2012 NJFBOA Fantasy Football

[cdacda13]

Hey Everyone,
So far 8 teams are signed up. The invite for the league was just sent to cycule and another was sent to Riggs.

The Current Owners list:
1. cdacda13 - Rev Tebow Touched Me
2. Dilley- The Arian Brotherhood
3. NastyEllEssWon - nasty
4. cbrrmike - wombats
5. Tru2Chevy - Teh Admins
6. 88WS-6 - Hurricane Ditka
7. coolmanvette75 - Evil Opti
8. (Pending to RiggsLW81- Sixx Killers)
9. (Pending to cycule)
10. Neverpullout

Few things up for discussion:
Everyone is still okay with a $20 buy-in for the league?
Any rule changes?
And most importantly, What time works for everyone for the draft? (The keeper deadline will be 48 hours before the draft.)

Good luck with the draft and with your season everyone!

[Mike]

Anything on a weds or Thursday works for me

[coolmanvette75]

Any night except tuesday nights and wednesday nights. I would tend to think friday night or saturday night would work for most people

[88WS-6]

Any day after 4pm except Wednesday.


And $20 is fine.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by coolmanvette75

Any night except tuesday nights and wednesday nights. I would tend to think friday night or saturday night would work for most people

Actually in the past I have seen that be harder. More people have lives on those nights.

[Tru2Chevy]

$20 is fine with me....the only nights I have off from work are Thursday and Friday, and starting later is better for me.

- Justin

[coolmanvette75]

Yea the later the better for me to. I can do any night after 11 eastern (10 my time)

[Dilley]

Where are we reporting keepers to? Is it on yahoo, do we pm the comish?

[88WS-6]

Originally Posted by Dilley

Where are we reporting keepers to? Is it on yahoo, do we pm the comish?

There is a link on our league homepage on yahoo. "Select Keepers" or something like that.

[Dilley]

Oh Alright thank you. And what's our rules for offseason trades? If its allowed I'm willing to make some pre draft moves I have frank Gore, Darren McFadden, Jimmy Graham, and Cam Newton that people would be interested in and willing to move. So make me an offer.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Dilley

Oh Alright thank you. And what's our rules for offseason trades? If its allowed I'm willing to make some pre draft moves I have frank Gore, Darren McFadden, Jimmy Graham, and Cam Newton that people would be interested in and willing to move. So make me an offer.

That they don't do

[NastyEllEssWon]

why is Rothelisberger not showing up for keepers??? im curious as to tell how high we drafted these people too.

[88WS-6]

Originally Posted by NastyEllEssWon

why is Rothelisberger not showing up for keepers??? im curious as to tell how high we drafted these people too.

I'm guessing here, but I think that if you pick one player to keep, it takes away your 1st pick. If you pick two, it takes away 1st and 2nd.

[NastyEllEssWon]

Originally Posted by 88WS-6

I'm guessing here, but I think that if you pick one player to keep, it takes away your 1st pick. If you pick two, it takes away 1st and 2nd.

i thought the way keepers work is that whatever position you drafted them the year before is what position draft pick you lose in the draft. im not understanding why ben rothelisberger isnt showing up on my list of players to keep.

[Dilley]

Originally Posted by 88WS-6

I'm guessing here, but I think that if you pick one player to keep, it takes away your 1st pick. If you pick two, it takes away 1st and 2nd.

That's how I've always done keepers.

[Mike]

keepers count as the pick for the round they were originally drafted in, its right at the top of the keepers page...

[88WS-6]

Originally Posted by Mike

keepers count as the pick for the round they were originally drafted in, its right at the top of the keepers page...

This was what I read on the keepers page:


"Keeper Rules Note (from the Commissioner)

You are only allowed to mark two (2) players as "keeper" players on your roster. I still have to figure out how this will effect the draft order, but it means that it most likely will not be auto pick and will be based on your placement from last season. For example if you finished last you will receive the 1st pick. If you decide to use a keeper pick you will forfeit your pick in the first round. If you decide to use your second keeper pick you will forfeit your pick in the second round. Questions or suggestions welcomed."

[Mike]

Nasty. Ben wasn't on your team at the end of the season. You have rivers,and no one else.

[NastyEllEssWon]

eh give me a few days to figure out. first its they only count for the draft we picked them at, then i read that it counts for a first rounder or second rounder. this keeper crap is more trouble than its worth honestly. ill let you know in 48 hours if i find another league or not as im not really clear what the hell is going on here and no one has made mention what officially is happening with this.

[NastyEllEssWon]

so how is this working. is it the first two picks in the draft you lose, or is it the round they were drafted in the year before. i wish i wouldve known this, after looking through my things, i think i dropped Rothelisberger when he got hurt last year. i wish i knew we were doing keepers.


so my question is....why not do the keepers thing next year and not do it this year since there might have been people who let someone go due to injury and it not being a keeper league.

[coolmanvette75]

I would tend to think its pick 1 and 2. The reason I say this is because what if you traded for someone or picked them up off waivers last year and decided to keep them. There is no "round" that you drafted them last year simply because you didnt draft them...

[NastyEllEssWon]

Originally Posted by coolmanvette75

I would tend to think its pick 1 and 2. The reason I say this is because what if you traded for someone or picked them up off waivers last year and decided to keep them. There is no "round" that you drafted them last year simply because you didnt draft them...

then it would go by the round the other person drafted them at. if they were undrafted im guessing it would be counted as a last round pick?

[Mike]

Nasty is correct. That is standard yahoo keeper setup

[88WS-6]

Originally Posted by NastyEllEssWon

so my question is....why not do the keepers thing next year and not do it this year since there might have been people who let someone go due to injury and it not being a keeper league.

I'm fine with that. Keepers is not a deal breaker for me and I'm ready for the draft either way.

[cdacda13]

If you want to wait until next season to do keeper leagues, that's fine by me. I can remove the keeper rules for this year.

Here's yahoo's indroduction and instructions on keepers.

Originally Posted by yahoo

Starting a Keeper League

So you want to step up your fantasy game. You've heard about keeper or dynasty leagues, and you think they might be just what you need to take your fantasy playing experience to the next level. But you just aren't sure what exactly that means or how to begin. If this sounds about right, then keep reading. The first thing to understand is there is no single, correct way to run a keeper league. Almost every keeper league dreams up its own combination of rules to suit their own needs and interests. Instead of telling you how to run your league, let's try to help you understand what questions to ask and give you some ideas to answer them.
What is a Keeper League?

In a general sense, when people talk about a keeper league, they are talking about a fantasy league where the league doesn't start fresh every season. Some players are carried over from the previous season to maintain continuity. At the extreme is a dynasty league, which usually refers to a league where all players are carried over from season to season.
Why Should We Have a Keeper League?

Participating in a keeper league adds a new dimension to your strategy and gameplay. We've all been in a league where our draft just doesn't work out the way we had hoped, and it becomes clear pretty early that we aren't going to be able to compete in the current season. In a non-keeper, or redraft league, the best you can hope to do is to be a good sport, continue to manage your team, and hope that either your team performs a miracle or you can at least play the spoiler. In a keeper league, you instead switch your focus: if I can't win this season, how can I better position myself to win in the future? But within this general concept, there are many ways to implement a keeper league, and many questions a league must agree upon to form their rules.
How Many Players Should We Keep?

This is typically the first question a new keeper league must address. If you keep too few players from season to season, then you defeat some of the purpose and strategy of having a keeper league to begin with. If you protect too many players, your league can become stagnant; if you finish in last place, but immediately notice that the top 50 players in the game won't be available to draft the following season, then the situation can be even more bleak than usual.

The simplest model, which many keeper leagues start with, is to pick a number league members are comfortable with, and all teams keep that many players each season. Again, there is no correct answer for this number; your league members need to discuss what aspects of the game strategy they want to stress and how much they want to encourage change and fluidity among the teams.

A more challenging model allows teams to protect a variable number of players. Such a league will often incorporate some notion of cost, such that you cannot necessarily just protect all the players you want. Without a cost of some sort, you would imagine that the winner of the league might very often just keep all their players, and be very difficult to beat the following season.
How Can We Incorporate Player Costs?

For many keeper leagues, the next step of evolution is to associate costs with players, so that protecting one player instead of another has an impact on your strategy. As is usually the case with keeper leagues, there are many different ways to establish costs. Here are some examples to spark discussion within your league:

Player Tenure: A player can only be kept for a fixed number of seasons before they must be released back into the pool to be redrafted. This is a relatively simple model that starts to encourage player movement and parity in a league. For example, a rule that says, "All teams can protect up to five players, but no player can be kept more than three years in a row." is relatively simple to understand and implement.
Team Tenure: A player has a cost that increases the longer he is kept on a team, and instead of being allowed to protect a fixed number of players, each team can protect a fixed number of years of service. For example, in a league that allows you to protect 10 years of service, you could protect 10 different players that were newly drafted in the current season, five players that had been newly drafted the previous year, one player that you loved and held for 10 years, or any combination, such as a player that had been held for five years, another player that had been held for three years, and two players that were newly drafted in the current season.
Draft Position: The cost to keep a player is related to the position in which he is drafted. At the start of every season, a league typically has a draft to populate their entire roster, and for each player they chose to keep, they'll require one fewer draft pick. Which pick that is can associate value with the kept player. For example, many leagues say, "If you wish to protect a player you drafted this season, you must sacrifice a pick one round better than where you selected him. Each year after that, you must give up a pick one round higher still." So if I draft a player in the 5th round, and he turns out to be a solid player I'd like to keep, I could choose to keep him rather than having a 4th round pick the following year. If he continues to be valuable at that price, the following season I could give up a 3rd round pick to keep him, and so on. Such a league should have rules for possible scenarios like, "What happens when I give up a 1st round pick to keep a player, and then I want to keep him another year?" The answer might just be, "You can't, and you have to throw that player back into the pool to be drafted.", or the league might find some other way to penalize a team for further protecting such a player. Similarly, suppose during the season you trade for a player that another team drafted in the 4th round, and at the end of the season you conclude you'd like to protect that player as well as the player you selected in the 4th round. You would not necessarily have two 3rd round picks to forfeit for keeping both players, so there needs to be a rule defined to handle this case. It might be, "You can't do that. Pick one of them." Or it might be, "Then you'll have to give up a 2nd round pick for one of them instead." Or it might be anything else your league defines and agrees upon.
Player Salary: Leagues that do an auction style draft have unique options related to keeper costs, since every player that is drafted inherently has a cost associated with him. So a league could say, "If you wish to keep a player after he was drafted in an auction, then you must increase his cost by $5 per year. The player is put on your roster, and your auction budget is reduced accordingly." And all these different possibilities and rules can interact; such a league might decide that the $5 increases will eventually make a player impractical to protect, or they might also implement a rule that says that no player can be kept for more than five straight years in any case.

What Happens to My Draft When I Have Keepers?

In the end, every team needs to end up with the same number of players. So for every player they protect they need to forfeit one of their draft picks. But which pick they give up depends entirely on your rules. Some examples:

All Teams Keep the Same Number of Players: For leagues where each team protects the same number of players, this can usually be resolved pretty simply. If every team protects X players, you can imagine that the first X rounds of your draft are just all the teams taking their keepers. Similarly, you could imagine that the last X rounds are just all the teams taking their keepers, and it would play out the same.
Teams Keep Different Numbers of Players: For leagues where teams protect different numbers of players, this gets more complex. If I protect eight players, and you protect five players, there is a noteworthy difference between whether I use an extra three picks at the beginning of the draft or the end of the draft. Your league can decide which is more in the spirit of their goals. Putting those picks at the beginning of the draft puts a substantial cost on the kept players that isn't present if they are put at the end of the draft.
Keepers Based on Draft Position: For leagues that value player cost in terms of a draft pick, then their keepers may effectively be scattered throughout the draft. Perhaps you and I each protect three players, but based on their past draft position I might give up my 1st, 5th, and 8th round picks to keep those players, whereas you might give up your 3rd, 12th, and 17th round picks to keep your players. Such a system is very powerful, but slightly more complicated to administer and maintain.
Auction Drafts: For auction drafts, there is no notion of draft position. Instead, each team will potentially be able to win a different number of players at auction to fill out their roster. If every team in your league protects the same number of players, then you don't necessarily need to adjust anyone's auction budget. But if your kept players have an associated cost, then that probably needs to get reflected in differing budgets per team, and if teams protect differing numbers of players you almost certainly want to have that reflected in budget. It has an important meaning if I protect six players and you protect three, but we both start with the same amount of money to fill out our rosters. Effectively, I'd be protecting three players as if I purchased them for $0.
Draft Order: In just about any redraft league, the draft order proceeds in a snaking fashion; whoever picks first in the odd numbered rounds picks last in the even numbered rounds, and vice versa. In a keeper league, it is often interesting to revisit this assumption. The NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL all give preferred draft position to teams that do poorly, in one way or another, in an effort to encourage parity. Your fantasy team may wish to do the same. Since the point of snaking the draft order is usually to not provide any undue advantage to teams that are all supposed to be drafting equally, you could instead say, "The team who finished last this year drafts first in every round next year, and the team who finished first drafts last in every round."

What About Trading Draft Picks?

In addition to trading players in a keeper league, considering also trading draft picks, just as the major sports leagues do. A team in contention for this year's championship may wish to trade away a quality pick in the next draft for a player that is doing well in the present. And for the team that can't win this year, that may make perfect sense for them, particularly if that player has an excessive cost associated with protecting him. This is similar to professional sports teams that decide to rebuild and trade an expensive star for future draft picks or cheaper prospect players.

In a league where you are allowed to trade draft picks, it definitely will make the commissioner's life easier if every traded pick needs to have a corresponding pick traded in the other direction. Since all teams need to end up with the same number of players in the end, this helps maintain order. For example, imagine a league where I trade a player for your 1st round pick. Then at the end of the year, we both decide we hate our rosters so much we are protecting no players. At that point you would have no 1st round pick, I would have two 1st round picks, and we'd both have 1 pick in every other round. So if the draft proceeded in this fashion, I'd end up with an extra player, and you'd end up short a player. It simplifies things if instead we're forced to say, "I trade you the player and my last pick in the draft for your 1st round pick."
How Do We Maintain Balance When Teams Have Different Goals?

Many keeper leagues find that there can be strange dynamics when some teams are playing for the present while others are totally playing for the future. In actual major league sports, teams are beholden to their fans to play a competent, major league team. There is no parallel to this in fantasy, which can encourage a team to completely dump value. There are various types of rules that can help temper this imbalance:

Salary Cap: Some leagues will implement some sort of in-season salary cap. This might limit the number of previous protected players any given team can have. For leagues that have costs associated with players, this might limit the amount of player cost a team can accumulate via trade.
Draft Order: Some leagues will put in measures to discourage giving up completely on the current season. Rather than simply reversing the draft order based on order of finish, a league might use a more complex system to establish the basic draft order. This is analogous to what the NBA does with their draft lottery, to ensure that doing horribly in the current season doesn't necessarily richly reward you for the following season.
Trade Approval: Some leagues might use a trade approval system (manager votes, commissioner veto) that is intended to identify when a team has gone too far over the top and needs to continue to play a competent team in the present, rather than sacrificing entirely for the future.

Next Steps

We've presented a lot of scenarios, and a lot of questions to think about. It can seem overwhelming at first, but if you sort through it and come up with a set of rules your league is comfortable with, it can lead to a much deeper and more entertaining fantasy experience. It is important to come to clear agreement on what rules you are doing, and to document them fully to avoid misunderstandings and frustration once you start playing, but if you come up with a solid set of rules, it can be well worth it. Good luck; if you decide a keeper league is right for you, and you come up with a set of rules that you are comfortable with, you can visit our page on how Yahoo! supports keeper leagues to see how our tools help a commissioner implement the rules you've chosen.

And here's their keeper tools page.

Originally Posted by yahoo

Tools to Support Your Keeper League

As described in the Introduction to Keeper Leagues, many keeper leagues use a unique combination of custom rules. For that reason, it is very difficult to fully support every keeper league. Rather than implementing a single model for how keeper leagues work, Yahoo! takes a different approach: we provide tools that will help the majority of keeper leagues, building upon our library of keeper-related tools over time to keep making life easier for the commissioner and the league. Let's take a look at the tools we offer, their intended uses, and how to best use them to improve your league.
The Tools

Because keeper leagues mean different things to different leagues, there is no setting to signify being a keeper league. Simply use the tools that help you and don't use the others.
Invite Friends

If you renew your Yahoo! league instead of creating a league from scratch, all teams from last year are retained. The Invite Friends tool helps you keep track of the managers invited back to own their teams and potential managers invited to take over existing or new teams. This franchise model is essential for some of the keeper-related tools; by retaining last year's teams, we can reliably associate things like last year's rosters and traded draft picks. This also makes renewal quicker for returning managers since we'll already know their team settings.
Edit Keeper Settings

Use the Edit Keeper Settings tool to allow teams to select keepers on their own. When you select the Enable Keeper Management Tools checkbox you will be prompted to pick a deadline date for the league to select their keepers. If your league uses a live draft, this date must be prior to the draft. Be careful to give yourself enough time to review and confirm keepers and give your league ample time to prepare for the draft once available players are known. After selecting the keeper deadline, you can add a note to explain your league's custom keeper rules which will appear on the Choose Keepers page described below.
Choose Keepers

Once a keeper deadline is selected, each team may view last year's roster and select players on their Choose Keepers page. Selections will not be publicly viewable until the commissioner approves the declared keepers after the deadline date. Keep in mind that since Yahoo! doesn't know exactly what rules your league uses, we can't enforce those rules. Instead we display the commissioner-provided note to remind owners of the rules and allow the commissioner to review and change declared keepers if necessary.
Approve Keeper Players

After the keeper deadline passes the commissioner can use the Confirm Keepers tool to review the keepers submitted by each team, change them if needed to comply with league rules, and approve the league's keeper selections, publishing the results. The commissioner is required to complete this step prior to a live draft, or the draft will fail to run. If the commissioner changes any of the team's keepers, this change will be noted in a transaction to improve league communication and discourage unethical changes by the commissioner.
Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players

Perhaps the most important keeper-related tool is the Custom Draft Order tool. Any keeper league eventually ends up depending on this tool, even if they did not choose to use the previous tools on our site to declare their keepers. It serves purposes:

After setting a custom draft order, the commissioner can set the order of team picks in each round. This is essential for leagues that want to base the draft order on the order of finish from the previous season or some other custom method.
Once the base order is set, decide whether the draft order repeats each round, or "snakes", reversing direction each round. Keeper leagues often use a repeating rather than snaking draft order.
If a renewed league allowed for draft pick trading the previous year, the commissioner can choose to import those traded picks and apply them to the base draft order.
If a league used our keeper management tools to select keepers, the commission can choose where keepers will be placed in the draft. Keepers can be automatically added as the first or last picks for each team or the commissioner can manually apply keepers to any picks.
The commissioner can reassign any individual pick to a different team as needed. This allows for any amount of customization for leagues with rules we can't automatically support. For example, if your league allows trades and trading of draft picks when the Yahoo! fantasy game is offseason, the commissioner can reassign those traded picks that Yahoo! is unaware of.
The commissioner can then pre-select any player into any pick. Since any player can be slotted into any pick, it allows the commissioner total control over how the selection of keepers impacts a team's draft position.

Assign Auction Keeper Players

While the custom draft order tool lives at the heart of keeper leagues that do a standard draft, it doesn't apply to leagues that do an auction draft, which has no notion of draft order. For auction leagues, there is a separate tool to Assign Auction Keeper Players. This allows the commissioner to add keepers and their costs to teams before the auction begins.
Keeper Costs

While Yahoo! does not have a particular idea what it means for a player to have a cost and does nothing to try to enforce or do calculations based on those costs, it can still be very useful for a keeper league to see such costs in-game. The Set Keeper Costs tool allows that to happen. For standard draft leagues, the commissioner can enter any numeric value for all keeper players, and indicate that these values should be visible within the game. This includes places like the full roster view, the trade flow, and so on. For auction leagues, the tool can be used in the same way, or a special option can be chosen to simply use the auction purchase prices as the player costs within the game.
Keeper Player Status

Since leagues may have rules designating when a player loses his cost or keeper status, the Keeper Player Status tool allows a league to automate some of that management problem. It first allows the commissioner to decide whether keeper status should be visible throughout the game. If visible, then it allows the commissioner to designate whether several conditions should remove a player's status as a keeper player, and stop displaying them as a keeper. In particular, a league can be configured to remove keeper status if a player:

Is traded
Is dropped from a team and claimed off waivers by another team
Is dropped from a team and clears waivers, becoming a free agent

Any or all conditions can be selected/unselected.
Allow Draft Pick Trades

Since many keeper leagues are enriched by the ability to trade draft picks, we now allow leagues to be configured to allow the trading of draft picks for the following season. Whether or not this is allowed is configured by a single setting in the League Settings tool. For leagues that allow traded picks, the following items apply:

Any trades involving picks must involve an equal number of picks going in each direction
Picks can only be traded for the following season
Once any picks have been traded, the feature cannot be turned off
A new page/tool is available to summarize which picks have been traded

Adding Keepers to Your League

Prior to this season, commissioners needed to track keepers offline and import them when they used the Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players tool. Now, if a commissioner would like to manage the process of declaring keepers within the game, they can do so as follows:

Renew the league from the previous season
Populate all teams by reinviting managers or inviting new users to own the teams via the Invite Friends Tool
Finalize the team list
Enable keeper management tools using the Edit Keeper Settings tool
Set a Keeper Declaration Deadline leaving enough time to process the submitted keepers before the live draft
Once the Keeper Declaration Deadline passes, review all submitted keepers using the Approve Keeper Players tool. Make any changes necessary to adhere to your league's rules.
Keepers can then be automatically added as the first or last draft picks or manually added anywhere in the draft when setting up a custom draft order using the Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players

Adding Traded Draft Picks Into Your League

If your league enabled the trading of draft picks in the previous season, when you use the Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players tool, you'll be given the option to add the traded picks into the draft order. You do need to avoid conditions that would make it impossible to safely and cleanly import traded draft picks. Those include:

If you shrink the maximum roster size such that one or more traded picks no longer exist, we cannot import picks. For example, if someone has traded a 25th round pick, and you shrink the maximum roster size to 23, then there will not be a 25th round, and we cannot import the picks
If you remove a team from the league that had traded picks in the previous season, we cannot import the picks
If you create a new league rather than renewing the previous league, we won't have knowledge of the traded picks
If you switch to an auction draft format, then the notion of a draft order becomes irrelevant, and there will never be an opportunity to import the picks

Setting Up Your Draft Order

When commissioners customize their draft order in the Edit Draft Order & Assign Keeper Players tool some changes were made to better serve commissioners:

When setting up the base draft order, commissioners can now choose to import traded picks from the previous season

If keepers were declared, the commissioner can choose several popular options to automatically import those players into appropriate picks. For example, if your league rules would allow for the keepers to always be assigned to the last picks each team holds or the first picks each team holds, that is now easily supported. If instead you need to assign keepers to individual picks throughout the draft, when editing a pick the tool can help you limit the list of players to those protected by the team owning that pick.

Viewing Keeper Information During the Season

There are several things the commissioner can do to help communicate keeper details during the season. For example:

The commissioner can use the Keeper Costs tool to enter keeper costs for individual players, can indicate that keepers should be designated as such throughout the league, and can show costs for the keepers where appropriate throughout the league.
The commissioner may be able to use the Keeper Player Status tool to match the rules of your league and to automatically maintain the keeper status of players across transactions such as trades and drop/adds.

There's really no "standard" for keeper leagues. Everyone is going to be different. If the everyone wants to do keepers based on last years draft picks, you still have to declare your keeper picks before I can assign the draft order and picks.
I believe that losing your 1st and 2nd round pick for your keeper picks is the fairest way to do keepers. Everyone is equal is their punishments for keeper their best players. It makes owners think twice if they really want to keep that player.

Let me know what everyone feels about this.

(sorry about taking so long with my reply, I just started my job a couple weeks ago and its been time consuming lately.)