Yeah, I enjoyed our long draft last year. The draft is the most fun part of the fantasy season so I don’t know why people are concerned with them running too long. It does get a bit frustrating at the end with all of the pointless downtime related to nominations I suppose.
I wonder how much of that is people who are completely unaware of the chat window and the conversation going on. I know people get into the process and don’t look at the chat - but there’s good info there, and legitimate points about speeding things up.
Well, I posted about it in the thread a lot before the draft too. So if people aren’t reading the thread, or looking at the draft chat during the draft, or not noticing that they’re going to be up in the nomation order… what the hell are they doing, exactly?
Another thing that might be helpful is to make sure you’ve got a list of bye weeks right in front of you. That way you’re not scanning through the player list to add players to your queue and having to look at their bye week as well. I’ve done quite a few mocks this year, so I’ve pretty much memorized each team’s bye week. I’m going to get into the draft room as soon as it opens and build a large nomination queue.
Well, I’m sorry guys but it turns out I’m not going to be able to make it to the draft. If you want to start looking for replacements feel free. I’ll see if I can find anybody to take my place but I’m not optimistic; about the only person I know who knows anything about football is already in this league. 
I’ll try to set up my auto-draft list the best I can if it’s too late to find a replacement.
Woops, I missed this somehow - haven’t had much internet access this week.
Do you have a friend that can do the draft for you? There’s a co-management feature where I can have two yahoo IDs running one team.
Otherwise I’ll either need to find a replacement for you, or just have you autodraft because the league can’t run with 19 people. Is there anyone still reading this thread who’s interested in this league? You need to be able to make the draft on Tuesday at 9:15 eastern.
I just found out I have to work tomorrow night and I won’t be able to make the draft. Or at least the first hour and a half of it.
I’m willing to accept what the autodrafter gives me, but if anyone out there wants to co-manage, I’m cool with that too.
Remember that because we have more people competing over the same players and a bigger total money pool, players tend to be more expensive than 12 man auction leagues and cheat sheets. If you do autodraft, pick a few guys you really want and pre-value them high - so you might get them rather than getting left with purely scraps like Court Jesters did last year.
Already ahead of you.
Does anyone have any friends that might be interested in fantasy football? We don’t have long at all to get this sorted out.
Anyone who might miss the draft, please do a lot of pre-valuing. The yahoo average value that the computer will use to draft is worthless - it’s based off prices in a 12 man league. You’re going to have to bump up the values significantly to have a chance at anyone.
Anyway, if anyone has friends who would be interested in drafting/comanaging for Justin, or replacing Squishy, please get back to me soon. We may not have time to find replacements, in which case you guys will have to autodraft - obviously that’s preferable to having a broken 19 man league that can’t hold a draft.
Another possibility is simply to have an 18-team league.
I don’t want to boot anyone out, and it sucks for Justin_Bailey that he’s been screwed by a last-minute call in to work, but you did say at the beginning that everyone needs to be able to make the draft, so maybe it would just be better to stick with that if there’s no other way to fix the problem.
I agree with mhendo. Autodraft on an auction - especially one this specialized - really screws other people over. We were upfront about needing everyone at the auction.
The concern with an autodraft team is that if it’s using the default yahoo values, it will never snatch up any real players. That’s what happened to Court Jesters last year - he’d have Greg Jennings auto-valued at $23 or whatever, when the actual price based on the amount of money floating around the league was more like $38, so he’d never get anyone. He was left with a bunch of $1 castoffs.
The problem with that is that it was almost a free win for whoever played him. It’d suck to lose out on a playoff slot because the other team you’re competing with for that spot had a freebie win and you didn’t.
We can mitigate this if the people who are going to miss the draft re-value their players appropriately so that they have a chance of building a legitimate team. Can you guys do that?
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to recruit 2 new people by tomorrow. Cutting both of those guys out and drafting with 18 players is a possibility, I’d like to save that for a last resort option if possible.
If both of the absent guys are willing to look up the values last year and create extensive pre-rankings that might result in a viable draft, I’d be willing to allow an autodraft. But you can’t just pick 10 guys you want and value them - because if other people outbid you on the spot, and you have no backup plan, you’ll end up with no one. You’d have to be willing to do a whole lot of pre-values, including some overpays, to ensure that you ended up with a viable roster. Are you guys willing to do that?
If you could find your own replacement drafters that would also be great.
A cut down to 18 is doable. However, the suggestion floated earlier of co-managing has some merit. The only thing is, while I can see it working for a snake draft, I’m not sure how it’d work for an auction. I mean, that’s an obvious conflict of interest.
While this isn’t as serious a league as the other SDMB leagues, I certainly tried as hard as I could last year to finish where I did. (Pathetic, isn’t it?) I wouldn’t mind co-managing for one of the teams that couldn’t make it, and would try to fulfill their auction wish list to the best of my ability. I’ve gone through a couple fantasy drafts this year (none auction) and consequently already have an idea for how I rank each player within a position, if not a $$ value. I wouldn’t mind throwing my name into the queue to co-manage, if you want to go that route. (This way, I could bid on the dog-killer, which I refuse to do for my own team.)
Anyways, just a thought. It’d suck not having players with the skill of Justin Bailey in the league (Were you in the league too last year, Squishy? If so, I probably lost to you.) and if we could find a way to keep players like Justin, while avoiding the Court Jesters debacle (whom I still lost to.) that’d be great.
Question: does the auto-drafter adjust its bids for the starting amount of money? If not, we could lower everyone’s budget to $120, and that should (theoretically) mean that the absolute values of players are the same as in a 12-team league with $200 per (since there would be $2400 total to go around in either case).
If we don’t know, it might be possible to run a test.
Anyway, it might be possible to find a non-member to draft for these guys (though we’d have to be up front about the time investment). Would they be willing to have a stranger – a friend of someone else in the league, say – draft for them?
Co-management in this case doesn’t refer to someone in this league drafting for two people, but rather if you can find someone to draft for you, I can add them to your team as a co-manager, so they could run your draft and then you could take over the team for the rest of the year - or I suppose keep co-managing the rest of the year.
But we need someone from outside the league to volunteer.
That might be a workable solution - I’m guessing yahoo’s bid system sticks strictly to the yahoo pre-rank value list, since it didn’t seem to adjust to our greater prices last year. I think it would be preferable to just have the affected players go in and pre-value players in accordance to our league though.
Or maybe it would have to be slightly higher than $120, since we need to buy a lot more scrubs. I really don’t know.
I’m going to be very busy today and I probably won’t be able to get on here until just before the draft. I need both of the players who are going to miss the draft to confirm they can pre-rank extensively keeping in mind the value adjustments of our league (or find someone to draft for them), or I will probably have to drop the league down to 18 members before the draft.