SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 17

The Game Room
1

Welcome back everyone to what must be one of the longest running dynasty leagues in the world.

League Dates

Preseason Began July 7
Cuts due by Sunday August 24 at noon eastern.
Draft begins at 12:01pm eastern
NFL Season opener: Thursday Sep 4
Trade deadline is until the week that the playoffs start. I will set the yahoo trade date to the latest possible date, but it will cut us off somewhere around week 12 or 13. After that, we can still make trades manually using PMs and announcing them in the thread.

2024 Final Results

1 No Use For A Name (Retrovertigo)
2 Exploding Pancakes (SenorBeef)
3 HungryHungryHaruspex (Jules Andre)
4 New York Fanboys (Ellis Dee)
5 Peteys (PeteysPart2)
6 Formerly Sentimental (Spiritus Mundi)
7 The Great Old Ones (Ol’Gaffer)
8 Warner’s Brothers (dalej42)
9 Nine Inch Neils (Really Not All That Bright
10 Gusterrhoids (Justin Bailey)
11 Moridwon (Hamlet)
12 Ides of Martz (Omniscient)

Hall of Champions

2024 Champion: Retrovertigo
2023 Champion Hamlet
2022 Champion: PeteyPart2
2021 Champion: SenorBeef
2020 Champion: Jules Andre
2019 Champion: Hamlet
2018 Champion: Ellis Dee
2017 Champion: VarlosZ
2016 Champion: SenorBeef
2015 Champion: VarlosZ
2014 Champion: Stringer
2013 Champion: VarlosZ
2012 Champion: Hamlet
2011 Champion: SenorBeef
2010 Champion: Stringer
2009 Champion: Really Not All That Bright

Points Leaders By Year

Includes weeks 15-16
2024: PeteysPart2: 2156.65
2023: Jules: 1966.95
2022: Jules: 2244.04
2021: SenorBeef: 2016.78
2020: Jules: 2131.96
2019: Hamlet: 2190.75
2018: Hamlet: 2204.75
2017: RNATB: 2095.71
2016: Petey: 2018.97
2015: VarlosZ: 2183.64
2014: Stringer: 2177.27
2013: SenorBeef: 2132.81
2012: Stringer: 2095.83
2011: Stringer: 2229.75
2010: Stringer: 2167.03
2009: Hamlet: 2207.00

2024 draft order

1 Ides of Martz (Omniscient)
2 Moridwon (Hamlet)
3 Gusterrhoids (Justin Bailey)
4 Nine Inch Neils (Really Not All That Bright
5 Warner’s Brothers (dalej42)
6 The Great Old Ones (Ol’Gaffer)
7 Formerly Sentimental (Spiritus Mundi)
8 Peteys (PeteysPart2)
9 New York Fanboys (Ellis Dee)
10 HungryHungryHaruspex (Jules Andre)
11 Exploding Pancakes (SenorBeef)
12 No Use For A Name (Retrovertigo)

Actual draft picks will be available after cutdowns

Trades affecting this year's draft

Omni receives Jules’ 2025 2nd round pick
Jules receives Omni’s 2025 last round pick

Beef receives Justin’s 2025 2nd round pick
Justin receives Beef’s 2025 last round pick

Previous Threads
Year Thread
2009 SDMB Dynasty Fantasy Football League (recruiting)
2009 SDMB Dynasty League: Year One
2010 SDMB FF Dynasty League: Year Two
2011 SDMB FF Dynasty League: Year Three
2012 SDMB FF Dynasty League: Year Four
2013 SDMB FF Dynasty League: Year Five
2014 SDMB FF Dynasty League: Year Six
2015 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year Seven
2016 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year Eight
2017 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year Nine
2018 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY league: Year Ten
2019 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 11
2020 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 12
2021 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 13
2022 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 14
2023 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 15
2024 SDMB Fantasy Football DYNASTY League: Year 16

Other rule proposals from last year’s thread:

I think it was Omni who wanted to get rid of defenses and kickers. I assume under this proposal we’d get two extra bench slots.

Re-petey proposed re: defenses “Regarding defenses, I’m in favor of keeping them but removing the ability for a defense to score negative points for the team (lowest possible score being 0). It seems far too punitive to have a bad defense as you really can’t fix that year to year by drafting. And it is silly that in some cases you are better off not playing a defense at all.”

There’s no way to implement that proposal as such, but we could reduce or remove the negative score from a high amount of points allowed. This would increase defensive scoring such that we might have to rework it in general.

I have a proposal that I think I made like 6 or 7 years ago and failed, but I was reminded of it in the thread last year. Yahoo has the option to re-seed the playoffs, and I think the #1 seed should be able to pick their opponent for the semi-finals game. It’s a reward for being the top seed. It adds an element of fun drama when the top seed picks the seemingly weaker team to play against but it ends up backfiring on them.

A bylaw we added in the middle of the draft last year that I will solidify. In the event that someone has an extended absense when it is their turn to draft, and we’re forced to skip to the next pick, we had a 2 hour “cooldown” between every pick that occur while they were gone, so that we didn’t rattle off a bunch of picks in a very short period of time while we were waiting for them to return.

Another note: As of 2 years ago, Yahoo stopped showing a live list of available players mid-draft. It used to be that you could search by free agents, and the players that were kept and drafted thus far were not shown in that list, so you could use it as a reference to who was draftable. Unfortunately they changed something on the back end so that this can’t be done anymore.

And after a lot of frustration and headaches, we will be keeping the rule that future trades need to be balanced, which may include the “… and his last pick next year” clause when necessary. It works, no one gets harmed by it, and I’m not even sure what we’d do without it.

Proposal 1: Remove the D/ST position, replace with bench slot
Proposal 2: Remove kicker position, replace with bench slot
Proposal 3: Rework defensive scoring to eliminate or reduce the possibility of negative scores
Proposal 4: The top seed can pick their opponent for the semi-final game

If anyone else has any proposals for rules or bylaws or have any questions or need clarifications, propose them now.

@EllisDee @Omniscient @Hamlet @Justin_Bailey @Really_Not_All_That_Bright @dalej42 @Ol_Gaffer @Spiritus_Mundi @RetroVertigo @PeteyPart2

(Due to a discourse limitation I can only mention 10 people. Jules will find his way here)

To make sure everyone is still alive and ready for the year please check in and post to the thread. Vote on the proposals if you like.

2

I am, I suspect, still alive and, although I’m not truly prepared to draft, I’m ready to do that also.

Proposal 1: No.

Proposal 2: Yes.

Proposal 3: No. Not starting a defense is always an option if you’re worried.

Proposal 4: Very Weak No. So weak, in fact, might as well call it abstaining.

Off to do some research. Keenan Allen is still with the Bears, right?

And, I believe I have the second pick in the draft. You Omarion Hampton truthers can shoot me an offer.

3

Greetings Gentlemen,

Here are my votes:

Proposal 1: No

Proposal 2: No

Proposal 3: Yes

Proposal 4: No

I will be having a baby that will be born no later than the 21st (scheduled induction), so I should be good to go for the draft. If I see that I will be too busy, I will give a list of picks to Jules to draft in my stead, but I don’t anticipate that happening.

Here’s to another year of the nonsense that is fantasy football.

4

Congrats and good luck with the little one Peteyv2!

As an aside, I would recommend that you don’t do what I did: As the date of the inducing was approaching, I told people it the date when my wife was going to terminate her pregnancy. My wife did not appreciate the dark humor.

5

It never occured to me till now but I wonder if one day we might have a situation where someone hands off their team in this league to their kid. A true dynasty.

6

I don’t think adding bench slots logically follows. If we agree that a reasonable, sensible approach would be to carry 1 K and 2 DEF, then we’re only working with 22 slots for individual players. Removing K and DEF would seem to suggest that we’d reduce roster sizes from 25 to 22.

My votes:

Proposal 1: Remove the D/ST position: No.
Proposal 2: Remove kicker position: No.
Proposal 3: Rework defensive scoring: Yes. Details below.
Proposal 4: Top seed picks opponent: Abstain, reserving the right to change to an actual yay/nay later.

Regarding defensive scoring, first off I wanted to see how much defenses scored last year just to get some context.

>169: 3 teams (Den 215, Min 181, GB 177)
160s: 4 teams (Phi, LAC, Pit, Hou)
150s: nobody
140s: 3 teams (Buf, Sea, Det)
130s: 4 teams (KC, Bal, Chi, LAR)
120s: nobody
110s: 3 teams (TB, NO, Ari)
100s: 2 teams (Cin, Mia)
90s: 5 teams (Atl, NYJ, Was, NYG, Ind)
80s: 4 teams (Dal, SF, Cle, Ten)
70s: nobody
60s: 3 teams (LV, Jax, NE)
6.0: 1 team (Car) – SIX points for the whole season?!

If you add them all up, on average team defenses scored ~118 points in 2024, on par with the 31st scoring QB (Justin Fields.) If you toss out Carolina’s ridiculous showing, the average is still only ~121, equivalent to the 30th scoring QB (Dak Prescott.) I’m not sure how any of this is relevant, but I was curious.

Next, here’s our current defensive scoring rules:

Defense/Special Teams SDMB Default
Sack 1
Interception 2
Fumble Recovery 2
Touchdown 6
Safety 4 2
Block Kick 2
Kickoff and Punt Return Touchdowns 6
Points Allowed 0 points 16 10
Points Allowed 1-6 points 12 7
Points Allowed 7-13 points 8 4
Points Allowed 14-20 points 4 1
Points Allowed 21-27 points 0 0
Points Allowed 28-34 points -4 -1
Points Allowed 35+ points -8 -4
Extra Point Returned 2

I like (almost) all of our settings except points allowed. Honestly, I kind of like Yahoo’s default settings for points allowed, both the positive and the negative values. I vote we switch to the yahoo defaults for points allowed, keeping our homebrew values for all the individual ones.

Except 4 points for safeties. I remember the discussion when we adopted this, how a safety is both a 2 point score and a turnover. But is it really a turnover? The team that gives up a safety gets to punt the ball away. To me, if you can punt you didn’t turn it over. So I vote we reduce safeties to 2 points. But I care very little, and the actual impact would be negligible, so take this opinion with an appropriate grain of sale.

It’s worth pointing out that if we did just switch the points allowed values to the yahoo defaults, defensive scoring will almost certainly go up. Just spitballing a wild guess, I would say something like from 121 (assuming Carolina’s pathetic 6.0 was an insane outlier) up to maybe like 140. That would be on par with the 28th scoring QB last year (Daniel Jones.)

EDIT: It occurs to me that the default values are blank if they are the same as the values we’re using. So the individual values aren’t homebrew, they’re likely default. If that’s the case, then my vote is to adopt the full yahoo default values for defensive scoring. And further, any increase in defensive scoring would probably be nominal; more like 125ish.

7

…going with the idea of 2 DEFs per owner, only the top 24 DEFs would be relevant. Average last year for the top 24 was 135, just shy of last year’s 29th scoring QB (Jameis Winston.)

8
  1. No
  2. No
  3. Lean no
  4. Completely open, no strong feelings
9

I’m here.

  1. No
  2. No
  3. Yes
  4. Yes-ish

Roster (tentative cuts in bold)

QB Justin Herbert, Bo Nix, Bryce Young

RB Najee Harris, Bijan Robinson, Rachaad White, Jaylen Warren, Miles Sanders, Antonio Gibson, Dameon Pierce, Kenneth Gainwell, MarShawn Lloyd, Jamaal Williams

WR Chris Godwin, Rashee Rice, Gabe Davis, Noah Brown, George Pickens, Jameson Williams, Jerry Jeudy, Malachi Corley

TE Tucker Kraft, Evan Engram, David Njoku, Brenton Strange

K Chris Boswell

DEF Washington, Indianapolis

Bryce Young, Njoku and Engram are all available for trades.

10
  1. No. However I think we should consider some rule changes to make this more dynamic. Suggestion: You can only keep 1. You can never roster more than 2. Teams sitting on 3 or more defenses to block others and stream is not how this should work and our deep benches make that easy to do without a big trade off.
  2. Yes.
  3. Maybe? I actually oppose the idea of not starting players/defenses as a strategy to avoid negative scores. I think we should require full rosters at every position and negative scores are part of the game. I think the rule change mentioned in #1 would go a long way to addressing this issue since the negative scores tend to be a side effect of the scarcity created by hording. But, if we don’t do anything about hording, my position on negative scores may change.
  4. No. No fundamental opposition but this feels like a lot of extra noise for a small benefit.It’s just a thing that could go wrong.
11

My understanding was that Yahoo limits you to 25 total players, so we selected the max. Removing K and/or DEF would allow us to keep the 25 player rosters and have extra spots for other positions. So it’s not explicitly about “adding” bench spots, but more about reallocating the existing max roster size (semantics, I know).

But you raise a good point. There’s no explicit reason why we should need to keep 25 players if we have 1 or 2 fewer starting spots. But I would note that both approaches will have an impact on keeper strategies this year depending on how many you have rostered now.

12

Hopefully you get a generous parental leave. Being home for a few months with a newborn would probably make for some amazing (if sleepy) football watching time. My kiddo came in the Summer of ‘21 so I basically got to watch the post-COVID Olympics at all hours of the day in between naps and diaper changes. Our infant loved watching the swimming, maybe the dulcet sounds of Greg Olsen will put the baby right to sleep.

13

What does “and stream” mean?

14

I thought I did, but you also raise a good point:

I hadn’t considered that the only reason we chose 25 is because that’s the most we could pick. Going by that logic, I think you’ve convinced me that if we did drop K and/or DEF, keeping 25 roster spots is probably the better play.

Back in the day, we only ever applied rule changes for the following season. If we do decide to change our roster composition, we could have it not go into effect until 2026 so that we don’t catch anyone with their pants down.

15

“Streaming defenses” is a fairly common strategy. Basically picking up a new defense that has a favorable matchup every single week In this league, that’s not really feasible since there aren’t any on the waiver wire, but if you roster 4 defenses you can approximate that because the odds are that one of those will be playing a rookie/backup QB in a given week.

16

I like Omni’s proposal to limit DEF hoarding.

17

I don’t. Is there a reason you can’t trade for a defense?

I’m open to the idea of removing defenses entirely, though am still leaning no on that idea. I genuinely like the idea of switching to yahoo default scoring for defenses to tone them down. But artificially limiting them feels like a non-starter to me.

It feels like a “have your cake and eat it too” situation. Streaming defenses has real value – I absolutely do that and enjoy doing so. But that value doesn’t appear to translate into trade offers. Why not? Because people wouldn’t be willing to part with players of real value to pry my crappy defenses away from me. So do they have value or don’t they?

I’m also guessing people don’t want to spend the roster spots. I carry four defenses, which means I can’t carry extra skill positions in those slots. That is a penalty I’m happy to live with for the streaming.

In the history of the league I’ve had a handful of seasons with a legitimate starting QB. Had Big Ben for 3-4 years, and now starting my second year with Jordan Love. That’s the list. Every other year (10+ years) I’ve had below replacement level value as my starting QB. That’s because I wasn’t willing to pay fair market value to trade for a real QB. (Which I finally did with Love.) What I did not do is suggest we limit rosters to 1 QB per manager so that I could just pick up a viable QB from the waiver wire each week.

If streaming or having a “stud” DEF is so valuable, trade for them. If it’s not valuable enough to offer a trade someone will accept, then maybe you don’t actually feel that value is real.

(Just tossing this out there: I’m not angry or anything. Not sure if this reads as angry. If so, that’s unintentional. I think I have legitimate points here, though.)

18

(Just slipping in here to shamelessly promote the guillotine league. Plenty of open spots.)

19

I’m in. Hope y’all had an excellent year. And congrats Petey2.

Proposal 1: No, despite the invariable frustrations and inevitable bad beats with D/ST I like the variance it introduces
Proposal 2: No, same as above
Proposal 3: Soft no, but no hard feelings really one way or the other. I recognize the incongruity with my answers to 1 and 2.
Proposal 4: 100 percent yes. I love this. We do it in my RL big money league and when it backfires its the best.

20

You don’t have to vote if you’re not interested, but I’d like to hear from @Justin_Bailey @Spiritus_Mundi @RetroVertigo and @Jules_Andre just to make sure you’re on track to manage your team this year and everything is good.