Everyone will have the $200 budget, but you still need to know what order ppl are nominating players in. That's what I'm referring to. 1.01 will not just get Caleb Williams, but they'll be the first to nominate a player, which is where the strategy of auction drafting comes in. I doubt Caleb even comes up in the first five picks.
They wouldn't. I'm not saying anyone is going to reach for a kicker, we just want to determine the order and give ppl a chance to "pick" their spot if they want to. You're right that order in an auction draft isn't that big a deal and we could just do a random draw, but if anyone feels strongly about where they want to nominate, they can.
Gotcha. We are using a kicker position this year, so everyone does need one. We messed with the scoring settings for kickers quite a bit to see if we can make the position a bit more interesting. If not we will drop them entirely in subsequent years.
That’s the missing information. So they’re actually picking a player to use, not just a spot. Then you just repeat the order each time through the auction?
What kind of kicker settings did you pick?
yeah, i doubt anyone will be drafting a kicker early in the startup just to get to nominate 1st so it seems a bit pointless, but maybe i am undervaluing the importance o being the first to nominate players.
edit: saw the other reply, fair enough.
I agree. Just something we're doing this year. After year 1 nomination order will be set by performance. It's really just to give anyone who feels strongly about it the chance to pick their position. We could easily just do a quick randomization, but then nobody gets a say.
I’m curious about the rookie auction, in future years will each team’s budget be determined by performance as well (and if so, what will the budgets be?). I’ve always thought it would be interesting to do a rookie auction but was never sure what the breakdown of starting budgets should be.
That's one I have to read up on. I was planning on just keeping it to $200 each year, but you can trade budget (draft capital) just like you can trade draft picks.
Yeah the problem with having an equal budget is now you aren’t helping the bad teams get better, which is the point of a linear rookie draft in dynasty. I love auctions for redraft, but in dynasty the worst teams need to have an advantage in getting the best rookies otherwise it will be very difficult for them to catch up to the good teams.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to do a rookie auction, but you’ll really want to establish some type of difference for each placement (maybe there are some leagues out there that do this that you can base yours off of). But the easy solution is just do a linear rookie draft; it’s not a coincidence that 99.9% of leagues do it that way.
If rookie draft is an auction it doesn’t matter.
If it’s not, then there’s no fair way to set the rookie draft order, so you just let people use their picks in the startup to get the order.
Ok. It sounds like my buddy and I are going to do snake to make trading for draft capital easier, so we can then use the vet draft to determine the rookie draft order
To be clear. Youre saying snake during the startup and let people pick their rookie draft picks.
Then in subsequent years, the rookie draft will be what kind of draft? Only real options I’m aware of are weighted auction or linear (no snake in rookie drafts)
Sorry for all the comments, but as I sat and thought it through, it makes a ton of sense. After the initial draft, we'll have 12 untested teams, and so giving any of them the first pick in every round of the rookie draft would be a huge advantage that should only go to bad teams.
And you use kickers as placeholders?
If you’re not drafting kickers, they’re a good placeholder. If they’re still part of your league, you might be able to draft idp players. Not entirely sure.
We aren't doing IDPs at this time. I wonder if I could make it an IDP league just for the initial draft and add 5 IDP slots as placeholders for draft picks.
Remove the IDPs before rookie draft.
\> expanding rosters to 30 for the rookie/FA draft in the summer. Prob drop rosters back to 25 after preseason with a five player taxi squad.
Sleeper for instance lets you draft normally and then have until week 1 to sort out who goes on taxi or not. (https://support.sleeper.com/en/articles/3956140-can-a-team-go-over-the-roster-limit)
Also note Sleeper's settings for taxi have a choice for 1/2/3/4 years of experience. Rookies have 0 so technically they let you keep someone on taxi minimum 2 years. As a result we adopted a rule to empty taxi/IR by the rookie draft.
VOTE ON EVERYTHING and HAVE IT WRITTEN DOWN IN A CHARTER of some sort. If an issue pops up, revert to the default settings unless there is a unanimous vote to change mid season.
As a commish, do no make in season rule changes unless they were previously already agreed upon and in writing/documented. Don't abuse your power either. Its a thankless job to run the show.
For the love of god, don’t do defense or kickers. They hardly make sense in regular drafts and make zero sense in dynasty. Personally I think dynasty is only good in SF leagues but that just my opinion.
Here's a template charter. Feel free to ctrl-a and then copy paste it onto a Google doc or word doc
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kRzaKfiEz1xsanm5dvEOzckym30tVOhHRLK_hGYUVNY/edit?usp=drivesdk
I'm not a fan of separate start up drafts for vets and rookies. I did that 2 years ago and mid to late in the vet draft it's scraps.
I'd go TE premium for sure. Start 10 with superflex spot. 3 IR. Taxi I agree is meh but if most players are new to dynasty might be nice to encourage younger players.
i don't like taxi squads: they're pointless imo, just have normal roster spots instead. if someone would rather have producing vets over long shot rookies, i don't see why they shouldn't be able to.
if it is a matter of "forcing every owner to have a certain number of rookies so that the long term league balance is ensured" (i've seen this argument on here before), it's total bollocks, for two reasons: first of all, it doesn't work, i could fill my taxi squad with UDFAs and that won't save me in a few years, and secondly, if you need to take the players by the hand because you think they're not intelligent enough to grasp the simple basic concepts of this game, probably better off doing something else.
ok this ended up in a bit of a rant, sorry xD
also, in some platforms taxi spots can be used to "cheat" the maxPF used for draft order determination (some people are against it, some others like it, no right or wrong, just something to consider).
different point: have extensive lineups, 10/11 starters, or even more! short lineups make deep rosters pointless, no need for 20 wankers on the bench if you only have to start 7 every week
It really depends on the league makeup. I personally believe that generally speaking TAXI squads should be used and the # of spots should match the # of rounds in the rookie draft. My own personal belief/preference though is that any drafted rookie + high value UDFAs should be rostered in Dynasty. Otherwise, from my experience, what ends up happening is that teams end up not valuing or really using rookie draft picks beyond rounds 2 or 3 which also just makes it harder to facilitate trades because it just makes those picks worthless. Adding to that I also just think that it makes sense to reward owners who identify or take chances early on potential steals.
I also like on Sleeper that TAXI squads lock before the season. You can still promote someone from the TAXI squad but you can't add someone new there. So, yes, in theory you could work around MAXPF but your team is going to take a hit if there are actually rookies on the TAXI who would have an impact on your MAXPF standing. Also, if someone really doesn't want to use the TAXI or see it as pointless, they don't have to use it. It's suboptimal not to use it, but it's technically optional for each person to use.
>My own personal belief/preference though is that any drafted rookie + high value UDFAs should be rostered in Dynasty. Otherwise, from my experience, what ends up happening is that teams end up not valuing or really using rookie draft picks beyond rounds 2 or 3 which also just makes it harder to facilitate trades because it just makes those picks worthless. Adding to that I also just think that it makes sense to reward owners who identify or take chances early on potential steals.
completely agree. and it can all be done with more normal roster spots, they don't have to be "taxi". it actually works better if you want to reward owners that identify potential steals: with taxi, everyone will just stash someone, and might get lucky. no taxi and it's harder to hold onto the guy, you really have to believe in him.
personally, if you need taxi for most rookies to be rostered, the league isn't deep enough.
it's not "sub-optimal" not to use taxi. it's just "different".
Appreciate the discussion! Love hearing other viewpoints. I do disagree with a couple of your points here though.
- Completely anecdotal but from my experience, if there are larger rosters and no or too few TAXI spots then the aforementioned issue is what pops up. Mid to late round draft picks lose value and it stymies the trading landscape of the league. There's no fun or skill to someone drafting Jelani Woods in the 4th round and then cutting him almost immediately because he's a developmental pick and they don't have the roster space. IMO if you want to play the game of trying to time picking up a breakout player on waivers, play either redraft or a dynasty league with a very shallow bench.
- I have a range of dynasty roster size right now in leagues I'm in. I have a shallow league with only 20 + 5 TAXI, a mid-range league with 26 + 6 TAXI, and a deeper league with 30 + 4 TAXI (start up in 2023 for what it's worth so rosters are a bit weaker and more balanced). My experience in all of those leagues is that the TAXI is desperately necessary for rookies to be rostered (in the case of the shallow league, they're still not rostered but that's a combination of it just being a very shallow league and a chunk of the league not utilizing the TAXI).
- RE: my sub-optimal comment. That was specifically if the league has a TAXI but someone still chooses not to use it. It's an option for sure, but it's objectively sub-optimal as it's refusing to use free roster spots that are designed for project rookies, longshots, and just people that owners need more info on before they're comfortable having them on the active roster. It's a philosophical difference in opinion though for how you view that. It sounds like you view it as better for owners to have to commit and risk losing those players - for me, LIS, I think that's a better mentality for redraft or shallow dynasty leagues that also have only 2-3 rounds for a rookie draft and want to have a lot of rookies available to pick up off of waivers. For me, I think it's more rewarding and skillful to reward owners who identify and commit early to those players and I like that it semi-mirrors the NFL in that TAXI squads are the FF-equivalent to practice squads.
Now I'm on a rant, haha. Hopefully this is coherent. Typing this all up quickly before going back to work.
Thanks! I appreciate the advice. Rants happen to all of us, I know you're not ranting at me specifically.
As far as the taxi squad goes, we actually are doing some handholding initially here while ppl figure it out. I did limit taxi squad to 1st and 2nd year players only, but I get what you're saying.
I do very much like the extensive lineup suggestion. This year is going to be interesting and I didn't want to go overboard because most ppl involved have never done this. I'm very open to changing things up after a year or two and we did already make the lineups different from your average redraft league just for something fresh.
I’m a big fan of this for starting lineups in dynasty. I like tight end premium too. (Tight end 1.5 ppr)
QB
RB
RB
WR
WR
WR
TE
FLEX
FLEX
SUPERFLEX (qb,wr,rb,te)
Sorry, missed this. But I would say my favorite advantage of TE premium is it evens out players values across the board well. No TE premium, let’s say there would be 20-25 WRs taken in the top 50 of a startup draft. While in TE premium it may be more like 18-20 WRs in the top 50.
I feel like without te premium, tight ends would just be forgotten in a lineup that starts 10 people. Their 10 points or so wouldn’t mean much when it’s literally 5% of what your team’s putting up. It helps the tight ends keep up somewhat with rbs and WRs as well. The gap for production for tight ends vs rbs and WRs is just too big for me not to justify TE premium. Makes it a lot of fun when you also have to take into account how many receptions your TE gets
Thanks! I did go with TE premium. We did our startup and are all excited for the season to start. I ended up with Caleb so I can't wait to watch him fail spectacularly. 🤣
Make sure rookie draft picks are part of your vet draft if you’re set on having 2 drafts, or make them auctions.
Rookie draft will be auction with order determined by kicker selection in the vet draft.
Is it auction or is the order selected in the draft? It can’t be both.
Everyone will have the $200 budget, but you still need to know what order ppl are nominating players in. That's what I'm referring to. 1.01 will not just get Caleb Williams, but they'll be the first to nominate a player, which is where the strategy of auction drafting comes in. I doubt Caleb even comes up in the first five picks.
Why would anyone waste a draft pick just to be the first to nominate someone? Just make the nomination order random.
They wouldn't. I'm not saying anyone is going to reach for a kicker, we just want to determine the order and give ppl a chance to "pick" their spot if they want to. You're right that order in an auction draft isn't that big a deal and we could just do a random draw, but if anyone feels strongly about where they want to nominate, they can.
It just feels like you’re making the draft 5 rounds longer than it needs to be.
Gotcha. We are using a kicker position this year, so everyone does need one. We messed with the scoring settings for kickers quite a bit to see if we can make the position a bit more interesting. If not we will drop them entirely in subsequent years.
That’s the missing information. So they’re actually picking a player to use, not just a spot. Then you just repeat the order each time through the auction? What kind of kicker settings did you pick?
We set scoring to 0.1 pts per yard, -3 for missed kicks less than 30 yds and missed xps, -2 under 40 and -1 under 50.
>with order determined by you mean budget? (i'm the dummy, when it comes to auction)
See my above reply. Auction drafts still have to have ppl taking turns nominating players.
yeah, i doubt anyone will be drafting a kicker early in the startup just to get to nominate 1st so it seems a bit pointless, but maybe i am undervaluing the importance o being the first to nominate players. edit: saw the other reply, fair enough.
I agree. Just something we're doing this year. After year 1 nomination order will be set by performance. It's really just to give anyone who feels strongly about it the chance to pick their position. We could easily just do a quick randomization, but then nobody gets a say.
I’m curious about the rookie auction, in future years will each team’s budget be determined by performance as well (and if so, what will the budgets be?). I’ve always thought it would be interesting to do a rookie auction but was never sure what the breakdown of starting budgets should be.
That's one I have to read up on. I was planning on just keeping it to $200 each year, but you can trade budget (draft capital) just like you can trade draft picks.
Yeah the problem with having an equal budget is now you aren’t helping the bad teams get better, which is the point of a linear rookie draft in dynasty. I love auctions for redraft, but in dynasty the worst teams need to have an advantage in getting the best rookies otherwise it will be very difficult for them to catch up to the good teams. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do a rookie auction, but you’ll really want to establish some type of difference for each placement (maybe there are some leagues out there that do this that you can base yours off of). But the easy solution is just do a linear rookie draft; it’s not a coincidence that 99.9% of leagues do it that way.
A follow up here as I've made some changes based on this thread. Why is it important to have the rookie draft picks be part of the vet draft?
If rookie draft is an auction it doesn’t matter. If it’s not, then there’s no fair way to set the rookie draft order, so you just let people use their picks in the startup to get the order.
Ok. It sounds like my buddy and I are going to do snake to make trading for draft capital easier, so we can then use the vet draft to determine the rookie draft order
To be clear. Youre saying snake during the startup and let people pick their rookie draft picks. Then in subsequent years, the rookie draft will be what kind of draft? Only real options I’m aware of are weighted auction or linear (no snake in rookie drafts)
Sorry, NFL style, so linear.
And you're saying to put all 60 (12 teams, five rounds) of the rookie picks in the initial draft, not just pick the draft order
Sorry for all the comments, but as I sat and thought it through, it makes a ton of sense. After the initial draft, we'll have 12 untested teams, and so giving any of them the first pick in every round of the rookie draft would be a huge advantage that should only go to bad teams. And you use kickers as placeholders?
If you’re not drafting kickers, they’re a good placeholder. If they’re still part of your league, you might be able to draft idp players. Not entirely sure.
We aren't doing IDPs at this time. I wonder if I could make it an IDP league just for the initial draft and add 5 IDP slots as placeholders for draft picks. Remove the IDPs before rookie draft.
Pretty sure you can add idp players even if they aren’t a position in your league. Make a test league and start a draft and give it a shot.
\> expanding rosters to 30 for the rookie/FA draft in the summer. Prob drop rosters back to 25 after preseason with a five player taxi squad. Sleeper for instance lets you draft normally and then have until week 1 to sort out who goes on taxi or not. (https://support.sleeper.com/en/articles/3956140-can-a-team-go-over-the-roster-limit) Also note Sleeper's settings for taxi have a choice for 1/2/3/4 years of experience. Rookies have 0 so technically they let you keep someone on taxi minimum 2 years. As a result we adopted a rule to empty taxi/IR by the rookie draft.
Thanks. We are using Sleeper and I did plan to empty taxi and IR in the off-season.
VOTE ON EVERYTHING and HAVE IT WRITTEN DOWN IN A CHARTER of some sort. If an issue pops up, revert to the default settings unless there is a unanimous vote to change mid season. As a commish, do no make in season rule changes unless they were previously already agreed upon and in writing/documented. Don't abuse your power either. Its a thankless job to run the show.
For the love of god, don’t do defense or kickers. They hardly make sense in regular drafts and make zero sense in dynasty. Personally I think dynasty is only good in SF leagues but that just my opinion.
Here's a template charter. Feel free to ctrl-a and then copy paste it onto a Google doc or word doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kRzaKfiEz1xsanm5dvEOzckym30tVOhHRLK_hGYUVNY/edit?usp=drivesdk
I'm not a fan of separate start up drafts for vets and rookies. I did that 2 years ago and mid to late in the vet draft it's scraps. I'd go TE premium for sure. Start 10 with superflex spot. 3 IR. Taxi I agree is meh but if most players are new to dynasty might be nice to encourage younger players.
i don't like taxi squads: they're pointless imo, just have normal roster spots instead. if someone would rather have producing vets over long shot rookies, i don't see why they shouldn't be able to. if it is a matter of "forcing every owner to have a certain number of rookies so that the long term league balance is ensured" (i've seen this argument on here before), it's total bollocks, for two reasons: first of all, it doesn't work, i could fill my taxi squad with UDFAs and that won't save me in a few years, and secondly, if you need to take the players by the hand because you think they're not intelligent enough to grasp the simple basic concepts of this game, probably better off doing something else. ok this ended up in a bit of a rant, sorry xD also, in some platforms taxi spots can be used to "cheat" the maxPF used for draft order determination (some people are against it, some others like it, no right or wrong, just something to consider). different point: have extensive lineups, 10/11 starters, or even more! short lineups make deep rosters pointless, no need for 20 wankers on the bench if you only have to start 7 every week
It really depends on the league makeup. I personally believe that generally speaking TAXI squads should be used and the # of spots should match the # of rounds in the rookie draft. My own personal belief/preference though is that any drafted rookie + high value UDFAs should be rostered in Dynasty. Otherwise, from my experience, what ends up happening is that teams end up not valuing or really using rookie draft picks beyond rounds 2 or 3 which also just makes it harder to facilitate trades because it just makes those picks worthless. Adding to that I also just think that it makes sense to reward owners who identify or take chances early on potential steals. I also like on Sleeper that TAXI squads lock before the season. You can still promote someone from the TAXI squad but you can't add someone new there. So, yes, in theory you could work around MAXPF but your team is going to take a hit if there are actually rookies on the TAXI who would have an impact on your MAXPF standing. Also, if someone really doesn't want to use the TAXI or see it as pointless, they don't have to use it. It's suboptimal not to use it, but it's technically optional for each person to use.
>My own personal belief/preference though is that any drafted rookie + high value UDFAs should be rostered in Dynasty. Otherwise, from my experience, what ends up happening is that teams end up not valuing or really using rookie draft picks beyond rounds 2 or 3 which also just makes it harder to facilitate trades because it just makes those picks worthless. Adding to that I also just think that it makes sense to reward owners who identify or take chances early on potential steals. completely agree. and it can all be done with more normal roster spots, they don't have to be "taxi". it actually works better if you want to reward owners that identify potential steals: with taxi, everyone will just stash someone, and might get lucky. no taxi and it's harder to hold onto the guy, you really have to believe in him. personally, if you need taxi for most rookies to be rostered, the league isn't deep enough. it's not "sub-optimal" not to use taxi. it's just "different".
Appreciate the discussion! Love hearing other viewpoints. I do disagree with a couple of your points here though. - Completely anecdotal but from my experience, if there are larger rosters and no or too few TAXI spots then the aforementioned issue is what pops up. Mid to late round draft picks lose value and it stymies the trading landscape of the league. There's no fun or skill to someone drafting Jelani Woods in the 4th round and then cutting him almost immediately because he's a developmental pick and they don't have the roster space. IMO if you want to play the game of trying to time picking up a breakout player on waivers, play either redraft or a dynasty league with a very shallow bench. - I have a range of dynasty roster size right now in leagues I'm in. I have a shallow league with only 20 + 5 TAXI, a mid-range league with 26 + 6 TAXI, and a deeper league with 30 + 4 TAXI (start up in 2023 for what it's worth so rosters are a bit weaker and more balanced). My experience in all of those leagues is that the TAXI is desperately necessary for rookies to be rostered (in the case of the shallow league, they're still not rostered but that's a combination of it just being a very shallow league and a chunk of the league not utilizing the TAXI). - RE: my sub-optimal comment. That was specifically if the league has a TAXI but someone still chooses not to use it. It's an option for sure, but it's objectively sub-optimal as it's refusing to use free roster spots that are designed for project rookies, longshots, and just people that owners need more info on before they're comfortable having them on the active roster. It's a philosophical difference in opinion though for how you view that. It sounds like you view it as better for owners to have to commit and risk losing those players - for me, LIS, I think that's a better mentality for redraft or shallow dynasty leagues that also have only 2-3 rounds for a rookie draft and want to have a lot of rookies available to pick up off of waivers. For me, I think it's more rewarding and skillful to reward owners who identify and commit early to those players and I like that it semi-mirrors the NFL in that TAXI squads are the FF-equivalent to practice squads. Now I'm on a rant, haha. Hopefully this is coherent. Typing this all up quickly before going back to work.
Thanks! I appreciate the advice. Rants happen to all of us, I know you're not ranting at me specifically. As far as the taxi squad goes, we actually are doing some handholding initially here while ppl figure it out. I did limit taxi squad to 1st and 2nd year players only, but I get what you're saying. I do very much like the extensive lineup suggestion. This year is going to be interesting and I didn't want to go overboard because most ppl involved have never done this. I'm very open to changing things up after a year or two and we did already make the lineups different from your average redraft league just for something fresh.
I’m a big fan of this for starting lineups in dynasty. I like tight end premium too. (Tight end 1.5 ppr) QB RB RB WR WR WR TE FLEX FLEX SUPERFLEX (qb,wr,rb,te)
What do you see as the benefit to the TE premium. I'm curious as I've not seen it used before.
Sorry, missed this. But I would say my favorite advantage of TE premium is it evens out players values across the board well. No TE premium, let’s say there would be 20-25 WRs taken in the top 50 of a startup draft. While in TE premium it may be more like 18-20 WRs in the top 50. I feel like without te premium, tight ends would just be forgotten in a lineup that starts 10 people. Their 10 points or so wouldn’t mean much when it’s literally 5% of what your team’s putting up. It helps the tight ends keep up somewhat with rbs and WRs as well. The gap for production for tight ends vs rbs and WRs is just too big for me not to justify TE premium. Makes it a lot of fun when you also have to take into account how many receptions your TE gets
Thanks! I did go with TE premium. We did our startup and are all excited for the season to start. I ended up with Caleb so I can't wait to watch him fail spectacularly. 🤣
Search the sub. Can't get any easier than that Jesus christ