Two people I was hoping to hear from. I’m not asking anyone to sit out unless you’re only half-interested - I’m just confirming interest and availability.
EsotericEnigma, you have your private messages and e-mail disabled so I can’t send you league info. E-mail me (in profile) or send me a private message.
NoClueBoy, are you still around? Your original post was “Subscribing to thread to keep updated. I’m commishing my main league again, but I’m also already in a couple of others. I can’t stand quitters, either, UGH! If enough people sign on, tho, I’ll just stay in my local leagues.” so I’m guessing you might’ve lost interest.
I removed the IDP roster positions. I thought we were getting pretty close to a workable, fun system, but it was clear most people were neutral or slightly positive to moderately opposed to IDP. It’d be nice if yahoo had a “commissioner poll” feature or something so we could just have a straight yes/no vote on it.
I set the bench as 6 deep, but I’d like to consider 7 or even 8. That might be too deep. We had a crazy deep league last year at 11 bench spots - the effect was that there were practically no free agents available. 6 seems short to me though - a big part of the FF fun is picking up sleepers. If the bench is too short, you can’t do that so much… more often you have to wait till a guy starts to break out, and then it’s up to waivers, rather than the guy who snagged him in the draft. In general I like having more depth because it creates more decisions. It also forces trading rather than relying on free agents, which can be good because trades and their discussion is fun. But… not so deep that there are practically no free agents. What do you guys think?
Speaking of trading - we had an issue last year where in the middle of the season Steven Jackson got traded for David Carr. Partly desperation - like I said, there were practically no free agents - the team trading Steven Jackson didn’t make much of an effort to find a good deal. Anyway… I was the only one, IIRC, that objected to this trade. It was obviously uneven, I think, but most people decided not to contest it - I’m not entirely sure why… perhaps not to be rude, or because both players weren’t in the top standings in the league, or what, but the trade did go through.
There’s an option for trade reviews to be up to the comissioner. I’d rather have the league vote - I’m not looking to be power hungry and control everything - but I worry because of what happened last year. Certainly if we switched it over, I’d discuss the issue with everyone. Trades wouldn’t have to be exactly even - but Steven Jackson was a top 5-10 player whereas Carr was like top 100. I don’t expect the same thing to happen this year - because the league is full of serious/dedicated people, and that trade (from the Steven Jackson side) was done by someone who only participated occasionally. But it’s an issue that’s come up in my mind.
The league settings, as they stand, are getting pretty close to the finished product, I think. I think our current QB scoring system is good… although it undervalues QBs a bit in my view that seems to be the trend that people want to go with. If you have any objections or suggestions about league settings, please feel free to discuss it.
Does anyone want to make any additions to the roster? I’ve seen 12 man leagues do 2 QBs, or 2 RBs, or 3 WRs or whatever. On one hand, it rewards teams who collect several good players, on the other hand it makes easier decisions in regards to who to start.
Also, does anyone know of a site that has free, quality auction-draft based FF? I don’t think I’ll be running another team this year, but if I did, it’d have to be trying something different, and I’ve wanted to try an auction league.
Edit: In a semi-related note, I plan to run a salary cap fantasy football league (as well as pick em and survival leagues) for everyone on the SDMB. Salary cap FF seems interesting - each player has a salary cap price based on their performance this season, and you have a limited amount of money you can “hire” players with every week. But players aren’t held exclusively - 100 different teams could play because no one owns their players. It’s all about picking who you think will play better than their projected stats, with your choice of anyone playing that week. If we could get a big SDMB league going for that it’d be really fun I think while being a seperate enough game from regular fantasy football that it wouldn’t be a distraction.
My roster ideal would be:
QB, RB, WR, WR, TE, W/R, K, DEF, 6 BN (14 total)
I’m resistant to having more than one QB or the ability to start more than two RBs. In the keeper league we can start 3 RBs and it’s a bit ridiculous. WR is a good place to expand, though, so if you’re looking for bigger rosters my vote would be:
QB, RB, WR, WR, TE, W/R, W/T, K, DEF, 7 BN (16 total)
I’d be down with either auction or salary cap. I like to be in three leagues, and it would be cool to have the third one be unique. The salary cap one sounds cool and would be good for supporting unlimited players, but auction sounds cool too.
As for trading, keep it as group voting. As the commisioner you have the power to undo any transactions you like. You can even backdate them if you want.
Ditching IDP allows me to use my home-grown drafting aid utility, which makes me happy. (I could still use it with IDP, but it would mean entering 2000+ names instead of 700. Way too big a PITA.)
Count me in on the leagues, even though I haven’t been chiming in on the stat and point discussions. I like Ellis’ second roster, only I’d vote for a 6 deep bench (assuming you can have an odd number of players).
I’d rather make it a W/R than a W/T just becuase it increases the chance of producing meaningful points out of the slot.
TE is a dead position so you’re pretty much adding a 3rd WR slot.
I’ll give you that TE is usually a once or twice a season point earner, but, like Ellis, I’d rather limit the effect of RBs. Having two W/R slots will have most people playing 3 RBs, and will put even more of a crimp on available RBs.
One thing that always got to me was game day moves. People who had internet access while watching had a definite advantage over those of us who can’t just sit in front of a TV and computer on Sunday. Whenever a starter when down, his backup was picked up before the golf cart was on the field. I’d like at least enough time for the information to disseminate before the frenzy begins. Don’t know if this is possible (or if it has been discussed), but just my two cents.
That’s cool. Like I said, I don’t think it’ll be an issue, because the serious nature of the players here shouldn’t result in crazy trades.
What sort of utility?
Maybe. It would give someone a viable draft strategy of trying to acquire a premium and also a good TE. I tend to agree that two WR/RB slots would tend to make the league too RB-heavy. So that leaves adding a WR slot, or, for even more flexibility, WR/TE.
What about QBs? What are the pros and cons of running 2 QBs?
See post 31 in this thread. I plan to implement something like that.
I wanted to discuss this a bit too. Bolded parts are something I’ve been thinking about.
Should we keep a waiver list completely seperate from yahoo’s internal waiver list? Yahoo’s internal list could be used for normal waivers (a player is cut) and our waiver list would be used in the case of signing a free agent after the games on Sunday. Since they’re essentially two different systems - one is for cuts, one is for selecting free agents - it makes sense to me to not punish someone who does one in regards to the other.
Both lists would start off initially as the reverse of the draft order - and then I’d just put the person to the bottom of the list when they successfully picked up an after-game FA. Eventually the lists would differ, and they would each be used for their different purposes.
Also, I’d like to cut back the lock time to sometime Tuesday afternoon or evening. By then everyone’s had a chance to submit a claim, and there’d be no need to wait until wednesday.
There’s a setting under league settings that I’m a little puzzled by. I think this is the default setting, because I don’t remember changing it.
“After draft, make all unowned players:”
Free Agents
Follow Waiver Rules
Those are the options. It’s currently set to Follow Waiver Rules by default. Does that mean that after the draft, anyone who tried to pick up another player would start a 2 day waiver process on that player?
If so, obviously we don’t need that and I’ll set it to free agents. It just seems like unusual behavior from an apparently default option, so I wanted to make sure I understood it before making changes.
Edit: I checked last year’s setting and it also said “Follow Waiver Rules”, and if I recall correctly, free agents could be added at any time without a waiver process. So then what does this option actually represent?
That’s exactly what it is. I’ve never understood the point of in leagues with a live draft. If there’s an autodraft then I can understand why it would be a good idea to put everyone on waivers following it. You don’t want one person to swoop in after the draft is over and grab those players who slipped through the cracks.
Aha. Well, from what I recall, I never saw that happen in our league, so I’m guessing this state only lasts a limited amount of time. Before the draft and week 1, and after week 1 everything is an FA?
It lasts as long as the setting for waiver time is. Currently, it’s 2 days. So with the draft on the Tuesday, everyone should clear waivers by the Friday. Following that everyone becomes a FA.
The only exception is when a new player is added to the game. They still have to clear waivers though this isn’t much of a concern in football.
That’s an interesting thought. I was blindsided by yahoo default waivers halfway through last season. I don’t have a good answer for it, though it worked pretty well to use a single, unified waiver priority. If you maintain a second WP list for Tuesday waivers, then we won’t be able to easily look up our current individual waiver position.
I just picked an arbitrary time that I could be reasonably consistent about. As a night owl, Tuesday between 11:00pm and 1:00am worked out well for me. Whatever time works for you is what you should use. The key is to be reasonably consistent about it. The way I did it, the act of posting the notification on Tuesday nights (even if just to say “nobody claimed anybody”) is what officially ended the waiver period.
As for my homegrown utility, it was written to handle the following:[ul][li]Offseason trades of draft picks[/li][li]Support for those trades during the yahoo live draft (via stuffing notifications to the clipboard)[/li][li]Ability to track each pick as it is made in realtime during the live draft[/li][li]Setting up keepers[/li][*]Generating reports detailing draft results, trades, keepers, etc… formatted for vBulletin posts[/ul]The downside is that I have to mostly manually enter all possible players into it each year. The upside is that I can configure it for my own personal prerankings and have it come up with the best possible pick for me to take when I get on the clock. This involves not only checking my personal prerankings, but also the bye weeks involved for both the available prospects and the players I already drafted in that same position.
I can maintain the waiver list in the comissioner’s message perhaps. I didn’t want to create a system whereby people were afraid of using the built-in yahoo waivers for trying to pick up cut players because it would put them at a disadvantage on the free agent waiver system. It probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but it wouldn’t be hard to implement a user-controlled waiver list for our seperate user-controlled waiver system.
You could argue, though, that they should be linked, and that anyone that uses either should go to the back of the line. But my personal view is that since they’re two different systems for different purposes, they should have their own lists.
Another thought: Should we put people at the end of the waiver list for claims that are uncontested? Seems like that if the waiver list never comes into the picture because there’s only one person claiming them, perhaps it shouldn’t affect their waiver position. Otherwise the decisions look like “I kinda think this guy will break out, but I don’t think anyone else is interested… so I can either claim him now, and risk resetting my waiver priority for someone no one else wants, or I can try to wait till Wednesday to pick him up for free…”
Of course, that might be the kind of decision we want people to be making, I’m not sure. Just throwing it up there for discussion.
That’s my opinion.
Very much yes.
I can’t find a free site that supports auction drafts (although I haven’t looked that hard yet) - I guess it’s probably more of a real life thing than online - although if we were so inclined, we could do an auction draft through a text chat program involving everyone and then enter results via the manual draft results feature at yahoo.
I guess we (whoever was interested, not necesarily the people in this league) could all show up in, say, an IRC channel at a certain time, then we’d go down the list of projected rankings of players, and people would call out their bids on each. Someone keeping track of thing would note the winner, deduct the his bid from his total, and then later input that data into yahoo.
I’m not too worried about it - I definitely plan to have this league be my primary focus - but it’d something that could be interesting to play around with. Obviously you’d also have to have dedicated players in that league - at least enough to show up for the draft - or it wouldn’t work. Auction drafts definitely sound fun though.
I’ve never done an auction draft, and as such, would be VERY interested in trying it out if we could get a suitably graceful way of making it work in an online setting. The way I’ve heard of it working is, rather than go down the rankings and just bid on everyone, you select almost a sort of ‘draft order’, and whenever it’s your turn, you choose who gets auctioned off next. Adds another layer of strategy, I’d think.