League Design Workshop #2 – The Draft
Posted: 1/22/07The Original Draft
You have to work out a few things before you can design your original draft. One is the roster size – we’ll talk more about that later. Second is whether the original draft will include that year’s rookies or not. I’d advise you to include the rookies rather than having a separate rookie draft in year one. I’ll go into the reason why in a bit. The third item is setting the draft order. And another item is whether the regular serpentine draft is appropriate for your league.
I’m in favor of including that year’s rookies in the original draft. One reason is that when you have separate drafts, there is no way to assure that all the draft slots have equal value. For instance, the top rookie is worth far more than the 12th best rookie. In a situation like 2006 where Reggie Bush was most often a mid-first round draft pick in a combined draft, the guy who goes first in the rookie draft and last in the veteran draft actually gets three of the best fourteen players. If instead of reversing the orders of the two drafts you randomize both, well then you could have the guy who goes first in the rookie draft also in the top few in the veteran draft and he’ll have a huge advantage.
But that’s not even the most important reason why a split draft is a poor idea in my mind. One great thing about dynasty is the different approaches that the team owners take. Some owners want to go for the win the first year and worry about rebuilding as the seasons pass. Other owners value youth and forgo current year scoring to build a team that they hope will be dominant in upcoming seasons. And others take a hybrid approach. By removing the rookies to a separate drat, you’ve reduced the pool of draft targets for the 2nd group. And then the vets don’t drop as far and thus the 1st group doesn’t have the ability to maximize their strategy. And by forcing the 1st group to grab rookies in the extra draft, you’ve basically forced everyone into the hybrid approach. Let freedom reign and don’t mess with anyone’s strategy – just have one draft the first year.
When you have a local draft you can just pull numbers out of a hat and there’s no reason to question the results (since you can all see the draws). When you run a league online, you have to do things more carefully. I use the Irony Games' Dice Server site for setting the draft order. I create a thread at the league site with the following instructions:
- Click that -> http://www.irony.com/mailroll.html
- How many dice would you like to roll? Choose 1
- How many sides are on each die? Choose 1000
- Should anything be added or subtracted from the total roll? Choose No
- You can drop either the highest or lowest die roll (or both.) Make both boxes empty
- The entire roll can be repeated; how many times? Choose 1
- Say what this roll is for: Fill in your team name
- Type in your e-mail address: Follow the instructions
- Also e-mail the results to: Fill in commish’s email
- Then, click on the [Roll them bones …] button.
- Then, post your results here – just copy the next page’s stuff here.
The commish will get a copy of the rolls. He can use that to check that the instructions have been followed and that what’s posted at the league site thread is accurate. The commish will need to copy his roll to another league member so that his can also be verified. Make sure to ridicule anyone who screws up the instructions and ignore any second or later properly executed rolls (once you roll, you’re stuck with the results – yes, even the commish). Also, if a tie results then have the tied teams roll again to break the tie using the same instructions (not a replacement roll, just a roll to see who goes first between the two tied teams).
You also have to decide if the highest roll goes first or the lowest roll goes first (obviously before the first roll). And you can choose “going first” to mean drafting first or selecting a draft slot first. Allowing the dice rolls to determine the order of selection of draft slots can add an extra element of strategy for a dynasty league. If you know you want to go for the win this year, you might want to draft later in the first and then grab two high-scoring veterans that the youth-obsessed teams have allowed to drop. If you want to go really young, you might try to determine the ideal draft slot to be able to grab two of the rookie or first year elite RBs. Or maybe you just want the overall best player.
Serpentine is the standard for fantasy football, but is it ideal? I’ll say that it clearly isn’t ideal. The best player has more extra value as compared to the 12th player than the 13th player has as compared to the 24th. So going first is better. Can we correct for that? First we’ll need a way to assign values to each draft pick and then find a way to make each draft slot hold about the same total value.
Luckily, Football Guys has solved the pick valuation problem for us. Here’s their Pick Value Calculator. I’ve actually reverse engineered it and used the formula to determine the value of each and every draft pick. The formula is only useful through sixteen rounds. Here are some findings (each pair of columns is the value of all the picks for that draft slot and the percentage difference in value compared to the best slot):
What this tells us is that while it’s always best to go first, there are ways to improve upon serpentine and make the other draft positions less worse off.
Another idea is to redraw for draft order every two or four rounds. Besides the attempt to remove the advantage that the first pick has, it also takes away some of the power that the double picks offer. The guys with those double picks can really dominate the draft – picking 2 RBs in a row when the starters are getting thin, picking two QBs in a row when the quality starters are getting scarce, or even starting runs on the lesser positions as the draft moves into the middle rounds. Randomizing the order again every few rounds should make that double pick advantage switch teams. (If you have a 24 round draft and want to have different orders for each four round segment of the draft, then put a 6 (= 24 / 4) rather than a 1 on line 6 of the dice roll instructions. Then all the 3rd rolls will be used to determine the draft order for rounds 9-12, for instance. If you have a 30 round draft, you might as well just do seven rolls and have the 7th rolls used for the last six rounds.)
The Annual Rookie/Free Agent Drafts
Some leagues are strict about the rookie draft being just for rookies. Most also allow veteran free agents to be drafted in these annual drafts. You’ll need to be specific about this in your rules. There are even leagues that only allow rookies for the first few rounds then allow vets and rookies for the rest of the draft. My own personal preference is just to include all the non-rostered players in the annual draft.
Most often, these drafts are worst-to-first in all the rounds. That’s consistently the case if the draft is three or four rounds. In annual drafts where there are six rounds or more, there are leagues that have certain rounds that flip to first-to-worst (for example, rounds three and six or four and six of a six rounder).
The question of how many rounds for the annual draft is less straight forward. Three never seems adequate – there are always plenty of tempting rookies undrafted in these. Four is fine for leagues with rosters of about twenty-four. Six is much better for leagues with larger rosters of about thirty. If you’re an IDP league with even bigger rosters, expand the annual draft as needed (usually a number that’s about 1/6th or 1/5th or so of the total roster size).
Lastly, here’s something else to think about and make sure you address in your rules: what happens if after your league has completed the annual draft there’s a player who gets selected in a supplemental NFL draft? This happens all the time in IDP leagues that draft in the weeks right after the NFL draft. But even non-IDP leagues will have this happen. There are several ways of dealing with this:
- Allow these players to be first-come, first-served free agents like anyone else not drafted in your annual draft (only applicable if you allow FCFS free agency in the preseason)
- Make them unavailable until the first in-season waiver process runs
- Make them unavailable until the next annual draft (no player can get added to a roster until he’s been draftable first)
- Have your own supplemental draft – owners can use next year’s picks to take these players this year, but if so then they lose that pick next year; you use the current year’s draft order and reflect any trades made of future picks to get the supplemental order; then allow teams in order to choose a player or pass (there will likely be a lot of passing) until the picks run out or the players run out; repeat if the NFL holds another supplemental draft (in ’85 there were four) remembering to remove the picks that have been used already; and keep track of the picks used so that they can be removed from next year’s annual draft (and so that they can’t mistakenly be traded away during the season).
Competitive balance is unlikely to be affected by a Tony Hollings (‘03) supplemental pick, but when the player is Bernie Kosar (‘85) then these rules can have a substantial impact and save your league from a messy situation.