Rather than have 20 people post to this thread whether they want divisions or not, I created a poll in the league page. I’ll also add other poll questions about rule tweaks or anything like that. Majority of votes wins, even if it ends up being 5 vs 4 or something, so if you want to have your opinion heard, go vote.
I created polls for whether to keep divisions and whether to add a flex spot as per my proposal. Any other ideas up for a poll?
I voted - good idea on the polls.
If we keep divisions, are we going to institute something to fix the tie-breaker? (either change the rules or re-do the schedule)
There’s no way to change how the tiebreakers work except not to award division winners playoff seeds. Munch volunteered to equalize the schedule and I think I can make him co-commissioner to do that.
Okay, we’ve got 17/20 returning players. Dalej42, mhendo, and Uncle Brother Walker have indicated to me that they won’t be participating this year, which means we’ve got 3 open slots. Overly Sentimental posted about having 2 off-board friends who want to get in, but I want active SDMBers to be in the league and only want off-board players as a last resort. I’ll check last year’s thread to see who expressed interest in the league, and start hitting the recruitment thread.
Is there anything else here as far as proposals for rule changes or anything like that?
I use this schedule generator (and then tweak it a bit) to make my pay league schedule
link
its on Footballguys.com
Its not perfect but it gets the tediousness out of the way.
Munch, I was thinking of adding a poll question re: your post 16 where you give different options for divisional schedules. Are you still volunteering to implement whatever the results are? If not, we’ll just tweak the schedule a little bit to make sure everyone has the same amount of divisional games but otherwise go with whatever schedule it gives us.
Yeah, you bet.
I voted in the polls. No suggestions on rules tweaks. I should do my smack talking now, because once the season starts I’ll probably drop like a rock to the bottom by the end of the early games on the first Sunday. And then my starting QB will have a season-ending injury in warm-ups.
Okay, the polls have been open for 5 days but only 10/17 of the league voted. I’m going to give 24 more hours before closing them. Then if we retain divisions, I’ll create a poll question about preferred scheduling.
We’re going to need to recruit 3 players. Overly Sentimental says he can bring in 2 good players, and we’ll take that if we need to, but I want to involve SDMBers first if we can.
Just so we’re all on the same page, the draft is on what date? And what time and time zone? I need to get my schedule to my assignor.
Tuesday Sep 3 at 8:45pm eastern. I know that runs kinda late towards the end for people on the west coast, but better they have a chance to fill out their team early and leave than west coasters miss the start.
Alright, votes are in, we keep divisions and do not add roster slots.
Next round of voting. We’re going to decide how to work the schedule. Munch had these options:
I’m going to add a simple option E: Take what yahoo gives us, which is mostly random, except make minor tweaks to ensure everyone has the same number of divisional games for the sake of the tiebreaker.
Anyway, I’ll put a poll in the league page.
One more poll. I was reading over a previous year’s thread and Varlos had a good suggestion. Instead of $200 each, we all get $120 each. This gives equivelant value to what you’d have in a 12 man league (so $2400 going after the same pool of players). In theory, this should get the auction prices closer to what you’d have in a normal 12 man league, which means that in the event of someone missing the draft, the auto-drafter could build them a viable team.
Downsides are… less granularity. In a league like this, the difference between a $33 and $34 bid can matter. The less total money we have, the larger chunk our minimum price difference will effectively be. I actually like not having an autodrafter in an auction draft - the computer is always there to bid up the price to some minimum, so you don’t sneak out underpriced valued players. And I like people having to figure out how to best adjust to this league and not just kinda follow the cheat sheet of recommended/average pricing.
So my preference is to just make everyone promise to make the draft and then kill them with our bare hands if they miss it.
Anyway, vote, discuss.
Alright, I’m going to aggressively recruit to get it filled up, then figure out how we’re going to adjust the divisions for the new players, then take Munch as co-commissioner so he can edit the schedule. If you have vote preferences, get them in now.
It looks like The Mad Hermit will be taking our 19th slot. We still need 1 more. I’m willing to recruit off-board friends now, so if you have anyone who’d be interested, who could attend the draft, and wouldn’t give up mid season, I’ll invite them.
We could also use a backup in case someone cancels at the last minute.
Alright, so if you remember, last year we were looking to figure out a way to structure the divisions in some logical way to give them at least some vague sense of meaning. I suggested that we do it by average finish in league history, so the top 5 finishers would be one division, 6-10 another, etc. But people didn’t want that - felt they were being punished for success or whatever rather than being given a greater challenge.
So we went with time spent in the league, with division 1 having guys who were in all 3 years of our league history, division 2 had 4 more who were in for all 3 years but one who was only in for 2 to fill it out, the third division was a mix of players with 2-3 years in the league, and division 4 was full of new players - except Cobra Kai who’d rejoined the league after spending 1 year in it before.
So anyway, when we reshuffle the divisions - we can try to maintain existing division structures by integrating new players to replace leaving ones in the same spot in their division, or we re-shuffle every year in order to maintain the seniority/time in league structure. If we do the latter, people will be shifted up a spot, so some people will move to new divisions.
So basically it’s arbitrary but more continuity vs less arbitrary but less continuity. Does anyone have an opinion about which way we should do it?
Here’s the list from last year. Players with *** have left this year.
So I was trying to work out what the new structure would be if we removed the missing players and shifted everyone up. And as I was doing it, I decided to fudge it a bit to keep Overly Sentimental and his offboard friend together in division 3. It’s not strictly necessary, but it keeps more of last year’s year 1 players together, keeps all the filthy offboarders into their own division, and generally works alright.
So here’s my initial proposal for a sort-of-consistent divisional structure.
Suggestions? Tweaks?
That works for me - and I’d suggest that in the future, we shuffle up the players at the top who overlap between 2 divisions.
Now - are we set on the voting? Looks like “play division rivals twice, one other division once” is winning out. Who plays who now? D1 v D2 and D3 v D4? I’d vote for that, simply because if we shuffle every year or so, we want to maintain those rivalries as much as possible.
Yeah, voting results are in, and we’ll be doing that schedule. I wanted to give a day to get people’s opinion on the proposed divisional alignments before setting the schedule, but it seems pretty reasonable now. D1/D2 and D3/D4 are the natural matchups.
Alright - I’ll work on the schedules.
Alright. Not sure if you’re designing the schedules in a spreadsheet or on the league page, but if it helps to actually assign people to a division, you can go ahead and do that. Otherwise i’ll be back later to do it. Whatever is easiest for you.
Edit: In fact, probably best to just put everyone in the right division now on the off chance that changing the divisions around resets the schedule.