Off-Season Rules Discussion - Open Mike

[larry linke]

I have never understood why we rush through the draft. It sure cuts down on people trying to move up / down. If I had my way I would either take 2 days for each round or have a day off between rounds (being married I am used to not getting my way).

Larry
Minnesota AFFL

[stevebarrett24]

I like the idea of doing rounds 1-3 (1 day each) and then 4 and 5 the next day and finish with 6 and 7 the last day.

[sportznut]

I'm not trying to speed up the draft at all, larry. I'm not asking for more picks per day.

I'm simply saying that when the majority of people are online, it would be nice to have an option to click "away" or "autodraft" to those GMs who know they won't be around to make their pick.

At the end of the day, the same number of picks still get made, but rather than wait around 3 hours (or whatever time) in the middle of the day, maybe it moves along quicker for a certain period of time.

I fully realize that with draft slots, the way its currently set up, you still end up with the same result at the end of the day.

Otherwise, you'd revamp the entire draft process, and require everyone to be live or automatically autodraft.

That's not at all what I'm suggesting. Some people will be online and if they have extra time b/c picks ahead of them went early, they're going to still use every second of that time. I don't really think that's fair either if one team has 20 minutes to negotiate a deal, and another team has 2 hours or more to do so, but not much you can do about that.

[Fish]

I don't think Larry thought you were proposing we speed up, just commenting that he doesn't understand why we do it so quickly. As a newbie, I was surprised at the pace and definitely unprepared for when the guys atop my list were taken before I could select them, particularly during the week when I'm at work and cannot commit to a specific time slot or have my research in front of me. On multiple occasions I had to trade down or swap to 2018 because I didn't have time to come up with a different selection. I don't know about the rest of the league, but I've never made a forced ranked list of 200+ players and stuck to it for any draft; typically a top 25-30 then rough tiers for each pick to narrow the selection down with perhaps a small list of sleepers or guys I particularly like.

I'm not saying the current setup needs changed, but I would support slowing it down if that was on the table. Even a round per day would be pretty fast in my opinion.

I think Marlin's suggesting about an autodraft option makes sense. I don't think I would use it, but I could see a few teams opting to do so.

[Ben C.]

I don't know about the rest of the league, but I've never made a forced ranked list of 200+ players and stuck to it for any draft; typically a top 25-30 then rough tiers for each pick to narrow the selection down with perhaps a small list of sleepers or guys I particularly like.

Last year I had 336 players on my draft board. In fact, every draft board I've done since at least 2012 had at least 200 players on it. I think my boards going back to 2007 were the same, but I don't have them as easily accessible.

I'm certainly not trying to say that you should be doing a draft board like mine. You can draft however you like. But I would suspect that GMs that find the most success have extensive draft boards as preparation for one of the most important parts of the game.

[Ben C.]

My two cents - any changes to the game should be put on the back burner this year so Goodell can finally focus on finding a way to speed up the sim process (i.e. program some set up for GMs to help in the process while ensuring checks and balances to prevent corruption/collusion).

[Fish]

How much time does something like that take you? How many sources do you use in order to have enough data to force rank all those players? Perhaps not, but I'm assuming then that you would have confidence in your draft board to just take the next name on the list when your pick comes up? So in a system like Marlin suggests you could just check the box to autodraft and be happy with your deep draft board?

Unfortunately, I just don't have enough time as one person doing this as a hobby to force rank ~350 players. On weekdays I have 60-90 free minutes per day after commuting, work and responsibilities around our home with weekends typically spent with family/friends, I'm lucky if I've read one report each on 2/3 that many players let alone multiple reports, seen film, pulled combine data, etc on 400+ players so I had enough info to do that. I actually tried to begin prep last weekend thinking with the combine behind us there would be plenty of info out, but that didn't seem to be the case with the draft 5 weeks away. After everything else I have going on, there is a baseball league with slightly more picks than this that takes precedence when I do have free time and I don't do that either. As mention, I typically have a list of several thousand players, a top 30 maybe 50 and then the rest broken into tiers I can quickly look at when my pick approaches. I wish I could do more, but that is life and I've been fairly successful in the baseball leagues.

[Ben C.]

It's a process that takes place during free time over a long period of time, but most of it is done in a spreadsheet where I bring together data from a number of different websites. Then I quickly glance at profiles of each of the top 200 players and adjust how they are rated according to my own evaluation. I'd say that all in all I only spend a minute on each player before the draft. It's always a challenge to even fit that amount of time in to my schedule.

Once my pick is coming up I look at the top players on the board in a little more depth to see how their position fits in with my needs and make a final decision on whether I'm interested. Sometimes that means dipping slightly below the "best player available" so I really don't like doing an auto-draft.

With all that said, I am fine with anyone taking any approach that fits with their time constraints. It's most important that the game be fun for everyone. Do what works for you.

[Fish]

1 minute per player doesn't seem like enough to rank them. Are you pretty much only looking at top 100-200 lists and not scouting reports and video? I'm derailing the thread though.

In general I agree we need to automate more or find some other way to keep things moving. I don't know if this is common, but I've found it very difficult to stay interested due to the delays even with my team playing well. I would like to see confirmation pages on all transactions as well as I screwed up a trade offer earlier in the year that was never intended.

[larry linke]

Sportznut, Fish had it right, I was not commenting on your post but on our draft in general. Last year I wanted to trade up a couple of times for a guy but with the pace of the mid- rounds (4 - 6) it is tough to get something done. I don't think stretching our draft over seven days will cause a major problem.

Larry