Let’s say the playoffs are the top 4 teams. In Weeks 13 and 14, teams 1 & 4 play each other, as do teams 2 & 3. They score like this:
Team 1
Week 13: 50
Week 14: 75
Total: 125
Team 4
Week 13: 49
Week 14: 77
Total: 126
Team 4 (126) beats Team 1 (125).
Same thing happens for Teams 2 & 3, and you pit the winners against each other during Weeks 15 & 16.
As an outside observer, I think picking the champions of other leagues is the way to go. Especially if you want to invoke the feel of a real relegation system. Any other arbitrary promotion system is just going to have people asking why they should care about this super league (doubly so because the big stat geeks are already involved). But people get championships.
Also, I think the second year should be an expansion to eight teams before the promotion/relegation system starts in the third year. Six seems way too small.
Obviously, as an outside observer, you’re free to tell me to go to hell.
Outsiders are always welcome when they agree with me!
And to SenorBeef, I’m not going to contribute to a multi-quote monstrosity and hijack this thread so we can have a reply war. I’ll just put it simply and leave it at this; fantasy skill is not exclusive. It takes time (to keep up with updates, which is 95% of fantasy “skill”), and a basic understanding of value/risk. Absolutely anyone can do it. Other things that take skill require some innate talent as a baseline. Fantasy requires no talent. None.
As a quick side note, how come you decided to post the average results of the All-Pro league with a minimum of four seasons? Why not, I dunno, three? I wonder why you’d make that choice. Specifically four, for some reason. 
Ok, let’s assume there’s no skill involved. Clearly some people are more committed to it, and hence better at it, than others, right? However you want to break it down, some people have more success in fantasy football than others due to the knowledge they have and decisions they make.
The point of this league is to identify those players so that we have the highest level of competition. Maybe that just means the most dedicated, active players. That’s fine. I’ve been stressing the skilled/active angle from the start. I like the active part probably better than the skilled part - I like to know that people will be up for talking in the league thread, that they’ll be proposing trades and responding to mine, that they’ll be writing draft reviews, etc.
Anyway, the point is - some people are better at fantasy football than others, whether they get there just from being football junkies or whatever. Fine. That’s really a seperate factor from the issue at hand. The issue is - how do you tell who’s the most committed and successful to fantasy? By their overall success at scoring points, and a larger sample size showing consistency is better.
Depending on the specifics of our criteria, usng a championship-based system, I probably wouldn’t have been invited to this league based on my last year’s performance. That’s insane. To have the best fantasy season anyone is likely to have, by a large margin, over several leagues, but to not qualify for the league shows a pretty huge flaw in selection criteria. It’s almost as arbitrary as saying “whoever scored the most points during week 7 will be declared the best in that league and invited into ours”.
As far as the 4 year thing in the auction league - we’ve had the same core group for most of the league’s history. I was going to make the list only for those who played all 5 years, to have the greatest sample size and the most fair comparison, but that would exclude 4 people who’ve been with us almost the entire time. So I compromised a bit and did minimum 4 seasons. I didn’t want to compromise it a step further and reduce the sample size by an entire 2/5ths, especially if it was just to cater to people who weren’t participating in the league anymore. I didn’t design it to exclude you specifically.
And you don’t want to respond to my entire post, fine, but please respond the part where I asked:
If we ran a points-only league, and someone won the league by a large margin, they’d be both the champion and have clearly the best fantasy team for the entire season. But if we hypothetically went back and time and switched the league to head to head format - and this same person drafted the same players, made the same roster moves, and did the same thing - excelled at the only thing he has control over, scoring a lot of points - and still scored the most points in the league by a large margin, but now because of having one off week, he finishes third instead of first, his accomplishment is no longer significant? He made the same decisions, dominated the league by the same amount, but in one case he’s a clear winner, a great player, and in the other case he’s just some unremarkable third place loser? Through absolutely no difference in anything he did, just because we’ve chosen to declare one particular semi-random result more significant than the combined sum of the other results?
Them’s the breaks, kid. You can downplay the equivalency to real life sports if you want, but it’s an apt comparison. You want to attribute a whole bunch of meaning to, and reward, relative success, I just want to reward success. We play this to win, not to construct moral victories out of tough losses.
I think we’ve spent exactly enough words to discover we’ll be rehashing the same arguments over and over, and in typical Dope fashion, no one will ever change their mind. We have a perfectly good working compromise from the very beginning. You’re the commish, you can overrule that compromise if you’d like.
There is one final point I’d like to make though. You seem driven to ensure this is a league full of the very best, the very most active. It seems counter-intuitive to me to then make this a relegation league and open up a spot for someone who may not meet the criteria you seem so desperate to maintain.
I want to get the best, most active players on the SDMB in this league. When it comes to evaluating them through random arbitrary matchups it carries no weight with me. You’re being arbitrary when you declare success, you’re saying “the person who put together the team that scored the most points (which is the only thing any person has control of) is irrelevant, only the person who had the best week at the right time is successful”. My model is actually in tune with the actual success based on the actions taken by the person making the decision, rather than random results.
Again you dodge my question about the guy who creates the best team, and dominatingly wins his points only league, only to hypothetically lose in a head to head/playoffs league.
And it is not at all an apt comparison to sports. I’m not out there covering you trying to keep you from making a catch. I’m not even starting my CB against your WR to see who can win that man to man battle - we’re both starting our own WRs to see who can race independently for more points.
Upon further review, it really isn’t a compromise. You’d be getting your way entirely. You want the league champion to win. So, ok, which league champion? Are you going to say “the auction league is more important than the all pro league which is more important than the keeper league” etc. so that we invite in that order? That’s a hard decision to make and there’s very unlikely to be a consensus, and you’ll probably piss people off in the process. So you need some criterion in which to order the multiple champions we’ll have. As you corrected me earlier in the thread, the tiebreaker being points scored over average was your idea in the first place.
So then you declare that your original proposal is a compromise (granted, I misremembered how exactly it went down so I called it that too), when it was really the original plan, but then frame the debate as if this issue were decided rather than still under discussion, and suggest that if I were to “overrule” this proposal, it would only be because I’d be using my commish power. That’s clever in a political strategy sort of way.
Anyway, everything is still up for discussion, and I’m hoping the rest of the league will weigh in with how they want it to play out. We’ve both laid out our cases, so let’s see how the consensus forms.
That’s true, and that’s a risk. And I didn’t have relegation in my initial proposal for the league. But the idea has grown on me. My thought is - if we’re replacing the worst person in our league (and one league-year of results is small enough of a sample not to be at all conclusive) with the overall best player of the SDMB leagues that year, it probably wouldn’t be much of a skill drop, if at all. But finding the best overall player to invite is a big part of that equation. We could very well invite a bad player who happened to luck into a barely making the playoffs and pulling out a good run. My proposed idea behind invitation criteria would mitigate that significantly. This is exactly why I’m so adamant about it - the level of competition in the league is my highest priority, especially over some arbitrary random results.
Ah, eff it. Let’s just vote on who to give the relegation spot to. Since we can actually look at what they did in other leagues, we’ll have the opportunity to eliminate people who did just get lucky.
So what happens when I finish last in this league (likely) and utterly dominate and win the other three SDMB leagues I’m in (unlikely)?
I dunno but I’m tired of watching Beef and Jules’ pissing match.
Agreed. Voting isn’t that bad of an idea - it’s no different than how this league was formed.
How is it a pissing match? It’s a debate about how to proceed. I only bring up my success as a counter-example to the idea that fantasy football performance is random and unskilled.
Voting could work I suppose. Maybe we could have everyone privately submit their preferences with 5 players in order? And then we give the 1st preference 5 points, second preference 4 points, etc. and the highest combined score gets in.
We’ve got other issues to work out too. Rosters for one.
The default position is to essentially double rosters that you’d find in a 12 man league. Since we’ll have 6 teams, that ends up having basically the same group of players started and drafted, just doubled on each roster. So something like
QBx2, RBx4, WRx6, TEx2, Kx2, DEFx2, and 14 bench slots.
This will make our league essentially like a 12 man league with half the teams in terms of quality of starters. But there’s no reason we need to be tied to that idea, that’s just sort of a default starting point.
Yahoo has a maximum nmber of players you can have per position, but you can mix pure and flex slots to get us any combination we really need. These are the limitations, the maximum of these positions possible:
QB 5
WR 7
RB 7
TE 5
WR/T 5
WR/RB 5
W/R/T 5
QB/WR/RB/TE 5
K 3
Def 3
Bench 20
The total size of the rosters can’t exceed 30 players.
Now there are two takes on this. Jules thinks we should have a ton of flex spots so we should be able to try to implement any strategy we’d like. Omni (I think?) thinks that we should minimize the number of flex spots to make the starting decisions harder and more meaningful.
I have no strong opinion on this and I’d be ok with either position or some combination.
My proposals are: Let’s give 3 QBs a try. In a normal 12 man league, going to 2 QBs is fairly drastic - you’d be starting 24 QBs. In a 6 man league, 3 QBs is somewhat less drastic - you’d be starting 18, which leaves some room for backups. I’ve wanted to try a league that has more QBs than typical for a while and this is a good chance to do it. We could make the third QB slot a QB/RB/WR flex spot so that if someone had an unlucky run and lost 2 QBs they wouldn’t be totally screwed, but you’d pretty much always want to start a QB if you could.
I also would like to eliminate kickers. I feel like they’re too far towards the random noise end of things. Some people already expressed a sentimental desire to keep them. Let’s at least keep it reasonable and not ramp it up and keep them down to 1 maybe? Keeping in mind that since we’ll likely be at max roster size, each kicker we add removes a bench slot.
I would like to maximize our roster sizes so that we’d all draft 30 players no matter what, whatever our starting roster count is, you could subtract it by 30 and get our number of bench slots so it equals 30.
My initial proposal would be something like
QBx2
QB/RB/WR/TEx1
RBx4
WRx6
WR/RBx1
WR/TEx1
TEx2
Kx0
Defx2
Benchx11
What do you guys think?
I vastly prefer adding a bunch of flex spots over a bunch of fixed position spots. One of the problems with FF is that while predicting the success of players over a season takes skill, predicting success in any specific game is at least half crapshoot.
Short-term predictive ability is already reflected in in-season roster movement.
Of course, there’s no reason we can’t have a bit of both, although I’m inclined to restrict the flex positions to WR/RB/TE as long as we’re already starting 2 quarterbacks.
3 quarterbacks is too many. From Week 5 to Week 8, there are six teams per week on a bye. That means we’ll be starting 18 quarterbacks out of 26 playing. Trying to draft backups with different byes from your starters is one thing, but trying to make sure you have one of the 8 who won’t be starting for someone else in each of those weeks and who doesn’t share your starters’ bye is going to be damn near impossible.
It’s going to be difficult to do that with running backs, tight ends and wideouts too, of course, but backup running backs and wideouts actually get to play. There’s a 99% chance that a quarterback who doesn’t start a game won’t appear in it, except for guys who get trotted out for gimmick packages (and Josh Johnson is the only wildcat QB I can think of who is actually listed as a quarterback).
I don’t think it’ll be a big problem. That’s why I suggested the third slot be a QB/WR/RB flex spot. To those people who plan out their draft better (and get lucky on injuries) they’ll get to start 3 QBs all year. People that don’t will have to start a RB or WR in that third slot every once in a while. But it’s not as if they’ll get a 0 - they’ll just get RB numbers instead of QB numbers.
I think it’d be interesting having to have different QBs from different tiers, and also the draft strategies around drafting multiple QBs. In a standard draft your big decisions tend to be when to go RB and when to go WR - but if you need 3 QBs, it makes the draft more interesting, with more possible drafting strategies, because QB stays in the running with RB and WR for quite a while.
3 QBs in our league is less drastic than 2 QBs in a 12 man league, yet the latter is considered viable if unusual.
I think 2 QBs is enough to worry about, and I prefer to have fewer flex spots.
2 QBs is the default amount of players to worry about for a league this size, it’s the equivelant of having 4 RB slots (double a 12 man league). In general I was hoping we’d run all positions a little deeper than just doubling roster sizes from a 12 man league. I want to see what drafting strategies people come up with, and how we end up going after the lower tiered guys. I want depth to be more rewarded.
At 12 we’d expect to start the same amount of players and have roughly the same distribution of quality as a twelve man league (halved, of course). RNATB posted in the league forum about wanting to give a 2QB league a try for a while, and I’m saying while technically having 2QBs makes this a 2QB league, in practice it doesn’t - it doesn’t make you dig deeper down the tiers or anything, and you wouldn’t change your QB drafting value. We’ll have the same 12 QBs starting as a regular 12 man league.
Much more interesting to increase the QB depth and see what people do with more flexible QB drafting strategy and having to choose between lower tier QBs. This league affords us a unique opportunity to ease into it with 18 starters rather than having to go with a more drastic 24 as you would if you were to go with 2 QBs in a 12 man league. It’s exactly in the middle of 12 team/1qb and 12 team/2qb.
Anyway, listing your preference is good and I’m not trying to say you’re wrong. I’m just trying to lay out a case because the 3QB thing is the only thing I actually feel strongly about at all with the roster settings. Everything else - kicker or no kicker, lots of flex spots or few - I don’t care about strongly.
I can live with the 3rd QB spot being a flex, I suppose.
Not a lot of movement here, so it’s worth bumping to get some progress going. Not a lot of time left to make decisions. And we haven’t even really decided the most basic concepts.
So let’s start ironing some things out. I’m pretty adamant about an auction draft. I know a smaller league would make a snake draft pretty doable, but there are enough caveats there that it isn’t worth the debate. Auction is better anyway.
I’d prefer a PPR league. 2QB vs 2QB+1Flex doesn’t matter too much to me, but I’d prefer the flex option for the sake of interest. It’s a cool idea. I like having kickers even if they’re mostly random noise just because it’s weird without them. I actually kinda like the idea of having a large roster but not a ton of starting spots so the choices between players matters more (especially since with only six teams we’re choosing between very good options instead of waiver fodder). So I guess in that regard, I’m okay not having a lot of flex positions.
QBx2
QB/RB/WR/TEx1
RBx3
WRx4
WR/TEx1
TEx2
Kx1
Defx2
Benchx14
Looks best to me. I made a couple conscious choices here. Eliminating the WR/RB flex makes the QB/RB/WR/TE flex MUCH more interesting because now it’s the only flex you can stick a RB in and it doesn’t automatically become a QB spot. Fewer starters overall to make the choices more meaningful.
I’m good with all of that, although I’d like to have five WR spots. I don’t really see the point of starting two defenses; all the other stuff can theoretically happen in a real game, but two defenses can’t play in a real game, so it feels… wrong.