auction leaue in-season waivers (1 Viewer)

[michael]

Hello!

I am commish for a league that has been in existence for over 15 years. It has been an auction league for the past 12. The core of the league has remained loyal I think in part due to the auction. Few of us play in other traditional draft leagues, and Auction Day is usually a lot of fun. However, we also are not stagnant with procedures and scoring. We like to change things up each year, sometimes dramatically and other times just tweaking something that seemed to be a problem last year.

One topic seems to come up more frequently -- how to acquire free agents during the season. The same salary cap we use at the auction remains in place during the entire season. So what you don't spend it at the auction, you use for waiver wire bids. We currently use blind bidding online, and it works OK for the most part. It takes a bit of fiddling with the automated system rules to allow players to be dropped before the bidding to clear up salary cap money, but we also dictate that you have to maintain a full roster at the end of the bidding period.

There are the usual gripes about whether owners with lots of leftover salary cap money should get an advanatge in bidding. But I have always felt it balances out over the season. You can spend it all at the auction --you are banking on your auction bidding skills and hoping to not get hurt by injuries. Or you can be a frugal auction bidder and save a chunk to go after the waiver wire sleepers. (I know that one, almost by accident I had a lot left in 2010 and was able to easily snag Vick among others, allowing me to coast to a decent pay day.) But there is one undeniable aspect to our blind bidding process: It can be confusing and intimidating, and as such not very popular across the board for all owners. (The reasons are many; it just does not seem to be as active as I see in traditional waiver wires in other leagues.)

So I am curious about the ways other auction leagues run things during the season. One technique I have read about is to provide a separate fund for in season bidding. I have suggested this and hear almost unaimous resistance. I also suggested reverting to traditional open free agent pickups, first come first serve for instance. But that seems to go against the grain of what starts as an auction league. It may be that the league is happy with the notion of letting your auction performance ride over into the season....

So I'm just looking for suggestions, comments, arguments, or reasoning for using alternative methods to handle waiver wire free agent acquisitions in an auction league, especially ones that seem to generate a lot of activity.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Enjoy life; it's better than the alternative…

 

[packseasontix]

I have never been a fan of blind bidding during the season. If your going to have an auction for FA then make it an auction, blind bidding does nothing for me and doesn't show skill as there is no relative value when you say you have $200 to spend on blind bidding.

As far as auction dollars carrying over its a weird option to get FAs acquired through the season. In this case I would still say get ride of blind bidding and have a 24 hour bid window with highest amount taking the players. Don't want to be out bid at the last second then throw a higher amount out there....

 

[schu]

We keep the same salary cap all season as our auction cap. Each week waivers are first cleared by another auction which ends midweek. Post waiver-auction the players are available for league minimum on first come basis.

This means that to secure the hot player of the week you likely have to drop an underperforming highly paid player from the original auction. If there is an injury which makes your decision easy to drop and free up cap this serves as a leveling factor in the competitive balance of the league and removes some of the bad luck factor.

I can't imagine a format with a more active or interesting waiver wire. League going on 15+ years with 7 original members of the current 12.

 

[michael]

following up...

packseasontix: we don't establish a new salary cap fund for the in-season FA bidding; it is a continuation of whatever you walk away from the auction with. None of us want to change that. your second suggestion is no different than blind bidding. in blind bidding you just name your highest price and hope you get the guys you want. the logistics of having a live auction every week even online would be a nightmare for us... to us, open FA pickups is lame, with no skill other than being more awake enough to pay attention to your team's stats. if we use an auction, we obviously want to maintain that competitive feel thru the season...

but the idea of a 24 hour window for bidding sounds fun, tho I am not sure how it would really work... might be worth looking into the logistics of how to run it. one way to eliminate the last minute out bid is to run it like an ebay auction with a proxy bid.

schu: we also keep our salary cap all season. Blind bidding has worked and most of our league is OK with it... how do you run the mid week auction? does everyone who wants to participate have to get online and do live bidding? or is it proxied like ebay? do owners have to name their "dropped" players before they participate in the auction? are those dropped players then available for bidding? do you allow dropping of players to free up salary at any time?

I think most of our owners would prefer to maintain the salary cap that was used in the auction throughout the regular season. No one seems very interested in open free agent pickuups, tho I think it might be more acceptable if it is done after the bidding like in the second option mentioned above by schu. As much as I personally would love to have a live auction every week, I may look into seeing how to run a midweek proxied auction as that sounds like it would work.

Thanks for the feedback!!

 

[GregR]

Hello!

I am commish for a league that has been in existence for over 15 years. It has been an auction league for the past 12. The core of the league has remained loyal I think in part due to the auction. Few of us play in other traditional draft leagues, and Auction Day is usually a lot of fun. However, we also are not stagnant with procedures and scoring. We like to change things up each year, sometimes dramatically and other times just tweaking something that seemed to be a problem last year.

One topic seems to come up more frequently -- how to acquire free agents during the season. The same salary cap we use at the auction remains in place during the entire season. So what you don't spend it at the auction, you use for waiver wire bids. We currently use blind bidding online, and it works OK for the most part. It takes a bit of fiddling with the automated system rules to allow players to be dropped before the bidding to clear up salary cap money, but we also dictate that you have to maintain a full roster at the end of the bidding period.

There are the usual gripes about whether owners with lots of leftover salary cap money should get an advanatge in bidding. But I have always felt it balances out over the season. You can spend it all at the auction --you are banking on your auction bidding skills and hoping to not get hurt by injuries. Or you can be a frugal auction bidder and save a chunk to go after the waiver wire sleepers. (I know that one, almost by accident I had a lot left in 2010 and was able to easily snag Vick among others, allowing me to coast to a decent pay day.) But there is one undeniable aspect to our blind bidding process: It can be confusing and intimidating, and as such not very popular across the board for all owners. (The reasons are many; it just does not seem to be as active as I see in traditional waiver wires in other leagues.)

So I am curious about the ways other auction leagues run things during the season. One technique I have read about is to provide a separate fund for in season bidding. I have suggested this and hear almost unaimous resistance. I also suggested reverting to traditional open free agent pickups, first come first serve for instance. But that seems to go against the grain of what starts as an auction league. It may be that the league is happy with the notion of letting your auction performance ride over into the season....

So I'm just looking for suggestions, comments, arguments, or reasoning for using alternative methods to handle waiver wire free agent acquisitions in an auction league, especially ones that seem to generate a lot of activity.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Enjoy life; it's better than the alternative…

I'm curious if some of your comments I put in red are because of your league hosting site's capabilities?

For example, on MFL, you (mostly) don't have to drop players before placing bids. When you submit your bid, you can name a player that you want dropped only if you have the winning bid. And the system will account for the money freed up by the dropped player when checking that your bid doesn't put you over the cap. The only downside is you can only name a single player to drop, you couldn't drop two or three automatically like that.

The second bit in red, maybe I'm miss understanding. Is your league a hard cap that enforced at all times, and bidding for FA is basically salary cap minus salaries currently on your roster? If so, I don't understand an argument that someone has an advantage by having saved money, when the other teams have already had first choice of actual players with that money... and can drop their players to free up that money to bid on the same FA. Unless you have some kind of cap penalty for dropping a player. Then there might be some argument (if a poor one). One way would be just to get rid of the cap penalty if so.

The final part I'm not sure, again, if it's your particular system, or the nature of the beast. Conditional blind bidding waivers are complex and difficult. That is just the nature of them. Anyone who has manually tried to process them for very long will realize that covering all the options is tough. Not sure if your system is making it worse than it need be or not. MFL has it about as simple as you can make it, and it isn't exactly straight forward at first. Though isn't terrible to master if someone who understands it walks you through it.

 

[michael]

Hello!

I am commish for a league that has been in existence for over 15 years. It has been an auction league for the past 12. The core of the league has remained loyal I think in part due to the auction. Few of us play in other traditional draft leagues, and Auction Day is usually a lot of fun. However, we also are not stagnant with procedures and scoring. We like to change things up each year, sometimes dramatically and other times just tweaking something that seemed to be a problem last year.

One topic seems to come up more frequently -- how to acquire free agents during the season. The same salary cap we use at the auction remains in place during the entire season. So what you don't spend it at the auction, you use for waiver wire bids. We currently use blind bidding online, and it works OK for the most part. It takes a bit of fiddling with the automated system rules to allow players to be dropped before the bidding to clear up salary cap money, but we also dictate that you have to maintain a full roster at the end of the bidding period.

There are the usual gripes about whether owners with lots of leftover salary cap money should get an advanatge in bidding. But I have always felt it balances out over the season. You can spend it all at the auction --you are banking on your auction bidding skills and hoping to not get hurt by injuries. Or you can be a frugal auction bidder and save a chunk to go after the waiver wire sleepers. (I know that one, almost by accident I had a lot left in 2010 and was able to easily snag Vick among others, allowing me to coast to a decent pay day.) But there is one undeniable aspect to our blind bidding process: It can be confusing and intimidating, and as such not very popular across the board for all owners. (The reasons are many; it just does not seem to be as active as I see in traditional waiver wires in other leagues.)

So I am curious about the ways other auction leagues run things during the season. One technique I have read about is to provide a separate fund for in season bidding. I have suggested this and hear almost unaimous resistance. I also suggested reverting to traditional open free agent pickups, first come first serve for instance. But that seems to go against the grain of what starts as an auction league. It may be that the league is happy with the notion of letting your auction performance ride over into the season....

So I'm just looking for suggestions, comments, arguments, or reasoning for using alternative methods to handle waiver wire free agent acquisitions in an auction league, especially ones that seem to generate a lot of activity.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Enjoy life; it's better than the alternative…

I'm curious if some of your comments I put in red are because of your league hosting site's capabilities?

For example, on MFL, you (mostly) don't have to drop players before placing bids. When you submit your bid, you can name a player that you want dropped only if you have the winning bid. And the system will account for the money freed up by the dropped player when checking that your bid doesn't put you over the cap. The only downside is you can only name a single player to drop, you couldn't drop two or three automatically like that.

The second bit in red, maybe I'm miss understanding. Is your league a hard cap that enforced at all times, and bidding for FA is basically salary cap minus salaries currently on your roster? If so, I don't understand an argument that someone has an advantage by having saved money, when the other teams have already had first choice of actual players with that money... and can drop their players to free up that money to bid on the same FA. Unless you have some kind of cap penalty for dropping a player. Then there might be some argument (if a poor one). One way would be just to get rid of the cap penalty if so.

The final part I'm not sure, again, if it's your particular system, or the nature of the beast. Conditional blind bidding waivers are complex and difficult. That is just the nature of them. Anyone who has manually tried to process them for very long will realize that covering all the options is tough. Not sure if your system is making it worse than it need be or not. MFL has it about as simple as you can make it, and it isn't exactly straight forward at first. Though isn't terrible to master if someone who understands it walks you through it.

Thanks for the comments... You made some very good observations.

First, we do use MFL and really feel it offers a lot of flexibility and automation. We have a $100 hard cap for the full year. We are now using the conditional blind bidding and allow the system to award players.

The only issues we have with the current way MFL blind bidding works are 1) what you mentioned, not being able to drop multiple players when bidding [but we solved that by allowing players to be dropped at any time before the end of bidding. Rosters are still required to be completely filled thru blind bidding.] And 2) there is really only one automated system of awarding players in the blind bidding-- if you have the most money you can get everyone you want. We have felt that the system should treat each round of payer bids individually and sequentially, not looking at all rounds of bidding for higher bids. But that's not a huge problem since it can be managed manually if we want to. For now we live with the "all high bids get the players" action. (I also still do not completely understand their concept of conditional vs. nonconditional bidding, but that's another story.)

But I digress from my topic. Maybe your comments about the salary cap and blind bidding are most accurate -- Why fret over a team having an advantage with a lot of salary cap leftover after the auction? They had their chance and decided to scrimp at the auciton or got really good value selections. So why shouldn't they have an advantage for picking up free agaents? Some people have expressed dismay at getting beat out on multiple free agent bids... Some of the most heated arguing has ocme from owners who came from a typical draft/waiver system and hadn't adjusted to how blind bidding works. So I think the real answer is that it's just the nature of the beast!

My original post was not supposed to be a complaint about the way we are running things. It was intended to see if anyone else had a novel approach to free agent acquisitions during the season that didn't conflict with the auction-based philosophy of the league. I hoped someone might have a "better" option that seemed to fit the basis for an auction league and salary cap management through the season... But in most respects, MFL's system does a good job once you understand how it works. We just didn't want our league to operate in a vacuum...

 

[GregR]

(I also still do not completely understand their concept of conditional vs. nonconditional bidding, but that's another story.)

I'm may not be savvy to every difference. But the biggest is that in conditional, you can multiple different bids in a single "round" where only 1 of them is allowed to win and if it does the rest is ignored.

So you can put in bids of $5 on Christine Michael and Knile Davis in a round and you only get one. In non-conditional, each would essentially go into their own round, and if each was the high bid you would be stuck with both. There is no way in non-conditional to say, "only get me one player from this list". You have to bid on every player in the list and possibly get all of them.

By the way, I bumped an in depth write up of the conditional bidding system at MFL over in this thread in case it's of interest. I didn't deal with non-conditional much I don't think, as I've never used it. Quickly saw conditional was better.

 

[GregR]

... We have felt that the system should treat each round of payer bids individually and sequentially, not looking at all rounds of bidding for higher bids. But that's not a huge problem since it can be managed manually if we want to. For now we live with the "all high bids get the players" action. ...

By the way, here's my guess why they don't do it the way you say above... and also why I wouldn't want them to do it that way.

Let's say 4 owners bid on Player A in round 1, 3 owners bid on Player B in round 1, and the other 5 owners each place the lone bid on players C through G.

In a "normal" auction, the three teams who lost the bidding on Player A would still be able to bid on the other players with their still undepleted auction funds. They wouldn't be automatically ruled out of further auctions because they placed a bid that doesn't win.

The blind bidding stuff is, in my mind, intended to be a replacement for real auctions, but where you don't have to be there live. So writing that kind of condition in would, to me, go against the goal. So you solve that by it doesn't matter what round you put the bid in, it will be considered whenever that player is being bid on.

That said, there are times what you're talking about is nice to do. I've heard of leagues where you submit a full roster with a salary for each player. You get any player at the stated price if you have high bid, or the lone bid on. Then you resubmit the spots you didn't fill, etc. So it's designed where you might want to take a stab at minimum price on players no one else will even name. But I think that's kind of a cool, unusual setup to do, rather than what a hosting site is doing in trying to cater to the desire for an option as close to live bidding as they can get without requiring it be live.