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Schedule
Offseason Trade Deadline: dunno yet
Keeper Declaration: Wednesday 9/13/2014 (tentative)
Live Draft: 9/17/2014 at 8:00pm Eastern (tentative)
Keeper Rules
You can only keep a maximum of 3 players.
You can only keep players drafted after the second round (third rounders or later only.)
A player can only be kept a maximum of twice. (Making 3 total roster years.)
A kept player incurs a two round penalty (e.g: drafted in the 6th, kept in the 4th.)
Hall of Fame
Year 1 winner: mouthbreather
Year 2 winner: Spiritus Mundi
Year 3 winner: Spiritus Mundi
Year 4 winner: The Mad Hermit
Year 5 winner: Nurse Carmen
Year 6 winner: Weirddave
Year 7 winner: VarlosZ
Year 8 winner: Weirddave
Year 9 winner: Really Not All That Bright
Year 10 winner: Really Not All That Bright
Year 11 winner: VarlosZ League History
I’m in. I have the rights to several valuable keepers and I’m willing to move one for a mid-late round pick if anyone feels light on their keepers. Let me know.
I don’t think we ever officially decided to change the draft order last season. Your draft order for this season is right, but the draft order listed in the code block isn’t.
I’m not sure if we officially put in a vote to change the trading of picks in keeper rounds either. We should iron that out before the draft and before keepers are declared. Also, SenorBeef suggested moving to a 6/14 playoff structure last season, which would significantly change how the playoffs and draft order are determined. That also never saw a vote that I recall.
Last year there were a lot of trades involving rounds that involved a keeper. For example, if I’m keeping someone in the third round but I have the number 1 pick that round I could trade down from the 1st to the 10th pick and pick up some value in a different round.
This made things more complicated and just felt wrong. I know we discussed stopping that this year but no official ruling was ever made. I’d like to see what everyone thinks about that if we’re starting polls.
There was a lot of discussion. In the name of fairness and democracy, I’ll post a poll on the league thread. In the hopes of a) getting a consensus on the issue and b) forcing people to join the league, I’ll do that by week’s end. In the meantime, could someone who feels strongly against either status quo positions please post a good summary of why we should change? I know SenorBeef was vocal - I’ll see if he can put something together.
Oh, in the meantime, put a hold on any trade announcements. Feel free to get something committed if you like - but this could all go to shit in a hurry if we don’t make a decision before we start making trades.
Alright, as far as advocating against the trades of picks that represent kept players page 2 of last year’s thread contains a lot of discussion about it.
Assigning players to certain picks is a record-keeping necessity because of the way yahoo does the draft. What’s actually being done, or should be done in a keeper system, is that you keep a player, and that player is removed from the draft, and one of your picks is also removed from the draft. Even though a guy may technically be kept in round 3, pick 2 - that’s not actually meaningful, that’s a record-keeping fiction, because it’s not as if the guy picking round 3, pick 1 could draft him. That player is not really kept at 3.2 in any substantive sense, it’s simply a way to tack a keeper system onto the way yahoo’s draft software tracks drafts.
The only logical way to run a keeper league is to remove the kept players from the set of draftable players, and remove their associated draft picks from the draft. So we have fewer players than the set of draftable players, and fewer draft picks by the same amount. So as much as Player X is unavailable to draft because he’s out of the draft, so should be the pick used to keep him. It just disappears, with that round having one fewer draft pick than it otherwise would have.
The position of the keeper has more or less value by coincidence/arbitrarily. If you have one of the picks at the top or the bottom of the round, it’s going to have more value than people drafting in the middle, because every other round, you will have one of the top picks of that round which has more trade value. People will rarely bother to move up from, say, 10th to 6th but they’re more likely to be motivated to move up to the 1st or 2nd slot. Furthermore, to demonstrate the arbitrary/coincidental aspect of this, because of the draft snaking, if you have to keep a player in the 3rd round and you’re at the top of the draft, your pick is valuable. But if you keep him in the 4th, it’s at the bottom of the draft and not valuable, or vice versa if you’re at the other end of the drafting order. This isn’t an issue of strategy, it’s more or less just coincidence.
Each side of the trade gets value out of it because the guy trading away the fictitious pick is giving up nothing. He’s not trading anything of value. So it’s beneficial to him to trade away the pick for literally any offer, no matter how small. The incentives are screwed up.
This damage the league as a whole, as more assets shift to one player for arbitrary reasons. Real trades involve people giving up things of roughly equal value. With uneven value, the rest of the league suffers as one player profits unfairly from a random situation.
More directly, whatever value a person gains by trading into a slot comes at the direct cost of the people below him. So if I use my resources to trade into a fictitious 3.2 pick and steal the guy who would’ve been taken at 3.3, I directly screw the guy, having not paid the real value for the pick, because the player trading away the pick is trading away nothing. He can sell it for the smallest increment of value we could possibly have, and still come out ahead. But everyone below me in that round of the draft effectively moves down one slot in the draft order for that round over what they would’ve had we been handling this issue logically.
It’s essentially busy work. The more active players get rewarded for bothering to be pro-active about it, and in order to not fall behind, everyone has to keep up. Now in general I like to encourage participation, but only if people are participating meaningfully - making strategy decisions, discussing legitimate trades, or even just talking smack. This is essentially just a weird arbitrary mini-game tacked onto the league.
To me, this whole system is completely nonsensical, gives no added value to the league, involves no real strategy, rewards people randomly, and unbalances the league. It’s an awful system that only survived because no one really thought about it and it wasn’t used much.
If that’s not convincing, I recommend reading the discussion we had last year about it that I linked at the top of the post.
I should add that imagine we were doing this draft in pen and paper. There’s no way this rule would’ve come about, and people made trades like this. Or imagine if yahoo’s keeper system correctly simply subtracted the player and the pick from the draft. Same thing - no way do people think making these sort of trades is even an option.
Only the fact that yahoo used this particular method of fictitious record keeping to tack keepers into their existing draft interface has created this situation where people are falsely lead to believe that keeper draft picks are normal draft picks which can be traded for value.
I treaded a little lightly with that statement because I was already involved in a contentious argument about the rules, but I disagree with rewarding picks 2-3-4 to the losers of the consolation bowl. Rewarding the winner gives some meaning to the playoffs and that’s fine for me, but rewarding the losers is pretty bizarre and unjustifiable, IMO.
Last year I didn’t weigh in on the proposed rule changes because I felt as a new player it wasn’t my place. I followed previous years’ threads but never really followed the keeper setup. However, after participating last year I would agree with Beef’s assessment of the keeper rules.
I don’t find the current system very satisfying, but this proposal to disallow the trading of keeper picks doesn’t actually work as intended. Instead, it works directly opposite some of the justification for it. For example, even if the system passes, you can still do the exact same thing with two trades instead of one. So then the only people who get that free value are the ones who have the most time available to negotiate trades (so balancing the ultra-participatory with the casual won’t happen). Someone will eventually game the system, innocently or not, and it’ll cause a huge headache for everyone. I want to vote yes, but I vote no because the solution doesn’t work as presented.
I vote no on changing the draft order, too. The justification for giving picks one through four to the consolation bracket is obvious: it’s always better to take a guaranteed 2nd pick in next year’s draft than risk a 25% chance of the 1st pick and a 75% chance of a bottom half pick. If the goal is to protect against tanking, this is almost the worst possible idea.
Could you explain what you mean by be able to do the same thing via two trades? I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re getting at, so could you flesh it out more?
Incidentally, if it helps, I think we should lock pick trading until after keepers are declared. Not necessarily the keeper deadline - if people declare keepers early, they can trade at that point - but it obviously doesn’t make sense to potentially deal picks which you haven’t yet decided if you have.
Is tanking a serious concern? In my leagues, I trust all my players to be acting in good faith. I thought the point of the consolation bracket was just to make the fantasy football season a little more interesting for a few teams for a bit longer.
Say I have a player I’m likely to keep high in the 10th round. I could make a trade to pick up a late 10th, then trade away my early 10th round pick to make up the value I’d lost in picking up the 10th. A little more effort intensive than it is now, but not really that much.
The problem with the proposal is that it’s going to make genuinely innocent trades look really shady. Then accusations get tossed around and resentment builds up until someone leaves the league or gets kicked out. Or worse.
Even still, it’s going to make for even less preseason movement than there is now, which is very little as it is.
I hate this solution. For a lot of reasons.
Firstly, it limits options because it reduces the potential ammunition a person has to make trades in the first place. Maybe I get an offer that I like more than I like a keeper. Maybe I do a few mock drafts and decide I really hate my spot in the 4th round and want to move up or back. I can’t use that keeper’s pick as a tool to help myself if I’m locked into the keeper before I can even trade.
Secondly, it greatly limits a person’s ability to make trades in general because it removes a lot of an owner’s leverage. Take my position right now. I have five good keeper options. If I want to trade away one or two, it’s going to hurt my ability to negotiate if the other owner knows who I’m going to keep.
Thirdly, it will make trades vastly more difficult because it will shrink down the amount of time an owner will have to negotiate a trade. Not only because the window to negotiate a trade between declaring keepers and the draft is smaller by your suggestion, but also because it would require two parties to declare keepers in advance, which is actually pretty rare. A lot of people don’t declare keepers until the week of the deadline. The activity level of this league isn’t quite ideal to begin with. Imagine having to negotiate a trade of picks when you have only a week to do so instead of two months. This is part of the reason we have so little in draft movement - there just isn’t time to negotiate the trades.
Finally, and worst of all, locking in keepers earlier presents a new massive problem we don’t have now. We’d be deciding who to keep before we really have a chance to know if we want to keep that player. What if they get hurt? We’d be getting screwed to fix loopholes for a solution to a non-existent problem. We intentionally draft as late as possible to prevent these sorts of shitty situations from coming up.
Tanking isn’t a concern because of the system in place. I actually don’t have as much of a problem with tanking as everyone else seems to - I think it’s a valid ownership decision. But if you remove the consolation bracket as it stands, there would be more temptation to tank.
First, I want to say that the concerns over the effects this will have of pre-draft trading of picks (where the keeper factor isn’t involved) is almost negligible because people almost never do them. I’ve had the option in my leagues for several years for pre-draft trading of picks, and IIRC, they’ve been used exactly twice, both times between Ellis Dee and I. And of those, they were of the “trade the #6 overall for the #1 overall” variety - where the importance of exact positioning of a draft is critical, over the top few picks. It’s very unlikely that we’d ever see a trade of the “I want to be at the back end of the 4th instead of the front end, because I want to get a little more value out of a pick I think will be there 7 spots later” variety, which seems to be your main concern.
The only reason the sort of trades we’re discussing in this thread happen at all is because the incentives are screwed up and they’re essentially freebies. Normal, balanced pre-draft trades almost never happen even in our most active leagues.
Ah, yeah, I get you. I don’t even think this would ever be an issue, but a “must be kept with your natural pick in that round” rule would get rid of that whole issue, although I’m sure you’d view it as reducing flexibility and options in general.
To me, we’re talking about extremely unlikely scenarios where something innocent that appears shady might happen. Compared to the normal keeper pick trades that this league has seen for years, which to me already are shady. Maybe shady isn’t the right word, because the people involved have viewed them as being above board, but the screwed up incentives unbalance things.
I agree, and that’s unfortunate, since you know I do my best to encourage participation. But participation that involves an overall negative effect on the league isn’t to be welcomed.
I’ve always thought that was a bizarre way of looking at things. It’s like before the NFL draft, some team will talk up a prospect. And then some fans will say “oh, we’re talking up player X so that one of the other teams trades up with us to draft him! They have to think we really want him, so they trade with us to get him!” When the actual consequence of such a thing would be for someone to jump you to get him before you had the chance.
But I never understood why the relative strength of a person’s position affected the other person’s asking price in this way. That is, if we agree to trade a candy bar for balloon, it doesn’t matter that I have a hundred candy bars and you have two balloons. If you think it’s a deal that benefits you, then do it. Don’t worry what it costs the other guy.
Anyway, that’s just sort of an aside that doesn’t actually affect the argument for me either way, just got off on a tangent there.
The point in your first paragraph is valid, and a real concern - but such a miniscule concern because historically we just have never seen that sort of participation in our leagues. The second one I don’t quite understand, as per my above statement.
You can negotiate a trade before you declare your keepers. You just have to make sure you keep your natural pick in the round that you plan on making a keeper in. So if you have 4 keepers, eligible for rounds 3, 4, 5, and 6, and you decide you can get a good deal for your 4th round pick, then simply agree to the trade, say that you keep 3, 5, and 6, and then trade away your fourth. You haven’t actually lost negotiating power here, because the deal was worked out when you had all your options.
Tanking isn’t a concern from me because it borrows from this year and puts it into next year - I suspect that’s the aspect you don’t have a problem with, and I don’t worry much about that myself.
However, having a player deliberately lose is unfair to the league.
Imagine player A and Player B, both are in the playoff hunt at the end of the season and they’ve played similar schedules. Now player A played Player C in week one, when player C was going all out to win. But player B plays player C in week 13, when player C was having a bad year and decided to tank. Now he’s deliberately losing the game. Player A essentially played more real games than Player B, whereas Player B got a freebie win. That freebie win may decide who gets the playoff slot.
Similarly, you could just have someone who quits mid-season because he isn’t going to win in a non-keeper league and you have the same issue.
Which is why I require in my leagues all players make a good-faith attempt to win every game, regardless of whether they’re bored or deliberately want to lose for position next year.