Draft Day

[Jonah Parker]

Gentlemen,

It's finally here.  Draft Day is upon us.  As a reminder:

What: The Draft, you putz!

When: 11:30 am CT (12:30 ET) start, draft opens an hour ahead

Where: Gus' in Coralville (2421 Coral Ct) http://gus-coralville.com/

For those of you attending live (I have 6 of you down), the doors open at Gus at 11.  We are in the back room to the right when you walk in.  Be sure to ask them for WiFi details if you don't auto-connect from last year.  As is tradition, I will tell you I'll be there when doors open and then show up 15-20 min late.

For those of you not able to attend live, just go to espn.com and navigate to your fantasy team.  There will be a link to the draft at the top of the page, likely in a bright red box.  The link should show up an hour before the draft starts.

As in years past, we will start the draft with each team nominating their rookie pick from the rookie draft.  Nobody will bid on the player so they can be drafted for $1.  If someone screws it up, we have to stop the draft and make the correction so let's get this right and keep things moving.

For those of you who have budget adjustments that need made budget trades, we will be making them on the first few players you draft.  As in years past, I have already made adjustments to keeper prices to account for as much of this as possible.  Note that if your team has more than $200 available for draft day, I didn't adjust any prices.  Since we will have to make an adjustment in the draft anyway, I wanted to leave as much alone on keepers as possible.  If you check the keeper sheet linked here, you'll find one tab with the actual prices and your traded budget with total draft budget, as well as a second tab that has the adjusted prices to account for those trades.  This doesn't impact anyone's keeper price, just allows less stoppage on draft day.

I want to remind everyone that we do allow trading in the draft.  As you'll recall, we aren't stopping the draft so you can negotiate, but if you get a deal done we will stop it to allow people to vote it down.  You can trade anything (draft budget for current year, next year, FAAB, rookie picks, players, naming rights, etc) but the league has discretion on defining collusion (personally, I will vote down anything that involves the exchange of anything with real monetary value but everyone has their own thoughts).

One final reminder to get me your entry fees.  If I don't have it on draft day, it's technically late.  I don't want to be a hard ass, but those of us in the Iowa City area have grown accustomed to drinking for free on draft day thanks to late fees and early termination fees so you will probably get popped.  If you aren't sure whether you've paid, you can always check the league accounting sheet here.

Finally, I know this is already a novel so I'm going to include an attachment.  I've always enjoyed this league because it has some unique rules that differentiate it from other leagues.  But, it isn't perfect and we are always looking to improve it.  Attached are some rule change proposals from myself, Josh and others.  I'll post official polls to the league site to make voting easy, but the plan would be to have a discussion either before or after the draft to get some things passed potentially while we have everyone together.  Please take a few minutes to read before tomorrow.

Good luck to everyone.  See/talk to you tomorrow.  May the odds be ever in your favor.

-JP