Rule Change Proposals: Player Acquisition

Most of these proposals are more neat ideas then problem solving.  The actual format of the draft would be the problem solver.

Real quick, then later with more details:
1) Use power rankings instead of records for draft order for non-playoff teams.
2) Use a week-long e-mail moderated draft as discussed after this year's draft instead of live draft.
3) Allow teams to have a single college player on their practice squad.
4) Expand franchising a little or all the way to a full dynasty league.
5) Reduce the minimum price of a free agent to $1 for QBs and RBs too.
6) A random good player may hold out this year and either cost its owner money or not be available.

1) Draft Order for Non-Playoff Teams.
Right now we use records to assign virtual ping-pong balls to teams for a draft lottery.  My thought is that we could use power ranking instead.

Why?  Basically, if we think it would be harder to tank using power rankings maybe we make it more certain that bad teams get high picks which I think is desirable.

The main reason we do a lottery to reduce the temptation to tank a season for draft position.  Now, I've never actually seen anyone do that so I don't think the temptation is too high and we also clearly have owners with high moral character (at least in the fantasy football dealings).  In recent years most teams were still in the running for playoff spots with 3 games left to play.  And its hard to move the needle on a 14-game power ranking too much in 3 games.  So I think it would be harder to tank late in the season if we used power rankings.

If that logic holds up then maybe we do away with the lottery and go back to a straight assignment based on power rankings or we weight the ping-pong ball distribution more heavily in favor of the worse teams.


2) Email Moderated Instead of Live Draft.
I know that there has only really been sporadic complaining about how long a draft takes in our system and lots of acknowledgment that there are not a ton of ways to speed it up.  But the idea of spreading the draft out might make it easier for everyone to participate, force people to make their own selections (instead of relying on me to bail them out), and might add some interesting dynamics as well by providing more opportunities for trading during the draft.

Here's the relevant part of my email from August:

One way we could go is to have each day be a round of the draft. 

Lets say round one was due by noon ET on Monday.  Everyone who had a pick in that round would send me an email with their choices in ranked order.  Now some people would have to give me more choices than others.  So this year John would just send me a single pick every round for most rounds because he had pick #1.  But I'd have to send in 12 picks just in case everyone else got taken.

After the deadline or after I received all of the submissions for round 1.  I would look at the first pick's choices and select their choice.  Then look at the second pick's choices and select their first available choice, etc.  I would publish the results to the site and then we would rinse and repeat.  

If we wanted to proceeded at a quicker pace, we could do 2 rounds every day.  One due and processed at noon and the next due and processed at the end of the evening. ~ 9:00 or 10:00 pm.  If we did 2 rounds per day, we could get the draft done in a work week. 

There are some details we could handle for skipping picks when no submissions are received (push to beginning of next round) and/or auction off unclaimed picks at the end of the draft.  I would send my choices to a generically trusted party to alleviate fears that I could cheat the system. 

I think its very doable and might be very interesting if people would prefer that to our current system.  It would require a bit of a different kind of planning, but it might also make it easier for everyone to participate and might also encourage more mid-draft trades with hours between rounds to work out details.  In theory, we could allow conditional trades to be submitted as part of a pick submission.  So my pick might say, if Dez Bryant is available, I will trade my pick this round to John Garner for his 1st round pick next year.  Otherwise, take so and so...  John could confirm this like we do in a normal trade.  Etc.

3) Allow teams to have a single college player on their practice squad.
There are leagues out there (mostly full on dynasty leagues that will let teams draft or otherwise acquire players that are not on NFL rosters (mostly college players but sometimes a CFL player or something like that).

I think its an obvious extension to our practice squad concept but I don't know if I want to make people know college football too.  So maybe we only let you put one college (or non-NFL if we want to do it that way) player on the practice squad.  So if you want to hoard more than 1 college player the others would have to be on your active roster and require normal franchising instead of what would be free practice squad franchising.


4) Expand Franchising
In the past we have limited franchising for fear that increased franchising would just lead to more and more franchised QBs and RBs.  I wonder though.  I think if I had more spots I'd be more likely to franchise a couple more defensive players.  I already try to franchise every single QB, RB, and WR I think has any value.

We could do this any number of ways I suppose.  One way would be to simply remove the 8-player hard cap.  This would effectively mean that your franchising would only be limited by your available slush fund and how many draft picks you had.

This would admittedly reduce the importance of the draft.  But I'm not sure how much.  It would likely remove a couple of marginal veterans from the pool of available players but there would still be all of the rookies and any veterans that people either did not have on a roster last year or decided were not worth the cost to franchise.

Alternately we could simply increase the hard cap to some other number.

One knock-off effect of increasing franchising is that it shortens our draft no matter how we do our draft.


5) Reduce the minimum price of a free agent to $1 for QBs and RBs too.
This is a holdover from suggestions in the past.  I am generally against doing this because I think that the current value of slush money seems to be well balanced against other resources like draft picks.

However, I don't really have an opinion about the other half of the suggestion: giving all players the same minimum bid.  The original concept of giving QB and RB be more expensive original bids is that they are generally more valuable.  But, with some exceptions, the ones you find in free agency are usually not the really valuable ones.  I will say that I would not let this decision change how franchise values are calculated (QBs and RBs have a hard minimum of $1 in franchising, WR minimum is $0.5, and all other players have a minimum of $0) especially if we increase the amount of franchising allowed.


6) A random good player may hold out this year and either cost its owner money or not be available.
So I saw this idea on the web somewhere.  Obviously its an effort to add some realism and random interesting thing to fantasy football.  The mechanics of the concept:

All you have to do is write the names of the highest scoring player(s) at every position from the prior season on pieces of paper and drop them into a hat.  Then drop in an equal number of pieces (or more) with no name on them.  Have the league champion from the year before draw a single piece of paper and the name drawn becomes the holdout for that off-season.  If a blank piece is drawn, there isn’t a holdout that year and everybody can breathe easy.

In the event there is a holdout, the rule would state the player is demanding a contract equal to the largest deal at his position.  The owner who has the player can decide immediately to cave to the player’s demands, give the player a raise and keep him active, or he can choose to let the player holdout and not use him until he reports to the team.

If the owner chooses to let the player holdout, the numbers one through sixteen are written on pieces of paper and dropped into the same hat.  After free agency and the rookie draft are complete, the owner of the holdout draws out a number and that decides what week the player will give up on his demands for a new contract and be eligible to play for his fantasy team again.  Of course, the owner will have the opportunity to give in to the player at any time after the first week of the NFL season, as long as they have the salary cap space.

Translated for our league I think we would do this after franchising but before the draft.  And the cost of bringing the hold-out player back to your active roster would be to pay slush equal to the difference between their franchise value (which you've already paid) and the highest FV for a player at their position.

I would think that hold-outs can not be placed on IR or PS but can be cut or traded.  Cutting would end their hold-out but trading would not (the new owner after a trade would have to pay the difference between their FV and their holdout demand to get them back to their active roster).

We would have to figure out how many players we thought might holdout.  Any player at a position who scored more FLOF points last season then the top FV holder (which could be no one at a position)?  The top 2 or 4 players at a position in total FLOF points last year (other than the top FV player at that position)?