Doing my annual password reset because I’ve forgotten it again… and checking in with y’all for this year. Will post cuts shortly.
Okay, I think I see how it was supposed to work as a future draft pick trade.
Before cuts: Hamlet trades two guys plus his last pick to Mundi for Mundi’s first pick.
I think that would have worked out the way Hamlet was originally thinking. It’s super counterintuitive, though.
This is the part I find confusing, unrealistic, and non-sensical. And I think last year we delved into the existential mantra of “can God make a draft picks so big he couldn’t trade it” navel gazing. I was under the impression that yes, we can trade future picks, and if it is done before cuts are finalized, then when the draft starts, and we figure out the order. I never understood, and likely never will, why, if you can trade future picks, they don’t really exist before the draft starts and creates them.
But, again, no worries.
Let’s get this going. Anyone interested in Tyler Boyd? He’s in the last year of his contract with the Bengals and is pretty damn solid.
Or a slightly used Zach Wilson? He might be better after watching Aaron Rodgers and not banging his Mom’s friend.
We can. The only stipulation is that when trading future draft picks, the future draft pick portions of the trade must be balanced. Meaning you would have had to send your last pick in the deal. That would have been fine, it was just hard to understand.
The reason it was hard to see is that how it should have gone is:
“We want to do a two for one trade.”
“No problem, but you have to make it a three for one in order to keep it balanced.”
I mean, that’s not really intuitive, y’know?
He’s actually starting to become intriguing. I was sure he was done with the Jets and possibly his entire career, but it’s clear at this point that the Jets are keeping him. And he could actually get better. I don’t know if I would bet money on it, but it is possible.
Just speaking in terms of real life as opposed to fantasy, I wonder what the Jets do if Wilson’s rookie contract comes to an end at the same time Rodgers retires. I guess they get to resign Wilson on the cheap?
I love this.
No I knew that, but Brady announced the same but wasn’t automatically removed from my roster.
I think this is the least confusing solution. There are probably a handful of negative trade-offs that would be realized once in practice, but I can’t foresee them.
I don’t really understand what you mean when you say “we don’t have a draft at all”, perhaps that’s a typo.
In any case, every team finishes the season with at least 25 players. Typically more due to IR slots, but at least 25. Then at some point before Week 1, we all get 4 draft picks. We conduct the draft (because there weren’t any cuts, this essentially becomes a pure rookie draft) and everyone has somewhere between 29 and 35 players on their roster depending on how many IR slots they used the previous season. Then after the draft and before the opening kickoff everyone has to get to a 25 man roster. They could cut a newly drafted player if they wanted to.
One potential issue is that we maybe wouldn’t want to enter this new post-cuts period on waivers. Those bad teams who would normally need to add more than 4 draft picks would need a chance to swap additional players before week one without impediment. Though, maybe waivers is a better system than FAAB at this stage of the process.
We also might need to make this post-draft/pre-cuts window a no-trade period or something.
It certainly has the benefit of looking a lot more like the real NFL. Whether that feels fair in the end is unclear.
Ides of Martz Roster
QB Justin Fields, Malik Willis, Jimmy Garoppolo, Davis Mills
RB Travis Etienne Jr, Antonio Gibson, Dameon Pierce, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Khalil Herbert, Kene Nwangwu, Pierre Strong Jr., Chase Edmonds
WR Alec Pierce, Khalil Shakir, Kadarius Toney, Darnell Mooney, Velus Jones Jr., Adam Thielen, Robert Woods, Devin Duvernay
TE Chigoziem Okonkwo, Cole Kmet, Jelani Woods, Jake Ferguson
K Jake Elliott, Robbie Gould
DEF Kansas City, Houston, Chicago
Cuts Chicago, Robbie Gould, Velus Jones Jr., Chase Edmonds, Davis Mills, Adam Thielen, Robert Woods, Kene Nwangwu, Pierre Strong Jr., Devin Duvernay
I kind of like the idea of a fixed four-round draft with 48 picks, but I don’t even remember the last time I drafted more than four players so I wouldn’t feel limited by it. People who draft more than four might have objections, but for all I know each year it’s different people who draft more than four. I just know that we frequently (always?) get to round 7+ with at least one or two people still drafting.
We should definitely think about this idea for next year, at least. I don’t think we allow structural changes like that to take effect immediately, so for this year it’s probably off the table. But next year it might be interesting to try. I was going to say we should vote on it next year, but we could (or maybe should) decide this year so that everybody knows what they’re getting into next year.
I think he means that the commissioners wouldn’t assign keepers in the draft results and then update as we go, but instead would just leave the whole thing blank until we finished and then enter everybody’s final rosters as the draft results.
EDIT: Thinking about it for another minute, I tend to prefer drafting three players. So I may end up viewing the fourth round pick as “free money” I’d be looking to trade away. (Something like my 3rd and 4th for a slightly better 3rd. I mean, it’s free…) In any case, I do agree that four rounds would be the magic number. Three rounds is not enough and five rounds is too many.
I very much like the idea that it more accurately models how the NFL draft works.
Yeah, sorry, this is what I meant. I wasn’t clear. We wouldn’t have a Yahoo draft in that scenario. We would go from pre-draft rosters to completed rosters at whatever speed the commissioner can update the teams.
There would need to be a longer draft, certainly needing to be started earlier in the year. People have always wanted the draft to be as late as possible to get the benefit of the preseason games, but these are being marginalized and devalued by the NFL anyway, so there isn’t a ton of value to them anymore. Then we would need a final cutdown period before Week 1, as Omni mentioned. I think Yahoo automatically puts everyone not on a team on waivers for week 1, so we wouldn’t be able to really avoid that becoming a free for all. But everyone at that point has had a chance to either a) draft available players they wanted, or b) trade for the rights to someone they wanted on another roster. So, if you miss out on someone, it probably isn’t a big deal and could have been avoided anyway.
I don’t much care about the scouting value of preseason. My main interest is to be aware of serious, season-ending injuries that happen during preseason games. It would suck if one of your top picks goes down for the season the day after you drafted them.
It’s not like we’re drafting established veterans who sit out of preseason games. It’s predominantly rookies who get a fair amount of preseason reps.
EDIT: In terms of draft length, I’m pretty sure we usually draft around 50 players collectively each year. 48 players would be the same amount of time our drafts usually go, I would expect.
Here’s the totals I have in my spreadsheets for the past four years, to get a sense of how long a 48-pick draft would be:
| Year | Picks | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 49 | 12 | 12 | 9 | 7 | 6 | 2 | 1 |
| 2021 | 45 | 12 | 12 | 11 | 7 | 2 | 1 | |
| 2020 | 39 | 12 | 12 | 9 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 48 | 12 | 12 | 11 | 7 | 5 | 1 |
Meh, 48 seems fine. Also, neat pattern on 3rd rounders. Wonder if there will be 11 this year.
Does this data suggest that only 3 rounds would make more sense? At least 5 people every year have no use for a 4th pick.
Assuming by waivers you mean rolling waivers (every owner has a priority in a list, and goes to the bottom when they use a waivers), we can’t switch back and forth between them. FAAB and rolling waivers are two different settings for handling waivers and I think you have to set it once for the season. If we did go with this system we should probably give a bigger FAAB boost to the lowest placing teams.
I don’t really see this as a benefit. How the NFL conducts their draft is sort of trivia for the purposes of our league and there’s no reason we have to try to copy it. It’s a bit like playing monopoly and modifying the rules to more closely resemble real-life real estate and banking rules. Doesn’t really matter for the purposes of our game.
For what it’s worth, I object to switching to this system but I’m not gonna make a big deal out of it if people want it this way. I think our system works really elegantly - you have total control over your roster, you can draft as few or as many players as you want - and aside from one weird edge case the system generally works just fine. I like the idea that some teams can choose to rebuild with 7+ draft picks.
It’s also a little confusing about how we’d handle the actual process of entering the draft into yahoo. In various posts people are talking about having the rights to a player and an option not to sign them/make a cut for them - would we have to have a second, final declaration period where you announced your final roster before we entered it into yahoo, and then it’s a waiver free for all? That works fine but we might need a little extra time at the end for that if that’s how we’re doing it.
I don’t know, everyone else seems to think our system is more confusing and broken than it actually is. I think it’s elegant and works 99% of the time. We may also find that there are weird edge cases with the proposed system (particularly if you start trading away the rights to players you don’t necessarily have to “sign”) that we didn’t anticipate. There’s a small benefit to the current system where you can see the live updates to the draft within yahoo as we go, and see the list of available players that way.
I’m okay with starting the draft earlier. I agree that early scouting value is less than it used to be with the changes to preseason and while injuries are definitely a concern, I don’t know that 1 or 2 random big injuries after drafting a player is more important than giving us some breathing room in the draft.
I know I’m the one who just mentioned injuries, but to bolster your point, even catastrophic injuries don’t necessarily ruin a player in dynasty. Cam Akers and Travis Etienne are both looking pretty valuable right now. (I probably shouldn’t have cut Akers…)
Theoretically, a player could trade down to stockpile 7+ picks, with many of them probably being in the 4th round. But that’s no worse than picking in the 5th, 6th and 7th.
Like trade your 1st to somebody for their 2nd, 3rd and 4th, then trade your 2nd for somebody else’s 3rd and a 4th. Now you’d be drafting with one 2nd, three 3rds and three 4ths.
If that’s the case, I think we need to allow 2-3 days at minimum between the day the rosters/draft are entered and the first game. Teams looking to add more than 4 rookies need time to make final roster additions. Would be good to reset the waiver order after week 1 so that teams wanted to make additional “draft” moves using waivers aren’t punished once the season starts.
I don’t think matching historic pick trends is the only (or most important) consideration. If having 4 picks forces owners with stacked teams to make one tough decision releasing a developmental player in favor of a fringe veteran or vice versa, that is a net benefit in my mind. It is Dynasty, but having some roster turnover is good and it might make early season waivers marginally more usable.
I probably have a faulty memory on this. I had it in my head that players went on waivers for 2 days after kickoff and then once the waiver period ended the FAAB kicked in. But I guess that’s just normal free agency.
My overall point is that fixing the draft a 4 rounds (or whatever number) kind of hamstrings teams that might otherwise want 6 picks give or take. I want a mechanism that allows those folks to swap players in the window between the cut down day and game 1 without them burning through their in-season FAAB budget or being stuck at the bottom of the waiver order. Perhaps Yahoo makes this difficult.
I somewhat feel the same way. I do think this issue of unbalanced trades is a fairly significant problem. Whether dumping the flexibility of the unbalanced draft is a net positive is unclear to me, I tend to always make 6ish picks so I’d be one suffering from the change. I’d prefer to limit either future draft pick trading or unbalanced trades somehow, but I admit making rules which are both enforceable and not overly restrictive seems to be a challenge.
This is definitely a non-trivial benefit. We may end up with more mid-draft snafus without it. I’ve never entered draft picks in Yahoo so I can’t comment on the overall administrative challenges.
That’s not helping the weaker team rebuild. If you need to sell off your high picks for low picks, the cost of greater roster turnover is prohibitive. Bad teams need those high picks to have any chance of being competitive.
Actual Dynasty Team Content!!
Trade to announce:
Omni trades the rights to Antonio Gibson to Jules.
Jules trades the rights to Washington Defense to Omni.
I’m looking to trade up in the second round (I have pick 2.10). If anyone with picks 2.1 to 2.6 have any interest, I’d be willing to swap picks and throw in Tyler Boyd (and take whomever you’re going to cut, so I can cut them pre-draft and hopefully avoid the “last pick” problem) for your trouble. Boyd has finished as WR #39, #32, and #35 the last three years, so he’s definitely flex starter worthy with a high floor and has great value if Chase or Higgins goes down. He’s 28 years old and in the last year of his contract and might be a bigger asset next year if he’s away from a team with 2 stud WRs.
Let me know if you’re interested.