Liquid Tension said:
GregR said:
Holy Schneikes said:
I think one of the big reasons is dynasty leagues are becoming more popular and most folks figure you can't do auction with dynasty (rookie drafts still traditionally worst to first).
I'm starting a new dynasty league this year that does strictly auction for all drafts (among other things to league enhance competitiveness and interaction) for that reason.
If anybody is interested, check it out in the looking for leagues forum:
http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index...howtopic=392123
You may be right there. Though personally I think a contract salary cap dynasty league is more fun than a "have the player for his whole career with no other considerations that need to be made" dynasty league. More fun to have to continually decide if a player is worth his salary, if he'll be worth it long enough to give him a contract extension at the cost of more money, etc. And auctions work great in such a league. We stick with an NFL-style (non-serpentine) rookie draft to allow the worst teams a better chance to improve, but have auctions for the unsigned vets and for anyone who wants to submit an offer on a franchise or transition tagged player.
GregR, would you mind posting your rules about contracts etc...? I think contracts is a good piece to add to teh equation and also list how long you are allowed to hold him and do they auto go up every year?
Sure. I'll do a quick summary and maybe a few comments then on what I like about them.Contracts and cap
Player contracts are initially 3 years at whatever amount the player was acquired in the vet auction or in blind bidding waivers. Minimum and maximum roster sizes. Hard salary cap (virtual money) that amounts to an average of $10 per roster spot. We are not a normal league set up so I won't bother going into the exact prices and such, but I found that $10 per roster spot with a $1 minimum worked nicely to balance the size of backup contracts vs those of starters.
A player who is cut to waivers has his contract completely erased (with one or two exceptions I'll hit later), and a new 3 year contract starts up at his new price when he's acquired in blind bidding. (ETA: There is no salary cap hit for cutting a player.) That wasn't my preference actually. I wanted it so for 1 week, a player could be picked up via normal waivers and his original contract would resume on the new team, and after that his contract would be gone and he could be acquired via blind bid waivers and would have a new contract. But MFL had some issues where I couldn't implement that, though at first read I had thought it would be possible.
Contract Extensions
Between years 2 and 3 of a contract, a team can decide to give the player a contract extension to buy 1-2 additional years. To extend him to just a 4th year, you have to give him a 20% raise (at least $5) over his current salary. To add both 4th and 5th years, you have to give him a 40% raise (or at least $10) over his current salary. The raise goes into effect right away, so he would have the new, higher salary during year 3 in addition to the extended years. Further, if you extend a player he cannot be released during year 3 (think of it as our version of a guaranteed year). He could be traded to another team, but that team couldn't release him during year 3 either.
Franchise Tags
You can also wait until a player's contract runs out and then use either your franchise tag or one of your 2 transition tags on him to try to retain him. You have 3 tags total, not 3 tags every year. The tag remains on the player for his full 3 year contract (but not for any extended years). Franchise tagged players get a 3 year tender at a price equal to the GREATER of the average of the top 5 paid players at his position/ 20% raise over his previous salary/ or 5 dollars. Transition tagged players it's the average of the top 10 paid players / 10% raise / $3 whichever is greater. Other teams still can bid higher than that on your tagged players... the tagging team has the right to match the winning bid and retain the player, or the player goes to the bidding team in exchange for rookie draft picks as compensation... two 1sts for a franchise tagged player, or a single 2nd for a transition tagged player.
You can cut or trade a tagged player, but if you do, you cannot reacquire him during the 3 years his contract would have been, unless you have the tag free to go back on him.
Those $5 and $3 minimums are there mostly for IDP, the offensive players average out to much more than that. Also worth mentioning, the tag remaining on the player is actually how the NFL does it. The difference is the NFL has a 1 year tender, and lets the team remove the tag before signing the player to a longer contract if they wish... while we just have a 3 year tender. The Tampa Bay Bucs didn't have an available franchise tag for a half a decade because they didn't remove the tag first before signing some D-lineman to a long term deal. He ended up on another team and their tag was still on him... we actually would let the team use the tag again once he's not on their roster.
Rookie draft
Rookie draft is NFL-style, so if you have the 1.1 pick you also pick first in rounds 2, 3, 4, etc. That's the only concession we give for worse teams to improve. Rookie salaries are based on an average of existing player salaries. Basically we count how many players at that position start in the league, take that many ranked by salary, and then we average the bottom half. So since we start 2 RBs and have 12 teams, that's 24 starting RBs. We take the highest 24 paid RBs, throw out the top 12, and then average the salary of RBs 13-24, and that is what any 1st round rookie RB's salary is regardless of where in the round he goes. If that average is less than $5 for an offensive position, then $5 is used for the 1st round salary. For IDP the same but it's $3 for 1st round minimum. 2nd round price is 2/3 of the 1st round price. 3rd round price is 1/3 of the 1st round price. 4th round and beyond every player is the minimum of $1.
In the offseason we expand the rosters by 5 and raise the salary cap to the amount necessary to pick players in rounds 1-5 at the highest salaried position. You have to cut back down to the normal roster size and cap limit before the vet auction. Our rookie draft doesn't have a limit, as long as people have roster space and cap room they can keep drafting. We do limit that you can't trade away a pick after the 5th round (so you can't stop drafting and trade a bunch of picks you never planned to use).
ETA: Oh, and we have unlimited Injured Reserve as far as the players not taking up roster space, but like the NFL, they still count against your salary cap.
Ok, so that's the rule summary. Probably more important, is how does it work out? Pretty well. Every off-season you are faced with multiple decisions. You have to decide what players in year 2 are going to be worth an extension. I gave out a league leading $130 in extensions the first time we could offer them, out of a $500 cap. So I had a lot of hard decisions to make about who to part with to free up salary for those extensions. You also have to decide which players you didn't extend who are going to be free agents, do you want to tag. To do that you need to look at the whole league and deduce what players other teams will let be free agents, and which will likely be tagged, and if it is worth it to you to go after the tagged player and give up the draft picks.
Some very good players may indeed hit free agency. LT is at a ludicrous salary so his owner is an idiot if he doesn't let him hit free agency... he could reacquire him from the vet auction at the same ludicrous salary if he really wanted, which would be cheaper than using a tag on him. Off the top of my head I expect Peyton, Edge, maybe SJax, Harrison, Owens, Holt, Chad Johnson, and Gates to hit free agency this year and be available in the vet auction, because their initial salary was already at or even beyond the maximum of what they were worth. Most teams end up with from 1/6 to 1/4 of their cap available in the vet auction.
But while some of the elite players do come up as free agents each year, the players that you got at cheaper salaries who then became good starters are guys that you could realistically keep for 8-10 years. You can easily keep a guy with a slightly below market salary for 5 years with a contract extension and then tag him for another 3. An over-priced player you can probably let hit free agency and reacquire him from the auction at a lower price than you had him for. Or cut him mid-season to reacquire him from blind-bidding waivers... though that is riskier since you can't see other people's bids. LT was lost to the guy who put in the ludicrous bid that way, and he's not the only player who was lost on a gamble he could be reacquired cheaper.
So there's a nice balance of being able to maintain a core unit on your team for years to give it that dynasty aspect, but not giving you the luxury of sitting on players forever without having to reckon the impact their presence is having on your salary cap. Having to deal with the cap is a big motivator for trades. As I mentioned, I had to free up 1/4 of my salary cap to give out a huge number of extensions on guys I had who were vastly outplaying their salary, so I had a lot of decent players I traded in order to make cap room. Also, teams targetting 1st round players at expensive positions like RBs likely will look to free up cap room.
I'm also seeing that tying the rookie salaries to the vets like that is working nicely. Our rookie RBs were vastly overpriced initially, but that price is already adjusting downwards quite a bit over the last two years and QB and WR prices are climbing closer to what they are worth in this league set up. But even when the RBs were overpriced, since the worst teams had the 1st picks in each round, they still got the first shot at the RBs when the prices dropped at the start of the next round.
One other thing I liked about this... it was nice that the first 3 years in this format give you a chance to adjust to everything by adding one new aspect of contracts at a time. Year 1 preseason you do the initial auction so everyone is familiar with auctions now (though really they should be before you start). Next off-season you have the vet FA auction, and the only new thing you added is the rookie draft. The next offseason you have the rookie draft and vet auction again, and add in the first time you give out contract extensions. Then after year 3, you do all the above and you add in tagged players for the first time. So even the owners who take a bit longer to figure it all and get comfortable only have 1 new thing added each offseason to have to figure out the details of.
ETA: Here's the full link to the rules page. The links in it don't work to jump to the relevant sections unfortunately, haven't gotten around to fixing them. There's also one or two things in there that have changed that weren't updated on the old site, so if you see a discrepancy, that is probably why. The first draft of the rules always got tweaked when it came closer to doing the tagged players or the contract extensions for the first time and we thought of things we'd missed or been wrong about in the first go round.
http://football25.myfantasyleague.com/2007...=36427&O=26
I know you're being clever, but legally fantasy sports are classified as "games of skill." That's how leagues are able to pay out prize $$$ without being held out as gambling.That said, anyone who doesn't think luck plays a HUGE role in fantasy football hasn't played it long enough. 
Just think 2007 Super Bowl! 
It seems that the extra complexity and value-judgement required to have a successful league make it more difficult to have a balanced and competitive league. How well would the average person NEW TO FF be able to perform in an auction league with 6-8 sharks?I love the idea of auction leagues, but it seems obvious to me that they are only good for the most experianced and dedicated FF players, not the rookies and more casual players, and it's a heck of a lot harder to find 12 guys (locally) that fit the criteria. Since auctions are best run live, there aren't many.ETA: Don't forget that those of us spending time on this message board Jan-May are not exactly a good representative sample of the general FF playing populace!
) or the rest of us fairly dull ( 
) but I think the real reason is that the concept is easily grasped and, again, there's a lot of luck involved in general in ff.
I haven't checked out fantasyauctioneer.com, but if MFL had quality auction software then I think the auction format would become a lot more popular.
