For example, if I traded away a player right now, I wouldn’t get a free draft pick out of it at 5.02. Instead I would have to either get a player or an existing draft pick back to keep it balanced.
Yeah, because the trade wasnt made before the draft. Ours was.
That is how the draft in this league works. This system is the simplified version. Nobody ever bothered to post a clarification about the sequence and timing of the actual draft mechanisms. This was an issue the first year I joined this league (and several years before that). We clarified this years ago to make it more understandable
I’ll edit to add that I went through and simplified this sequence to make managing the draft within yahoo easier at least 3 years ago now.
Regardless, you can’t possibly have pick 3.11 if you never had pick 3.11. This is the reason we clarified this timing, specifically for these types of arguments. You don’t have picks to trade until cuts are made. Once cuts are made, the deadline for getting picks has passed. You can’t get new picks after the deadline. Trades can’t “process” until picks exist, and picks don’t exist until cuts are made.
Cuts turn into picks. Picks turn into draft order. Draft order is set. Trades process. It has to be this specific order
Its no biggie, I’ll find someone regardless. Just wondering.
No you can trade before cut downs. The key is that draft picks are created by cutdowns. Not before, not after. Only the cutdowns create draft picks. If you had 23 guys during cutdowns, you only created two draft picks.
You can do uneven trades before cutdowns, but draft picks do not exist before cut downs because, again, cutdowns create draft picks. If Mundi decided to keep 25 guys, pick 1.01 would not have existed. (And Breece Hall would be mine!)
EDIT: Put it this way: If you did get to pick at 3.11, who would make the pick at 7.01? Everyone would already have full rosters by then. Meaning it would be promoting 7.01 into 3.11 for free. That would seem wonky, right?
Yeah, but it didn’t affect me, so I didnt pay attention. 
Now I’m confused again. There wouldn’t have been a pick at 7.01, Mundi would not have been assigned that pick because his roster would have been full.
I think I understand this if yahoo assigns draft positions/picks before any trades can be made. So the cuts are first, then draft spots figured out, and only then can trades occur. It seems weird that they allow any trading of future draft picks if thats how they handle it, but, as I said, no big deal. I dont really need to understand it.
Yeah, I don’t know if Yahoo has an actual interface for dynasty leagues. They have a keeper interface, but there’s no way to trade picks within Yahoo that I know of myself. Beef is more experienced and knowledgeable about the system than I am. We just handle trading picks outside of the system. There’s almost certainly no way to trade future picks through Yahoo
He kept 18, which created 7 picks. You kept 23, which created 2. You are then free to trade those created picks, but once created they are set in stone. They can’t be upgraded.
I was actually thinking that we could change the way the draft works to be even more simple. The downside is that the draft would take 2-3x longer, so we wouldn’t be able to draft around cut-down day (which has always been the goal of the league). There’s no reason we can’t give everyone X number of picks (say, 5). And then do the draft. Then you cut down players to actually claim your picks. If you draft 5 and cut 1, you only roster your first round pick and everyone else goes into the free agent pool for week 1. I haven’t thought how it would affect trades, but it seems simpler to me.
So if I only actually wanted to draft three guys, in the “everyone drafts five” system I could “protect” the last two guys I don’t intend to keep, but want to keep away from everyone else? I don’t think I love that.
Those last two are 4th and 5th round rookies (in a draft with a FULL 5 rounds, not partial rounds in 3-7 like we do now), so it’s unlikely you’d care too much about protecting them. However, you aren’t protecting them anyway, because they would be up for grabs for anyone during waivers
Yeah, I guess it would just be applying a waiver tax to them.
If I were still picking guys to fill up my roster, I wouldn’t want managers who already have a full roster just taking guys out of the draft pool ahead of me in the order.
That’s exactly how the real NFL does it, and it is undoubtedly simpler than dealing with “last picks.” There are downsides to the idea, but it would be easier
But that brings us back to Yahoo’s artificial limitations. Yahoo requires rosters to have exactly 25 players after the draft in order to start the league. It would be akin to the NFL requiring the 53-man roster cutdown happen the day after the draft. In real life NFL teams can keep however many players they want well after the draft.
Yahoo requires us to have 25 players to start the season. We could draft in May and then do final cuts the day before the season started to get to 25
I tell you I keep setting them up and you keep knocking them down. At this moment I’m reduced to saying but I just don’t like it. That’s not very compelling.
Or, as I thought it worked, I traded two players to Mundi, and kept 21 players. Mundi received 2 players, and kept 20. Then, the draft picks are assigned, and my 4 picks are 1.1 and my regular ones. And Mundi’s are Mundi’s. Thats how I thought trading future picks worked.
But, again, no big deal.
One thing that idea would open up that is currently not possible is the ability to trade 2 for 1 to open up roster spots for your draft, like with this situation Hamlet brought up. As it is, you can do that during the season, but not during the draft. I have often been frustrated by being forced to cut a player I wanted to keep because I couldn’t trade someone 2 for 1 to open up a final roster spot.
The biggest downside is having to draft way, way earlier in the year to get through the extra 10-20 picks. It rewards owners who pay attention to the NFL draft, but penalizes owners who rely on the preseason to inform their potential picks
I think this might gloss over the reality. I only have this draft to judge by directly, but there were three teams that had no round 3 draft picks this year. Looking at past threads, 1 team had no round 3 pick last year. 3 teams had no round 3 pick the year before. It seems to me like there would still be desirable players in round 3 that owners with strong teams (thus not needing/wanting to cut deeply) would simply be making more expensive for every other owner to claim after the draft while also diluting the advantage of draft order in later rounds. That doesn’t seem like a good thing to me - though I have great sympathy for the argument of ease.