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Footballguy
I've had a few people PM me to ask about our league structure (most recently in response to this post)...I figured it might be worthwhile in the quiet of the offseason to throw this out for discussion...
We started this league several years ago when nearly all of us were new to FF...in fact we named the league the "eternal rookie" league as a nod to the fact that we have so many novice owners...in the beginning we wanted the simplicity and "forgiveness" of a redraft (bad picks only cost you one year)...but we also wanted to grow into a league with more strategy and many of the benefits of a "dynasty" format (with long term strategy and rewards for betting on the right prospects)...lastly, when possible we'd like to make our league feel "like the NFL"...
I considered a keeper format but there were several things about it that I didn't like...in particular I didn't like that keepers are typically selected at the end of a season, rather than identified when drafted (more "like the NFL")...and the techniques most of these leagues use to make sure studs fall back into the draft pool (like only keeping players drafted in or after a certain round) seemed artificially complicated and cumbersome for our amateur owners...
I considered a salary cap format but decided against it because determining initial salaries without switching to an auction format was problematic and I believed the added complexity of salary and the lack of good strategy guides online would be too much for our novice owners...
Instead I crafted a hybrid contract based league...when drafted players may be granted a contract of so many years and kept for the length of that contract...this is more "like the NFL" in that drafted players get contracts upfront...any drafted player may be granted a contract of any length...when a contract expires the player drops back into the pool...in fact it's a little more complicated than that, as we have rookie contracts, a free agency period, and veteran contracts, but the basic idea is the same...
Now, to avoid jumping full on into a keep-all format, a cap was introduced on the total number of contract years that a team may grant...in the first year teams had 4 years to grant...a team might choose to lock up a guy like L.Tomlinson for 4 years, or give 4 different guys 1 year contracts...this was the first hint of strategy but the cap was so small that it was almost impossible to screw things up long term...and we had varying results, some teams planned well and made good contract choices, others made some bad missteps but within a year or two were able to correct things...
Lastly we established a roadmap of yearly cap increases...6 the second year, then 10, and so on until we'll eventually have effectively enough cap to keep nearly all of our rosters...because of the caps, especially in the early years, studs are falling back into the draft pool in interesting ways (allowing teams to plan ahead when particular players will be free agents or will be available in the draft)...and teams have been able to make creative choices about managing their cap, keeping room open for trades or future drafts...
Once we had the basic structure we considered endless "what if" scenarios...we tweaked things to avoid "gaming the system" (e.g. to make sure that players couldn't cut a player to change his contract status, to make sure owners couldn't change contract terms by trading, or to make sure that catastrophic mistakes wouldn't literally crush a team)...we I also did a ton of additional analysis for this league...modeling 4 years worth of player stats and tested several scoring systems, running several mock draft scenarios and tweaking our roster requirements, and running some models to balance IDPs at about 2/3 the value of ODPs...so there's a lot more to our league structure...but this notion of an expanding cap as a means of evolving from redraft to keeper to dynasty seems to be fairly unique...any others have a league structured like this or have thoughts about this kind of format?
We started this league several years ago when nearly all of us were new to FF...in fact we named the league the "eternal rookie" league as a nod to the fact that we have so many novice owners...in the beginning we wanted the simplicity and "forgiveness" of a redraft (bad picks only cost you one year)...but we also wanted to grow into a league with more strategy and many of the benefits of a "dynasty" format (with long term strategy and rewards for betting on the right prospects)...lastly, when possible we'd like to make our league feel "like the NFL"...
I considered a keeper format but there were several things about it that I didn't like...in particular I didn't like that keepers are typically selected at the end of a season, rather than identified when drafted (more "like the NFL")...and the techniques most of these leagues use to make sure studs fall back into the draft pool (like only keeping players drafted in or after a certain round) seemed artificially complicated and cumbersome for our amateur owners...
I considered a salary cap format but decided against it because determining initial salaries without switching to an auction format was problematic and I believed the added complexity of salary and the lack of good strategy guides online would be too much for our novice owners...
Instead I crafted a hybrid contract based league...when drafted players may be granted a contract of so many years and kept for the length of that contract...this is more "like the NFL" in that drafted players get contracts upfront...any drafted player may be granted a contract of any length...when a contract expires the player drops back into the pool...in fact it's a little more complicated than that, as we have rookie contracts, a free agency period, and veteran contracts, but the basic idea is the same...
Now, to avoid jumping full on into a keep-all format, a cap was introduced on the total number of contract years that a team may grant...in the first year teams had 4 years to grant...a team might choose to lock up a guy like L.Tomlinson for 4 years, or give 4 different guys 1 year contracts...this was the first hint of strategy but the cap was so small that it was almost impossible to screw things up long term...and we had varying results, some teams planned well and made good contract choices, others made some bad missteps but within a year or two were able to correct things...
Lastly we established a roadmap of yearly cap increases...6 the second year, then 10, and so on until we'll eventually have effectively enough cap to keep nearly all of our rosters...because of the caps, especially in the early years, studs are falling back into the draft pool in interesting ways (allowing teams to plan ahead when particular players will be free agents or will be available in the draft)...and teams have been able to make creative choices about managing their cap, keeping room open for trades or future drafts...
Once we had the basic structure we considered endless "what if" scenarios...we tweaked things to avoid "gaming the system" (e.g. to make sure that players couldn't cut a player to change his contract status, to make sure owners couldn't change contract terms by trading, or to make sure that catastrophic mistakes wouldn't literally crush a team)...we I also did a ton of additional analysis for this league...modeling 4 years worth of player stats and tested several scoring systems, running several mock draft scenarios and tweaking our roster requirements, and running some models to balance IDPs at about 2/3 the value of ODPs...so there's a lot more to our league structure...but this notion of an expanding cap as a means of evolving from redraft to keeper to dynasty seems to be fairly unique...any others have a league structured like this or have thoughts about this kind of format?
