I didn’t think this was complicated. In previous seasons we made it so that the winner of the consolation bracket was awarded the 5th overall draft spot. A two-time loser would end up in the 8th spot. Couple seasons ago we removed that so that a team that just barely misses the playoffs with the 5th overall seed can choose to ignore his post-season line up and get rewarded with the 5th draft pick by starting a bunch of injured/covid guys or even flat out benching guys. We haven’t seen it happen in any egregious fashion yet, but it’s just a matter of time.
If the overriding goal is to get to more parity then we shouldn’t be awarding draft positions based on record (and definitely not based on playoff outcomes), we should be doing it based on points scored. I suppose we could make an exception for the championship bracket.
My team was dismal this year but I had a lot of schedule luck. I’m very fortunate I didn’t stumble into the 8th seed and accidentally win a consolation game. I’ve have had the second worst point total but would have been stuck drafting in the 7th or 8th spot instead of the 4th spot. That said, even picking in the 4th spot is a big detriment for my barren roster. I scored almost 250 fewer points than the team drafting just behind me (the difference between the top and bottom scorers being just ~350 points.)
I don’t really understand why you’re so concerned with bad faith in this league. We’ve ran for 12 years now without anyone engaging in trying to bend the rules or bad sportsmanship like this, but some of you are convinced that we have to lock down every possible way to play in an unsporting/anti-competitive way like everyone here is doing their best to skirt the rules.
Anyway, yes, the consolation bowl winning the draft pick was anti-parity by a little bit. The absolute worst case scenario was that someone got moved down 1 slot (the real worst team got the 6th pick instead of the 5th) so it wasn’t that big a deal parity-wise and people thought it added a fun little novelty. I personally don’t care about the consolation bowl or the prize for it, but I assume at some point we had a vote and people wanted it that way.
I’d be fine with awarding draft order based on points scored, too - are you proposing this as a rule we should discuss and vote on?
Because we’re all human, and we’ve been turning over some owners in the last few years so the past may not predict the future.
We had the exact same argument about the COVID IR spots. Everyone said “it’s fine and no one here will abuse it” and then within a couple weeks I cited an incident, unintentional or not. Gentleman’s agreements simply are not viable. In fact we don’t know that there has never been any tanking in this league…all we know is that there’s never been a big fight about it. Maybe it’s never happened, but then again maybe it has and it didn’t get noticed. Or maybe it was done artfully.
Just as an example…I lost in week 14 ensuring that I’d have the 9th draft pick so this is moot now, but I had CEH on the bench as he was a game time decision and Adam Theilen in the starting lineup as he was questionable before Thursday night. I was proactive and managed to get the right guys into the lineup, but I could have ensured the loss by simply not doing anything and claiming bad luck/timing. No one could have reasonably accused me of tanking…but the incentive was clear.
I think you’re under the impression that we awarded draft picks in order of the consolation bowl for all 4 players - that is, players in 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th got draft picks 5, 6, 7, and 8. But we actually only awarded the #5 pick to the winner, and all other positions drafted in reverse order of standings for the season, not the consolation bowl. Easy mistake to make, but as I said, the way we ran it, at most everyone gets moved down 1 slot, not up to 4.
If it’s so subtle and unenforceable, there isn’t really a way to make a rule to enforce it short of forcing everyone to automatically start the highest projected players on their roster every game. I really don’t think we’ve ever had a tanking problem and I trust everyone to act honorably in that regard.
However, if we want to codify anti-tanking rules in principle, that’s fine with me. Enforcement is tricky, but I’m comfortable with making a rule that says that you must try to create the best/most winning team with your available roster every week in good faith, both for the sake of correctly assigning the draft order as parity, and because throwing games can reward other teams and create an unfairness there. I bet we probably do have a rule like that created 10+ years ago, but we don’t really have a big official list of rules anywhere, we just sort of solved things as they came up.
In your proposal, does the championship/playoff bracket get seeded in reverse order of finish, or points? If it’s all points, then you could potentially have the champion drafting 9th, which I could live with, but it would probably rub people the wrong way.
I was thinking that, but my point stands. You could go from 5th to 9th if you were on the boundary of missing the Consolation Bowl like I was. Of course I’d have needed to win both in week 14 and then twice more, but I did have the choice in week 14 to tank and ensure a substantially better pick. So it’s true that the difference can be more than 1 slot if you look beyond just week 16’s results.
This is NOT what I’m proposing. It’s completely unenforceable and can only lead to hurt feelings. What I’m saying is that we should build a rewards system that discourages it. Making the consolation bowl a reward for it was a effective way at convincing those middle of the pack teams to compete. Incentives are they only practical approach. Nannying is not something we should be doing nor is anything that requires a form of self-policing. That again was the problem with the IRs. We had “written” rules that couldn’t be directly administered by Yahoo which made it infeasible.
So, if we’re completely out on trying to create an incentives-based approach to curb tanking then we need to actually do that fully. Points are a much surer indicator of a team’s quality than record is (and better than the results of a single playoff game). And in most cases the points differential by week 16 is so great that the final results in the last week will have little bearing, so the consolation truly becomes all about pride.
I think we should seed draft picks based on points scored through the end of the regular season. From top-to-bottom including picks 9-12. In that scenario you could probably have a league champion drafting even higher than 9th because of the way we use divisions, but that’s fine by me. This year Jules had the 7th (and barely missed being 8th) highest point total and had a chance at the title. I’m not sure if Yahoo counts post-season points in the running total on the standings page or not, but you get the idea.
This of course doesn’t entirely prohibit tanking, but a player would either have to sandbag all season or they’d have to be close enough in the point counts at the end of the year to manipulate the results. Not impossible, but ultimately it’s not likely to come down to a single sit-start decision the way a single game result can.
I’d be fine with a blended approach where the Championship bracket is seeded in reverse order just to avoid that outlier situation like Jules had this year.
We did actually award the picks from the consolation bowl in exactly that fashion, since even before I joined the league. The draft order has always been 12, 11, 10, 9, 5, 6, 7, 8, 4, 3, 2, 1 until this year when we got rid of the consolation bracket incentive. You can see Varlos confirm this is by design here
Just to toss this out there, the counterargument against basing draft picks on points is that it’s inconsistent and almost nonsensical to award draft picks and league championships using different criteria.
From my perspective, it just makes sense to use regular season point totals to determine draft picks, and have the playoff tournament be just a separate thing for bragging rights. ie: championships.
Those two statements are at odds with each other. I agree with the second idea. The first only sounds weird because its how professional leagues do it, but since there are no defenses in fantasy you can trust that points are an accurate indicator of quality. That’s not the case IRL.
Yep, the first statement was the argument against my position, while the second statement was/is my position.
It should be noted that this rule change would do nothing to help the tanking issue. You can just as easily tank points as you can wins, and you would for sure be able to tell whether or not it would help you to do so.
This change would only help in a parity sense, not a tanking sense. I support it for parity.
But wins can have a outsized impact. One loss can move you 3-4 spots, Its highly unlikely that tanking points would be as effective on a single week basis.
Theoretically we could use potential points instead of actual to remove the possibility of tanking. Short of actually dropping players, you’d have no control. I don’t think anyone wants to base draft picks on a custom points system, though.
EDIT: For the new guy, at various times I have posted potential point totals in the thread for fun. I wrote a little program that takes everyone’s Yahoo results and figures out the most points you could have scored with perfect knowledge.
I haven’t since the boards move to discourse, and unfortunately discourse is unkind to my the vbulletin-formatted stat posts. Long and broken, thread-ruining stat posts.
So I actually just dug around all the old league threads searching for “consolation” and came to realize that I think we had several different ideas about the consolation bowl and draft picks. Some people (Justin and I, and you once) thought that we were only giving the 5th pick to the consolation winner and everyone else drafted in their normal (reverse order of standings). Others (you a different time time, Varlos) thought we were doing the entire 5-8 middle of the draft based on the order of the consolation bowl finish. I haven’t actually looked up to see what we did every year because we may have been inconsistent.
It’s actually kind of a confusing mess that I didn’t realize we never quite cleared up. We did this year, as we changed the consolation winner prize to FAAB and kept the draft in reverse order of standings, which is good I think, but there has been some confusion about the 5th pick only vs 5-8th pick for the whole bracket issue.
This wouldn’t work primarily because you can’t assume that teams with the highest potential points are the “best” teams. For example, a team might be constructed with a stars and scrubs style roster loaded with premium starters and a bunch of young, injured or unproven backups. That team could be an absolute powerhouse especially if they chose to use trades to bolster their starting lineup by shipping off picks and high-quality backups in unbalanced trades. but they’d have next to no depth or bench scoring. But a team with a lot of difficult game-day roster decisions because they are loaded with redundant middle tier flex players but few clear starters over the course of the year may have a higher potential point total. Since they will inevitably make the wrong choice a lot of the time, they could have a consistently high projected total but a middling record.
Yeah, it was my mistake. We did award 5th-8th draft picks in order of consolation bowl finish, not just 5th pick. I proposed we just did 5th pick, as I thought giving the winner a boost was enough and the losers didn’t also need to determine the seeding, and in my head that’s what I remembered being the rule, but the way it was implemented was actually 5th to 8th drafted in order of consolation bowl finish.
True enough. Could use total roster points but meh. It’s not a good idea to begin with.
I kinda like the 7th, 8th, 5th, 6th idea.
I could also get behind going by regular season point totals for the top 8 picks (including the consolation bowl) and let the playoffs determine the last 4. (EDIT: Actually, there’s no guarantee that the top 4 point totals will be the 4 playoff teams. So scratch that.)