SDMB Dynasty Fantasy Football interest list

The Game Room
21

I don’t think the league would take a massive amount of effort to commish. I’ll do it if no one else wants to. You have to set rosters up once a year from a big list - but using the import draft function on yahoo is 100x easier than using the horribly designed add/remove player from team roster that you use in season. It shouldn’t be much more work than the auction draft - you look at last year’s roster, assign players to the appropriate team (through the import draft function), and then when you do the draft you can only draft rookies.

I’d rather not have it be a pay league, simply because it’d discourage some people from playing, not sure how the mods would feel about it, and I’m pretty broke at the moment.

22

I understand the point of the league; I like the idea of having the continuity from year to year. But I’d like it to be more akin to the kind of continuity you see in real life: teams try keep their core players, as well as keeping few players for development … but also dealing with a certain degree of turnover. In real pro sports, every team every year loses at least a few players they would like to keep. In real life, there is a price for success; the Patriots pay it when they have to choose between Cassel and Brady, and the Giants between Jacobs and Ward. The smart teams adjust and renew themselves.

I’m okay with a team needing two or three years to build before becoming a contender. But “a few years before they can become good again” … meaning a cellar-dwellar in 2009 will probably also stink for 2010, 2011, and can, with skill, hope to be back in it in 2012? Screw that.

AFAICT, you It seems you’re interested in something more akin to pre-free agency baseball, where once you draft a guy he’s yours forever, and rosters are huge. I don’t see how that’s challenging or interesting for anyone – including the teams at the top. If teams can bring back all my starters, plus backups plus have five or six developmental guys in the pipeline, that annual draft is really for nothing more than rookies. And how many skill-position rookies that matter are there in the NFL each year? 15-20. That means that in annual draft, you’ve really only got two picks that have a realistic chance of helping you. After that, it’s a crapshoot. I don’t agree with Ellis that the first round would be boring – but round 3 would be full of Stephen McGees and Mike Hartlines. Lame, and a crapshoot.

On the other hand, take my seven-keepers idea: That would mean you can bring back five contributors plus maybe two guys you’re developing. That’s about the ratio for real teams. The NFL doesn’t have farm leagues or sixth-string tailbacks, which is what unlimited keepers would entail. I’m not married to the number seven … nine would be OK, or go with the contracts thing. But if you’re going to say teams can keep everybody in perpetuity, that doesn’t sound fun to me.

Yes, but most of those guys wouldn’t be available if everyone had huge rosters. If you were smart or lucky enough to have taken a guy who later emerges as a staring RB, that’s great. But if teams and 20 man rosters and unlimited keepers, there’d be very little chance that guy who emerged into the top 50 had been on the waiver wire at any point.

23

The keeper feature would be much better. A bit more of a hassle than the Import Roster features, but setting all the dynasty players as keepers means you can use the yahoo live draft feature. Otherwise you’d be looking at a MB thread draft.

After the inaugural season, the actual drafts themselves would only be 2 or 3 rounds long, with most players being set as keepers in the round 4 to 20 picks. That would be labor intensive, but it would be the best way to set it up.

24

I’m not totally opposed to the idea, though I admit it’s not what I had in mind initially.

What does everyone else think? Some form of roster limitation? If so, which kind?

You can make it so that you can only keep a certain number of players per year. In this case, how many? You want it to be enough so you can hold on to your core players and your good prospects, but not so much that good players or prospects never hit the draft. 7 probably isn’t too far off in this case.

You could give players contracts of definite length. A few ways to do this I suppose. You could give each team a set number of contracts of varying lengths, so at any given time each team would be able to have, for example, two 5-year contracts, three 4-year contracts, five 3-year contracts, etc., to be assigned at his discretion. Alternately, you could have contract length determined by draft position. So, in the inaugural draft, 1st Rounder would have 5-year deals, 2nd Rounder 3 year deals, then 1 year deals, then 4, etc. You’d mix it up so that there would be “young guy” rounds and “old man” rounds, then do essentially the same thing with the subsequent drafts.

I’ve even heard of leagues that have a salary cap. All player acquisition is done by auction, with the auction price serving as a player’s salary. Combine this with some form of guaranteed contracts and you have a real limitation. Sounds like fun to me, but also sounds like a nightmare to design and (especially) to maintain.
But yeah, any ideas are welcome.

25

I think people are underestimating the amount of change in the dominant players from year to year. For every RB and QB that’s at the on a consistent basis, there are many one hit wonders, stars arising out of nowhere, etc.

Look at the rosters of the team champions of your leagues from 1/2/3 years ago. Would that roster carry them to an easy victory in subsequent years?

There’d be plenty of changes in the quality of players on a roster from year to year even if the roster doesn’t change.

I’m open to the idea of a contract system. It would make the off-season more interesting. It’s more work, but maybe instead of straight keepers, at the end of the year you could have a set number of 3 year contracts, a set number of 2 year contracts, some more 1 (more) year contracts, and others are released as free agents.

So, just pulling out numbers out of my ass, we could have 25 man rosters, with:
4 3-year contracts
6-2 year contracts
8-1 year contracts

You could only give a player a contract once, and when the contracts are up, they would re-enter that next year’s draft.

This is significantly different than a dynasty league, and falls somewhere betwen a complex keeper league and a dynasty league, but it’s a workable idea.

Edit: Keep in mind that for pretty much everyone this will be a second, third, or fourth league. They have the standard redraft every year experience. The point of the league is to do something different. So yes, there’d be less to a draft in years 2 onwards than a standard league, and yes, having a bad first draft will impact you negatively in future years - but that’s part of the experience. We’re shooting for something different than just adding another standard league.

26

I love the idea of contracts, but short of setting up an offline utility like I wrote for the keeper league, I think it would be way too much work for the commish.

Let’s just start throwing out actual ideas and see if any stick. Note that specific roster makeup is integral to any specific idea, so I’m going to lead with the roster and then spitball from there.

Starters: (8) QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR/TE, K, DEF
I’d really like to put in a flex RB, but my gut says that having three RB spots is too much and having only one dedicated RB spot is too little. Just my opinion, and I could be convinced otherwise.
Bench: 10 (eg: QB, QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR, TE, Flex, Flex)

Maybe 10 keepers. All players on final roster are eligible regardless of whether acquired via draft, trade, waivers or free agency. Keepers never expire. This means the inaugural draft is 18 rounds, subsequent drafts are 8 rounds.

I would be interested in something like this.

27

This conflicts with the long term player development idea, though. The guys you’re drafting in round 12+ are usuaully guys who aren’t very good now but who you expect to blossom. Getting stuck with a minimum length contract on them doesn’t give them much of a chance to work out.

It might actually work best the other way - you only get your top picks/star players for a year or two, but you get to keep your long term developmental players for longer. So the top talent/big name/high expectations players would have significant turnover from year to year, while everyone would be able to keep their late round gems.

Hmm. That may actually be an interesting idea. If for example your first and second round picks you only get for a year, rounds 3-5 you get for 2 years, 6-10 3 years, and 11+ indefinitely then no one would have Adrian Peterson for years, but if you were good enough to find this year’s Marques Colston in round 15 you get to keep him. New drafts would have rookies plus players whose term is expiring.

It could also be interesting for the draft, as people decide whether they’ll try to snag a player in round 2 because they think his value is high, or they can hope he falls to them in round 3 where they can get a longer contract.

28

That’s why I suggested mixing it up, alternating long, mid, and short term rounds. So maybe Round 11 is for one-year deals, and everyone drafts their Ike Hilliards, then Round 12 is four-year deals, and everyone drafts their Ramses Bardens.

Your idea could work, too, though I’d worry that there wouldn’t be enough ability to keep stars. That is, for every long-shot like Colston who breaks out in year one, there are a dozen long-shots who don’t break out until year three, which doesn’t pay off all that much if they’re on a 3 or 4 year contract (or if they were released after their rookie season).
Speaking of which, how would drops work with a contract system? Would a three year contract be binding, or could such a contract be voided and then become available to be used on another player?

29

Which is why you draft a second year developmental project instead of a rookie. The 5+ year contracts take good players out of the talent pool for too long. It overemphasizes the first draft and doesn’t add anything to player prognostication (other than looking REALLY long term).

The contracts are binding. You sign Vince Young to a three year contract, he’s eating space on your roster for all three years. The only thing that helps is that you get one contract termination a year which would let you terminate it if you realized that you made an stupid mistake drafting that head case in the first place.

30

Maybe you saw the kid in college and you knew after a few years of adjustment to the NFL game he’d be a star. Or there’s someone on your team that’s held back by the coach playing favorites. Being able to guess who will be a star 2-5 years down the road instead of this year is something you can use your FF knowledge to predict to some degree (more knowledgable people will have better picks on average) and so it does add to player prognostication.

31

This would be awesome, and not too hard to keep track of.

32

When I first read Beef’s draft idea I missed the part about indefinite contracts for late-rounders. In that case I like it better than I did before.

33

So draft that kid in his second or third year.

It’s all a balancing act. You can skew it so that finding that potential star pays off huge, but then you’re also making it tough to get new talent into the drafting pool. Turner, AP, MJD, Megatron, and on and on would all be gone for over 5 years. There has to be some trade off. And while I appreciate finding that diamond in the rough who will blossom, the tradeoff is drafting each year with the top 50 to 100 players already gone.

Although your idea on keepers by round is interesting. Maybe even make it so the first 3 rounds, you can make the contract 1-2 years, rounds 4-5 contracts can be 1-3 years, rounds 6-10 can be 1-4… and on and on. There may be something workable in there.

34

It’s not quite that simple. Since year 1 could have a 25+ round draft, chances are any player at having some production will get drafted. Someone’s going to draft him, if only by default at some point. It severely hampers the ability to find long term gems, which is one of the main points of a league like this.

Making contract length optional and non-standard presents some logistical problems. If every 1st round pick is elegible for the draft in 1 year, and every 2-3 round pick is eligible then 2 years, then everyone is losing the same amount of players in the appropriate rounds. Everyone will have the same number of keepers for draft purposes, everyone will have the same number of roster spots to fill, etc. Making it variable length so that different teams are losing different numbers of players in different rounds in different years would be difficult to set a draft for.

Personally, I’m fine with an uncomplicated straight up dynasty league. The relative lack of roster turnover has some downsides, and I can see why someone may not want their only league to be a dynasty, but when we’re all playing multiple leagues then you’re already getting your yearly redraft fix - this is different enough to be interesting. IMO.

35

I agree that differing contract lengths would be awfully complicated and a pain in the ass. I don’t know that it would add a whole lot, either. I think it’d be simpler to just have a standard contract of three or four years. I’d even say we should allow some players to be resigned without going back into the draft pool, so you really can keep a guy for his whole career if you want; just that you can’t keep everybody for their whole careers.

Of course, the simplest solution of all would just to make it a keeper league with a large enough number of keepers that you can bring back the core of your team year after year.

36

I have some experience commishing a keeper league, and I assure you that a contract system of any kind would be WAY too much work. I have a difficult enough time keeping track of eligibility in a league where every player can be kept exactly twice, and each team can only keep up to 3 players per year. We’re talking hours to process the eligible keeper list for the league.

You guys are talking about hundreds of eligible keepers, all with their own individual contract length? I wouldn’t wish that commish job on my worst enemy.

37

This essentially just becomes a redraft league where the redraft is once every 3 or 4 years. So the people who are concerned that they don’t have a chance to change their team too much from year to year probably wouldn’t be happy with this.

This is also an option.

38

It would be simpler if we had a standardized contract length by rounds like I mentioned. That way you could go straight down the draft list “okay, all players from last year’s first round go back in the draft and players from 2 years ago drafted in round 2-3 go back in the draft”, etc.

39

So wouldn’t a league with enough keepers to cover your entire starting lineup be the perfect solution? That way you have to make some tough choices about who to keep as a starter and who to keep to develop for next year (just like a real GM) while still keeping the draft interesting on a year to year basis.

Besides that, as SenorBeef points out, you wouldn’t want to have the same starters from year to year because they won’t be as productive.

40

If we were to do a league that simply puts a cap on the number of players that can be kept each year, my concern would be this: if the cap is low enough to do its job (i.e., giving each draft class enough quality to turn weaker teams around relatively quickly), then optimal strategy would preclude keeping more than a couple of developmental players on your roster. For all but the best prospects (or the teams with the weakest starters), the probabilities just won’t work out in favor of keeping the young guy with upside, who may or may not ever become a regular starter in the NFL, as opposed to the unspectacular 29 year old WR who’s a safe bet to go for 850 yards and 7 TDs.

So, ***if ***we were to set a keeper limit, I would suggest allowing players to be redshirted until up to the start of their 4th pro season. You could have (for example) 6 keepers from your active roster, but also 5 redshirted players who you may keep in addition to the other 6. It would work like this:

– No player may be redshirted who has been in the NFL for 3 or more seasons.

– From the inaugural draft, any player who is entering his 1st, 2nd, or 3rd NFL season may be redshirted; in subsequent drafts, only incoming rookies may be redshirted.

– A player who is placed on a starting roster for any game immediately loses all redshirt eligibility.

– A player who is traded or waived maintains his redshirt eligibility, so long as he has never been started in a game.

– To help keep track of redshirts and avoid abuse, we could (assuming we use Yahoo) have each team list all of its redshirt-eligible players in its “smack talk” field, so that the list would be displayed right above the starting roster in the matchup screen.
Thoughts?