may have mixed two of these up):
4th and 19 - Wilson
HungryHungryHaruspex - Jules Andre
TaiwanJonesExpress - BabaBooey (who it appears will be replaced with Ottoerotic anyway)
Fightin’ Quakers - furt
Exploding Pancakes - SenorBeef
Off Constantly - Munch
No Use for a Name - DragonAsh
I think the others are all self-explanatory. The Mad Hermit doesn’t post much anymore but he’s Crabby Hermits.
It artificially reduces the cost of kept players. There’s a reason that it costs quite a bit to keep players. It allows you to get returned value essentially by coincidence as to whether someone you kept last year is going to fall on an odd or even round this year, and how you finished in the rankings. That returned value is effectively a discount on the price of a keeper.
“The system we have” is just one of several functionally identical bookkeeping/placeholding systems that yahoo could come up with. This is just the easiest one to understand, but it’s essentially coincidence that they keep track of it that way. They could just as easily keep track of it by placing keepers on the rosters and removing those picks from a player’s draft - the end result would be identical under normal circumstances - but that would make people occasionally wonder “wait, what happened to my third round pick” so for purposes of clarity they put the keeper at that pick during the draft as a placeholder.
The only actual positive value you’ve suggested that this whole system brings is that it gets people more involved in the league. I’m not swayed by that argument. Involvement isn’t inherently positive if it isn’t beneficial to the league in some way. We’re moving around placeholders to the coincidental benefit of some and detriment of others - it’s not an inherently positive activity worthy for its own sake.
Otherwise, it rewards people who happen to be able to keep keepers in rounds where they’re at the top of the round (and incidentally favors people at either extreme end of the draft over the people in the middle, since the higher picks in the round are more likely to be traded for, and people at the extreme ends have high picks every other round).
It effectively hurts the people who have others move ahead of them in the draft.
To demonstrate, player A has a 4th round keeper and drafts at the top of the 4th round. Player B drafts 2nd in the 4th round, and player C drafts 3rd. Now player A isn’t actually drafting - his keeper here is a placeholder. He will not pick a player that is available to players B or C. So B is effectively at the top of the round. However, player C offers to swap picks at the end of the 15th round with player A to move him up a couple spots. Player A, having no downside to make this trade because his pick isn’t actually real, gives up nothing and might as well take any value offered to him. Now player B is effectively victimized - player B should legitimately be the first pick of the 4th round, but now player C has jumped ahead of him through a quirk of record keeping and weird league policy. Player A gets unearned value essentially from coincidence, and player C profits at the expensive of player B.
Those are real costs which are de-stabilizing and unbalancing to the league, and I’m not seeing where the offsetting benefit comes from.
I’m not understanding the difference. In your hypothetical, you give up your first round pick to keep one player. Both that pick and player are effectively removed from the draft.
In our system, you give up X round pick to keep one player. Both that pick and player are effectively removed from the draft.
We track our keepers to determine what the cost is - what round X will be - but it’s not fundamentally different. Both are placeholders for non-picks for players excluded from the draft. It’s just that by one set of rules it might cost your 1st 2nd and 3rd round picks, whereas by our rules it would cost your X, Y, and Z round picks. But it doesn’t change the fundamental placeholder nature of those picks.
Nope - those people still have to find a trade. The people that benefit the most are those whose keepers happen to fall at the bottom of their round (i.e. my 3rd round AJ Green and 5th round CJ Spiller), as they get to keep their valuable top-of-the-round picks without having to improve another team’s picks.
This is, as far as I can tell, the only downside to doing this. Then again, this is also why we’ve incentivized finishing 5-8, so that people out of contention for the league can still fight for a favorable draft order.
Is it? Has there been instances in the past where someone moving from the end of the 5th round to the beginning of the 5th round has destabilized the league? Which year did that occur? An unfair player-for-player trade has a far more likely chance of unbalancing the league than moving someone up 10 spots in a middle of the draft round.
And there’s dramatic difference in value between the front of a round and the back of a round.
It’s still essentially coincidence. It’s not based on merit or strategy.
Not sure how that’s relevant - if they’re stuck in the middle, shifting between 6th and 8th doesn’t significantly change their appeal in this regard.
Okay, let’s say you have a normal draft, and X has pick 4.1, Y has 4.2, Z has 4.3. Now player X has the ability to draft anyone he wants here. Maybe he’ll pick the guy that player Y wants. Or maybe player Z offers player X a swap of later picks of roughly equal value to move up two spots. So maybe player Z moves up to 4.1 and takes the guy player B wants. Well, that’s fair - player X could’ve taken the guy too. Player B isn’t wronged.
However, in our scenario, player A has a kept player at 4.1. This effectively means that pick 4.1 is removed from the draft, and 4.2 becomes the first pick in the 4th round. Player B can get the guy he wants. Except… if player C trades up with player A, then essentially a new draft pick is created in the slot where 4.1 would be. This draft pick is logically effectively gone from the draft, but is recreated by the notion of trading for a placeholder that’s not a real pick. In this case, player C moves up ahead of player B by creating a non-existent draft pick and snatching the guy player B should rightfully be able to draft.
Again, essentially coincidence. To give a real world comparison, if you draft a guy in the supplemental draft in the NFL by bidding a second round pick, you give up that pick regardless of whether you’re drafting first overall next year or you win the superbowl. It’s not quite a perfect analogy but the logic holds. You’re committed to give up your pick in that round (and you can’t trade away that pick) because you’re effectively spending it on something outside the draft.
So what? Player B had the same opportunity to move forward, and he’s going to be picking ahead of C in a different round when he otherwise would not have.
In theory, that’s not really functionally different than if we decided anyone could create draft picks at the front of any round by giving up some arbitrary later value.
Teams finishing the regular season between 5-8 go into the consolation playoffs, and play for the top 4 draft spots. It’s quite relevant.
There are a lot of things that are essentially coincidence in fantasy football, especially as it pertains to draft order. But you’re conflating “coincidence” with “meaningless” here - and higher draft picks within a round are not meaningless.
If you could point to an instance of trading picks like this causing unbalance in the league (again, 10 years of history to go through), I might be swayed. But as it stands, it seems to me that people enjoy making these trades, people find mutual benefit from making these trades, and in the keeper system we have set up, these trades are decent enough way to offset any perceived inequality in the essentially coincidental draft order people are given.
Strictly speaking, Beef is correct, of course: it doesn’t *really *make sense to have the whole league do these trades every year. If someone had objected 8 or 9 years ago, that might well have nipped this in the bud.
I can rationalize the trades in a few ways:
It rewards the more active players.
It helps to neutralizes the randomness of keeper costs. For late-round keepers it doesn’t matter, but if you’re considering keeping a player in the 3rd or (especially) the 2nd Round, where you’re picking can make a huge difference. Doing it this way, for the most part, a 3rd Round keeper costs you a generic 3rd Round pick, in total value.
Why should someone get a bonus just because his keeper fell on a round where he happened to be drafting towards the front? Well, because a guy who’s keeper happens to fall on a round where he’s drafting at the back *already *got a bonus: through sheer luck (there’s no design or planning here) he got to keep his player at a less than expected cost. Why not spread the wealth a little?
Now, I think the last two have some merit, but ultimately I do believe these are largely rationalizations, and that the negatives counterbalance the positives almost exactly.
But I don’t care. I don’t think it does any meaningful harm, and it’s just the way we’ve been doing things. Status quo has some inherent value. Think of it as a charming quirk of the league. [shrug]
I’d prefer to eliminate it simply because it’s just an extra hassle with little to no benefit. If I had the time to game the system today like I did 5 years ago my opinion would probably be different.
What I’m saying is that these situations aren’t the result of some strategy. No one is thinking “I’ll suck this year to get a high draft pick next year, so the guy I kept in the 6th this year can be kept in the third where I’ll have a high draft pick” - the opportunity to be in a position to make a trade like this is essentially coincidence, not the result of willful planning.
You give me this task because you know it’s impractical, yet you use it like it’s evidence. I’d have to comb through the 10 year history of the league, and I’d have to isolate the cases where this situation could’ve caused an unbalance, then I’d have to know what the original intent of the players who were jumped was, before I could make any conclusions. The intent part is unavailable, unless everyone who’d been jumped over happened to say “aw damn, if you hadn’t jumped ahead and taken X, then he wouldn’t have taken Y, and I could’ve done that” and then I’d have to calculate what the impact of that player having Y on his team would’ve been.
I gave the more relevant information anyway. An argument as to why it’s flawed, abusable, and to the detriment of the league. Whether anyone has bothered to exploit something is less relevant than whether or not it’s exploitable when you’re talking about crafting the rules.
This can’t be an honest interpretation of my words. My entire point, made rather verbosely, is that it does benefit the individuals involved in the trade, at the cost of those not involved in it, to the overall detriment of the league. Not engaging in these trades myself (and there’s no reason for me not to, if this is going to be part of the rules) doesn’t protect me from being negatively affected by them.
My bad on that second quote, for that last post the board brought me to RNATB’s post as “last unread post”, which skipped Omni’s. I didn’t realize you were replying to him and not a general comment towards me. So ignore that part.
Anyway, I’ve made my case - if the league still wants the rule, that’s fine.
I just wanted to throw in a quick note - it absolutely wasn’t my intent to give you a bunch of busy work. I really was interested to see if you’d seen an imbalance that resulted from these trades, or could throw out a hypothetical that might result from them, sorry that I wasn’t clear. I certainly didn’t want to send you on a pointless quest for trivial information. This isn’t a meaningless exercise like some elaborate thread in Great Debates, this is important - this is fantasy football!
I was the commish of this league in the beginning, and I retired from that role because I get all geeked up in talking about this minutia. Back then I became afraid that I might be turning people off from getting involved in a fun competitive league because there were too many heated discussions about minor tweaks to the system, and what sort of trades should be vetoed, and blah blah blah. I certainly don’t want to trip over my own dick in an effort to “improve” things at the expense of pissing people off when there are plenty of other league options around here.
So with that said, I want to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the structure of the league as it is right now. I’m happy to make adjustments to the trading picks situation - but any changes to that will have to be made for next season, since we’re already too close to the draft right now, and there have already been trades made - and it wouldn’t be fair to the teams involved to rescind them. Maybe we can revisit this mid-season and see if anyone has more thoughts on the situation?
Well, think about the logistics of proving that the trade ended up causing balance issues. I’d have to know who would’ve been taken by who in the absence of those trades, and then analyzed how they affected the outcome of the league. That information isn’t available - even if I analyze the draft logs, I can’t know who someone would’ve drafted if they had the chance had someone not jumped ahead of them. The sort of thing that could very well happen is an example I outlined in post 65.
So its been almost two months since Baba’s logged into the dope. I hope that everything is alright. Has anyone heard from him?
If not, I respectfully request to be officially invited into the league so I can declare my keeper by the deadline tomorrow. If nobody objects, please PM me and I’ll give you my email so I can get signed up on Yahoo. Thanks.
