This league will be recruiting. Last year we ran with 8 people but I see no reason we can’t bump it up to 12.
You absolutely must make the draft, though - there’s no autodraft in an auction league.
We may be using ESPN’s FF site to conduct the draft, but most likely we’ll be playing on yahoo. ESPN’s a free sign up that takes under a minute so that shouldn’t be a problem.
We could always just play on ESPN, but I think there may be others like me who buy the yahoo live tracker package and I’d like to consolidate all of my FF there.
If we don’t do that, we’ll probably use a voice/text chat program like we used ventrilo last year to conduct the draft. If we go that route, I’ll be breaking up the duties to various volunteers to speed up the process.
If you’re new to the auction draft thing, don’t be intimidated. You can join a mock draft on ESPN.com to see how it works. There’s lots of info about it in last year’s thread.
If you want to join the league, the ID on yahoo is 327418 and the password is cecil. The draft date is unset currently and we need to discuss what works best for everyone. I left the maximum teams at 20 for now but we’ll probably only run with 12 or 14 depending on interest.
If you’re not sure you can make the draft because we haven’t set a date yet, you can join and then withdraw later if you’d like, just give some advanced notice if possible.
How do we want to handle waivers/free agency? I don’t have any experience with the following setup, but we could have a blind auction every week. The funds available to buy free agents could either be a pre-determined amount, or the remnants of each owner’s funds from the draft (thus adding another level of strategy to draft day). I don’t know how well it would work in practice, but I think it’s a neat idea.
ETA: Oh, and we should definitely wind up on Yahoo, regardless of how we do the draft.
I’d be interested, but the time of the draft would matter to me greatly. Also, I’m on dialup generally in the evenings, would that be a problem for the various methods for doing a live auction draft?
I’m in. Need to know a draft time as soon as possible though. My manager makes schedules two weeks ahead so in order for me to get time off of work I’d need to know well in advance. Otherwise I’m going to have to call in a bomb threat, and that’s a problem. (It should work out though, I do a good middle eastern accent).
If someone who knows the ESPN stuff wants to set up a draft for Wednesday August 27th sometime in the evening (if that works for everyone), that’d work. I’ve got to catch a flight in a bit and I have to finish up doing stuff. My internet access will be sporatic for a while.
You can forward me the results e-mail and I’ll input it into the yahoo league.
ESPN’s flash interface should work ok over dialup, I’m guessing.
I’ve been away from the interwebs for a few days. In order to give people time, I’m setting the ESPN draft date for Tuesday Sept 2 at 9pm eastern. Is that okay with everyone?
Sign up for an ESPN.com fantasy account, it’s free and quick:
Then if you’d like, do a mock auction draft to get a feel for the interface. Make sure you’re signed up for both the yahoo and ESPN leagues… the ESPN league will handle the draft and then the actual in-season play will be done on yahoo (unless we want to just stick to ESPN… their description page said that their free leagues have free live scoring).
I’m not sure how you join the league - it never asked for a password and didn’t give me a number. Maybe you join manually by league name? If so, it’s “SDMB Auction Draft”.
I’ll only have sporatic internet access until then but I’ll try to keep up to date.
As far as I can tell, the only way to join a private league on ESPN is to be invited.
Send me your SDMB name and the e-mail address you want to use to sign up for (or have already signed up for) the ESPN FF site. Send it to my e-mail of [my sdmb name]@yahoo.com.
In 2 days or so, anyone who hasn’t sent me an e-mail address will get invited under the e-mail listed on their yahoo team.
BTW, we may want to consider just running the whole season on ESPN. They seem to have the gametime till Tuesday waiver system that we do manually. Does anyone have any experience using ESPN for FF?
To anyone new: We’re still recruiting people, feel free to e-mail or PM me to get an invite.
I’ve used ESPN a couple of times for fantasy sports (baseball and football). I think their interface is far sleeker, with better information closer at hand, than Yahoo. ESPN has had a history of some technical problems though, a few of them big enough to sabotage leagues. I think those have been worked out now that ESPN has had a few seasons under their belt and have put a lot of money into promoting and upgrading their fantasy experience. It’s my site of choice.
That said, I’ve never tried creating a league on ESPN, and I have no idea what scoring options they allow. I do remember thinking last year that they didn’t seem to offer a lot of customization on rosters / scoring.
At the end I’ll get an e-mail with the roster results, which I can then input manually into yahoo.
Yahoo has no auction draft interface whatsoever - we’d have to do that manually to do it that way. Last year that meant using a text/voice program… which will be harder for me now since I’m on a laptop with a small battery on wifi away from home.
I’m going to invite people to ESPN via their yahoo FF e-mail address. If you don’t want me to do that for you for some reason post about it here or throw me an e-mail.
I use ESPN for my baseball league, and those techinical problems caused a fair number of headaches eyar. (They reset all leagues a week and a half into the season). Still I’ve stuck with them, and they have been better this year, albeat with a number of diluted features. They do offer free live scoring in baseball though and number of options that Yahoo doesn’t. I’m not sure if they have live scoring for football, as I haven’t used them yet.
I would be interested in doing a football auction draft, as I have never done one before. Do you have an estimate on how long it will take?
I just did a mock auction draft on ESPN. Their program seems to work fine, and it’s pretty intuitive. It seems to take almost exactly 1 minute per pick, so I don’t know of it’ll be any quicker than what we did last year, but I’m sure record keeping will be easier.
Still can’t find the league, though. Once people get signed up and have a chance to look at the interface we can maybe have a discussion about whether or not to move to Yahoo.
Sorry for the delays, I’ve been both busy and without internet access.
I sent out invites to the ESPN league to everyone’s e-mail that’s listed in the yahoo league. Except for Kiros, who has his address hidden. Send me a PM with your e-mail please so I can invite you.
The league is still open for new people, just bring it to my attention on this thread that you joined the yahoo league and I’ll invite you on ESPN.
The draft is set for Tuesday, Sept. 2 at 9pm eastern. It can still be changed as far as I know, but that seems like a decent draft time.
The current plan as far as I know is to use ESPN to draft and then set up the yahoo league with the results. Ellis Dee suggested that we use both services for the first week and then decide which to use for the rest of the season, which seems reasonable.
If we want to do any sort of bidding waiver system or whatever, I’m open to ideas.