As one of the suckier teams, I’m not particularly discouraged. The current mechanism of getting to pick at the top of every draft round is pretty strong, despite my inability to take advantage of it.
EDIT: I’m still annoyed and behind the 8-ball from unexpectedly showing up to the inaugural draft late. Not pre-ranking (since I expected to be there) got me Brian Westbrook in the first round instead of my intended pick (who was still available): Aaron Rodgers. I have yet to recover.
As someone whose team just stopped being sucky, it would suck if we installed new parity measures now. And 2nd-round picks are pretty valuable. This year’s second round looked like this:
Last year’s looked like this:
… okay, maybe extra second round picks won’t unbalance things too much. I think it would be better if the worst team gets an extra pick at the end of round one, second worst at the end of round two, and so on.
Yeah I’m not in love with myself for dropping Kelce last season around week 6. Compounded by the fact that I was really high on him during the draft last year and kept expecting him to be taken by the time I picked. Ah well.
I could fill a book with my regrets about guys I dropped at one time or another.
No one else wants to play the roster game ala this post?
I thought it might be interested to see how we all built our teams.
I face 0-6 furt this week, who’s got a pretty respectable 114 scoring projection. But I’ve got a monster projection of 144. I hope my team can tee off this week and not have to drag it down to the wire. Rodgers to Nelson should have a good day against Carolina, but they’ve had a pretty good day most weeks. I’m still willing to trade Jordy Nelson for a running back though - I’ve got more receiver depth than RB death. I’d even package something like Nelson + Mathews or Richardson or something.
I sort of played the roster game in last year’s thread. Which of my running backs would you be interested in? No, you can’t have Gio.
I’ll play. Like I said before, I already typed out a whole summary and then accidentally closed the tab as soon as I was done. That rankled, but I think I’m ready to do it again.
My season of impossible roster decisions continues: Newton, Romo, and Ryan have respective projections of 17.62, 17.83, and 17.85. It’s close enough that I’m considering pulling Romo in part because he’s playing against my Giants, and that’s never a good sign. And, as is typical, for my two flex spots I’ve got seven players with projections between 8.9 to 11.8.
Oh, and is Yahoo acting funny for everyone else? I can’t get the little ‘Notes’ popups to work – it just opens the full player page in a new tab, which ironically has a lot less information. Also, on said player pages, the players’ schedules on the right side are listing every game as a road game. This is not reassuring.
You could have traded Ryan to me. Just sayin’.
I always have trouble with the player note popups in Chrome.
I always hate to see players I’ve traded away succeed, but in this case (Vereen) I’ll make an exception. Go RNATB!
Oh Jordy Nelson, you’re so pretty. I don’t know why RNATB dumped you, but I’m so glad we’ve been together all these years, even though I tried to trade you over and over.
Er, I think that was, um, me. And it was because I found out he was a white guy.
That goddamned Panthers are getting blown out so bad they’re probably about to pull their starters … of which I’ve got three in my lineup today.
I haven’t wanted to say anything, since my team has been down for 2-3 years in a row (finally optimistic for next year, though…) and so it looks self-serving, but: I’ve always thought that the keepers in this league are too generous. Apart from parity, the “keep as many guys as you like” makes it less challenging for the good teams in that there are fewer hard choices to be made and the draft kind of sucks. But adding more picks for the bad teams will just make the draft suck more for everyone else, and moreover, seems like a reward for sucking, so I don’t like it.
My approach would be to remember Sid Meiers’ axiom: the essence of an interesting game is making consequential choices. I’d limit the number of keepers to about 12; just like real life, you keep your studs, maybe a key backup, and a few prize prospects. Yeah, it’d be nice to keep everyone … but every NFL coach thinks that. The reality is that change is part of life, and you have to be prepared for turnover and constantly be rebuilding through the draft and … free agency.
Free agency takes place before or after the rookie draft. It’s an auction, with every non-rookie not on a roster up for bid. Everyone gets the same starting cash, plus whatever unused waiver money you brought forward from last year (just like the NFL salary cap rolls over). Thus, it’s an opportunity for bad teams to get better, provided they make good choices; it’s just as much a chance for them to get worse. Good teams can use it to get even better, but if they do it’ll be because they’re making smart choices on important decisions every offseason, not coasting on a few great picks from three years ago.
There’s an idea, FWIW.
I think your idea is interesting, but it would have to be for an entirely different league. I wouldn’t want to turn this league into that. A lot of the fun in dynasty leagues is managing the obscure parts of your roster - for seeing talent that you think might bloom far down the road, having complete control over your roster, and, well, creating a dynasty.
As a practical example, I drafted Demaryius Thomas in the 2nd round as a speed/height/weight guy with potential but he was injured and worthless through his first 2 years in the league. But I held onto him, convinced he would amount to something, and then he blossomed after that and became one of the best receivers in the league. Something like that wouldn’t work in anything other than a dynasty format, and I find that kind of long term planning appealing.
I think a keeper league with an unusually high number of keepers is a fundamentally different kind of thing than we have. If we ever started a new league though to test out some novel ideas, it’d be interesting.
Jordy Nelson keeps teasing me by having like 50+ yards and a TD on the Packers opening drive. I think that means he’s gonna finish the day with a monster line, but often he just has another catch or two for a few yards after that. Still a good day, but not what I get excited about.
I have Demaryius Thomas and a 40 point lead over Furt’s Kaepernick, Andre Johnson, and Suisham. I’m probably somewhere between a 2:1 and 3:1 favorite, but it’s definitely not over.
Varlos has a point, Sanders, and Crabtree vs Hamlet’s Julius Thomas.
Stringer needs 26 points out of Antonio Brown and Arian Foster to beat Retrovertigo - pretty likely.
Justin Bailey has 1.5 points, Gore, and Boldin against RNATB’s Houston defense. I really need someone to start giving RNATB some losses
Meh; I don’t know what a dynasty league is but “a keeper league with an unusually high number of keepers.” I mean, I don’t see why dynasty leagues by definition mean “keep every single player.”
And while I get your point about huge rosters enabling stash picks, that’s kind of the problem: especially in a league of pretty smart guys, 90% of the players with a real chance of emerging as a star are locked up long in advance; outside of trades, the draft is the only place to really improve yourself, and even there you only get maybe two picks that you think are anything more than a shot in the dark.
Obviously, going from “keep all 26” to “only keep 12” would be a big change; setting the number at 14 or 16 would still enable people to stash players, just not all your players.
At the end of the day, though, the only way you increase parity are either explicit rewards/handicaps beyond draft/waiver order (which I don’t think many would really like), or by making the talent pool more free-flowing.
While I am kind of interested in the idea, I’m a huge fan of our in-thread drafts. For that reason alone I’d be against increasing our draft picks so much that we’d need to use an actual live draft.
In a dynasty league, you have complete control over your roster. You don’t have to drop anyone for reasons other than that you think you can fill the slot with a better player. You’re never forced into any roster management moves or losses. That’s a significant difference over a keeper league.
The teams with better rosters have the established studs, but everyone in the league has the same chance of grabbing unknown prospects that you think might become something. The worse teams moreso, in fact, due to the draft parity.
And the reverse order of standings draft really does work significant as a parity mechanism. I’m suggesting that we augment that in some way along the same lines to make the effect more powerful - to give the bottom teams greater access to tools to acquire good prospects. To this effect, it’s a lot less disruptive to add some FAAB dollars or some extra draft picks or something like that, than to rework the league to be fundamentally different than how it is now.
Yeah, I think the former is less disruptive. I don’t want to fundamentally change this league - it’s my favorite league and I like the way it works. I’m just advocating for minor tweaks.
Something like more FAAB dollars would be a lot less contentious than extra draft picks, I think. That may be a way to go. I also like the idea of awarding any bonus dollars based on average finish over several (perhaps 3) years as to most help the teams that are chronically struggling.
I actually don’t hate furt’s idea, though the part of me that dies inside at the start of every year when I have to find 3-5 cuts fills with rage at the idea of only getting to keep 12. (My babies!) I also agree with **Ellis **that giving up the message board draft (as we’d have to do) would be a real sacrifice.
Anyway, I think finding some tweaks around the margins to aid parity would be worthwhile. More FAAB money, sure. We could impose a really high keeper cap – like, 20 or 21 players – which wouldn’t change the fundamental nature the league, but would shave off a couple of players from the deepest teams in the league and put them into the draft pool. We could do a very limited Rule 5-type draft, where the bottom four teams each get to draft a player from the rosters of the four playoff teams (who get to protect most of their rosters, of course) – probably once a playoff team had one of their players poached, they’d be exempt from further picks (or could extend protection to additional players), to prevent one team from losing 3 or 4 players in a single year this way.
Or if we keep things as is that’s fine, too.
If RNATB’s charmed season continues (he needs 12 points from Houston’s DEF), that would make me happy. Yahoo says it’s 50/50, but it feel to me like a real long shot.
The only other close call heading into tomorrow is with Stringer, who needs 26 points combined from Arian Foster and Antonio Brown to avoid an upset at the hands of RetroVertigo.