I agree with the sentiment, but it doesn’t happen in the NFL draft. If the Giants trade two players to the Bucs for one player, the Giants don’t get the Buc’s last pick to keep things even. In the NFL, you are allowed to finish the draft with however many players you want. You then cut down (or sign more) later.
Yes, but what I’m saying is if the Niners traded for the Rams last pick it wouldn’t automatically be where the Niners place in line would be. It would be where the Rams are supposed to draft that pick.
There is a very good chance I’m misunderstanding the situation, and if so I apologize.
Way-to-early potential cut list:
Justin Herbert
Chris Godwin
Chris Olave
Rachaad White
Miles Sanders
David Njoku
Jerry Jeudy
Najee Harris
Jameson Williams
Jaylen Warren
Noah Fant
Leonard Fournette
Evan Engram
Hassan Haskins
Eno Benjamin
Mike Gesicki
Keaontay Ingram
Jordan Mason
Jeff Driskel
Tutu Atwell
Chris Moore
Rondale Moore
Mecole Hardman Jr.
I am interested in trading for a backup QB, preferably one with upside. Might even give up my #1 pick in the second round.
Do we have cut down and draft start dates? Asking for a friend…
We added the rule because not having it caused a bunch of problems. I don’t have a great recollection of the precipitating event but I recall it being deemed essential. Not having this rule allowed a person to end a draft with more than the maximum number of players which disadvantages all the other drafters.
If we get rid of it I suspect we’ll simply end up replacing it with a policy that amounts to essentially the same thing.
I’ve not yet heard a single compelling description of why this rule is actually a problem. People seem to think it’s illogical but what’s the cost? Why so bent out of shape over it? If we’re all allowed to exit the draft with more than 25 players then we might as well just go all in and do final cuts after the draft is complete. At least we’d all be on a level playing field if we did that.
It cost Hamlet several rounds of value in his last pick last year when there’s no reason it needed to.
The exact same trade before cutdowns vs after cutdowns works differently because of the rule, which adds confusion.
How does trading your last pick cost someone “rounds of value?”
The reason he had to do it was so he wouldn’t have 26 players. Why does he get to have 26 players and someone who doesn’t do a trade can only have 25? That’s a player people drafting after him can’t pick.
Like I said, if he gets to make a mid-draft or post-draft cut to get below the threshold, why does anyone need to make cuts pre-draft?
We’re talking about between cutdowns and the draft, not during the draft.
Also, he was the short side of the trade. He had to get another pick because he only ended up with 24 after the trade. If the trade had happened before cutdowns, the new pick he got would have been his own last pick, which would have been in the fourth round. But because he did it after cutdowns, he had to take back his trading partner’s last pick instead of getting his own new one. That one was in the 7th round. So he lost three rounds of value out of his final pick for no reason other than (unnecessary) bookkeeping.
There does not need to be any functional difference in trades before and after cutdowns. During the draft is a different issue; this rule change wouldn’t apply to during the draft.
(It’s worth noting that the rule change is starting to look moot for this season, since cutdowns will likely go right up until the draft begins. We are rapidly running out of time.)
We draft offline. Technically there’s no difference between after cut downs and during the draft. In every practical sense the first overall pick in on the clock the second we lock in the cuts. The only reason for s gap is so the commish can do the updates in Yahoo.
In Hamlet’s scenario I see no logical reason he should be gifted a 4th round pick by virtue or conducting an unbalanced trade. This is really just gaming the system. It’s not like he cut an extra player and needs to be made whole. He got value for that 25th player by turning it and another player into one better player. If we want competitive balance he should probably not get any picks back and should have to get up to 25 players through the waiver wire.
Just to be perfectly clear, the idea that I was “gaming the system” is complete and utter bullshit. I was tired of this kind of crap last year, and this year isn’t starting great. I can fucking give up Chris Olave to keep things cool, and still get accused of gaming the system or wanting rules changed only to suit me. Utter Bullshit.
Here’s what happened last year. On August 25th (4 days BEFORE the last cuts were made and the draft started), I traded Joe Burrow and Juju for the #1 pick. When the draft started, I got the 3 picks I needed to fill my roster. But what should have been my 3.11 pick was turned into the 7.01, because of whatever the reasons are for that rule. That was even after I specifically asked if I should be given a player back in the trade that I could cut to avoid that situation. I lose 16 picks in value for what I still cannot figure out is a valid reason other than adherence to a rule that made no sense in my situation and could have been avoided if my recommendation was accepted.
But it’s fine. I can live with it, and it’s just fantasy football. But this bullshit about “gaming the system” is really fucking annoying, and just makes this league so much less fun than it was. I’m really fucking tired of it.
There was no gaming of the system, Hamlet acts in good faith and there was just disagreement about the fallout from how the rules worked.
Sorry that I haven’t been more active in the thread, I ended up needing to extend my traveling. I’m flying back home just in time to be during the peak flooding and don’t even know if the roads will be usable. Or electricity. We might get a years worth of rain in a few hours worst case scenario.
It wouldn’t be gifted, it’s not gaming the system, and this is just a bullshit take.
Cuts have not yet been made. If I trade you two players and you trade me one back, how does that work? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way it works is that I then cut down however I please and get all natural picks, and so do you. You do not get any of my picks, nor do I get any of yours. There is no logical reason that there need to be different rules before and after cuts in terms of how trades work.
And no, the draft does not start the moment cutdowns are made. The draft starts when the draft starts.
I was the person on the other end of the Hamlet trade last year. Nobody was trying to game any system. It was my first year in league and we sought and followed guidance on how to execute the unbalanced trade. The method recommended and followed resulted in Hamlet picking in round 7 to fill his extra slot. If he had taken a player from me at the end of the roster and then cut him, he would have picked in round 3. This is entirely a result of him having better roster strength than I did going into the draft, so he was cutting fewer players. I think it is a mistake to consider either scenario as “gaining” or “losing” value from some “natural value” position. There is no natural value position. The disparity exists because not every team cuts the same number of players each year, but roster sizes need to be identical.
So the rule choice, to me, comes down to whether we want to use the execution of an unbalanced (in numbers) trade as an opportunity to reinforce a deeper roster or inhibit it. This is the same question we address when we choose draft order. So I am happy with the current rule but not attached to it. In essence, the current rule disallows unbalanced trades by implicitly including a draft pick to balance the roster numbers. If someone is concerned about the placement of that pick, it is a negotiable element of the trade.
If I’ve done this right, my end of season roster was:
QB Joe Cooler, Jared Goff, Jordan Love
RB Cam Akers, Brian Robinson, Gus Edwards, Darrell Henderson, Alexander Mattison, Tyrion Davis-Price, Damien Williams
WR Tee Higgins, JuJu Smith-Schuster, Christian Watson, Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, Van Jefferson, DaVante Parker, Calvin Ridley
TE Pat Freiermuth, Cade Otton, Hayden Hurst
K Will Lutz, Greg Joseph
DEF Baltimore, Las Vegas, Seattle
No idea on cuts yet, though a few of them will be obvious.
This is not true for trades before cutdowns. Unbalanced trades are perfectly fine before cutdowns because draft picks do not exist until cutdowns.
And now I’m remembering a crucial detail: Hamlet traded two guys for the first overall pick. That’s why we said he couldn’t do it until after cutdowns. The first pick didn’t exist until after cutdowns.
However, it was correctly pointed out that future trading is allowed. You can trade for next year’s first if you want, even though it doesn’t exist yet. So why couldn’t Hamlet trade for Mundi’s “next year’s first rounder” where next year technically meant “next week after cutdowns.” There is no logical reason he couldn’t have done that according to our long-standing rules.
But at least now I remember why we advised to wait until after cutdowns. There was a reason, it just wasn’t a good one. What we should have done is just treat it the same way that we handle trading for future draft picks.
The fact that it was two players for a draft pick (as opposed to two players for one player) may very well change things.
How does future draft pick trading work? Let’s imagine I’m trading away DJ Moore. If I trade away Moore for your first rounder next year, do I have to send back my last pick next year to keep next year even? Does that also mean I have to take your last rounder this year to keep this year even? I genuinely don’t know how we would handle trading Moore for next year’s first. Assume it’s before cutdowns this year. How does it work, exactly?
I had been hypothesizing this entire time about trading two players for one player, no draft picks involved. The fact a draft pick was involved probably does change things.
This is how we have been doing it for a few years now, since I have done that exact trade with Dale a couple years in a row. That exact situation will be happening this year when Dale gets my 1st and I get his last pick
Well in that case, maybe I should backtrack. From what I can tell, last year Hamlet properly drafted his last player in the 7th. There was no way he could have drafted his last player in the 4th or 3rd or whenever his natural last pick would have been. It would be different if it were two players for one player, but two players for a draft pick means he was always getting Mundi’s first and last pick no matter how you slice it.
Here’s the thing. This league is massively, comically, weighted to benefit the good teams. There’s no salary cap and there’s no free agency to cause teams to part ways with players before the owner wants to. We have so little parity in the mechanics of the league.
One of the obvious ways where this manifests, is that every year, the deepest team (usually also the best, but not necessarily) ends up using a 3rd or 4th round pick to populate his 25th roster spot. The bad teams are stuck foraging for 7th and 8th rounders to fill out their 25th spot. This after filling their 23rd and 24th slots with 5/6/7th rounders.
From the beginning I’ve pretty much opposed unbalanced trades and future draft pick trading because both are another windfall for the haves over the have nots. If your roster is stacked and you have a bench full of starter level players, it’s easy for you to package 2 or more players to get literally the best player in the league from another owner. And when you’re doing that in the offseason before the draft, not only are you packaging 2 players for one super star, you’re also then backfilling that newly created roster hole with a high round pick who is younger than the guy you sent pakcing. Another win-win.
Of course, we can simply agree that this is just capitalism, and that this kind of self-reinforcing advantage is the reward an own gets from being both lucky and smart with their team construction. And that’s a perfectly valid position to take. I however would like to see some token attempt to make things at least marginally tougher for the fat cats. Since I’ve been a doormat since the day I inherited my team, I’m probably biased here, but I want us to at least say it out loud when we make life harder for the weaker teams.
Each year we peel back another restriction to roster management. First it was the allowance of future draft pick trading. Then it was the additional IR slots. Now it’s a complete free for all with unbalanced trades.
Under these new rules, if you have a loaded roster and you’re looking to only have 2-3 cuts…you’re a damn fool if you don’t work out an unbalanced trade to upgrade a couple starters and capture a couple more draft picks. I suppose it’s not gaming the system if we all decide that that’s just the system working as designed. I just think it makes it less fun to try and claw my way out of the toilet.
Would the solution be in these situations that you can’t just say that you are “trading my last pick” and instead you must provide exactly the pick you intend to trade to balance?
In practice if I make a trade where I have to provide my 4th Round pick as balance I’m then required to cut that many players to ensure I have a 4th Round Pick.