The Season Has Begun

Image by Wen Z. via Flickr

Guess I slacked off for a while there but, I'm back.

A lot has happened in my league (B.F.F.G.) since my last post. There's been some surprises and some set-backs. The good news: I'm in the 3rd season of the B.F.F.G. as an awards-style fantasy football league. This is why Football is #1.

The live on-line draft was a success. I was kinda worried about possible technical difficulties but everyone seemed to log on and know what to do when everything started. Using the Yahoo on-line draft tool reduced the draft time to 1 1/2 hours. A lot less than the 7 1/2 hours last year when we drafted manually. It didn't take any fun out of the draft either. There were a few parties of teams doing their own thing at home. 2 guys decided on autopick and it didn't hate on 'em too much. The chat tool was amusing at times. The experience was better than expected.

It's safe to say I will stick to the live on-line draft style next year, but I must say I missed having the party. I was reluctant to have one since I didn't know how a wireless router would respond in the situation. 14 PCs hooked up for the draft sounded like an overload waiting to happen. Thankfully, there were no technical difficulties with 5 PCs hooked on the wireless router. So I think its good. I plan to reimplemented the draft party next year, "B ring Y our O wn L aptop" style.

The only small set-back was losing 2 teams due to hard times in a bad economy. This brings the B.F.F.G. down to 12 total teams for 2009. Luckily, I was able to edit the schedule before week 2, making the 2 lost teams face each other every week. The lost teams will not affect the rest of the league this season.

The challenge then becomes, what to do with the players on those teams? I'm very happy with the advancements in Yahoo. I was able to dump the players on the 2 teams and place all free agents on waivers. This allows each team to simply make claims using their acquisition budget. To make up for the addition talent in the free agent pool I increased the max moves and trades to 12 each, which was the average request by some team managers.

The process of dealing with the 2 lost teams made me think about some of my settings. The idea of max moves and max trades is to keep the free agent acquisitions fair. I set the roster size to 16 from the standard 15 to adjust for the fact that each teams max moves is 10. I'm wondering now if I went back to 15 on the roster, weekly waivers from Sun - Tue and set the free agent acquisition budget to 200 if it would not only keep things fair but make it more interesting. I'll have to think about that one.