Goals and Purpose
The purpose of this league is to promote friendship and contact between regular posters of the “KFFL – Fantasy Football” message board without hindering the valuable interaction that takes place there. For that reason the drafting and preseason free agency for this league will take place as early in the offseason as realistically possible. While an early draft and free agency may mean league participants are forced to make roster decisions a bit uninformed, everyone in the league will be at the same disadvantage. While a league that drafts in the late summer would be preferable, any league drafting during the time for normal fantasy football drafts would severely damage the discourse and free exchange of ideas that makes the KFFL message board so valuable to us.
The secondary purpose or goal of this league is to be as realistic as possible. For that reason the league will be both intricate and involved. Since many of the concepts for this league will be new to almost all of the participants, owners with a lot of experience are not required. All that is required is a high level of dedication.
Basic League Structure
The basic structure of the league is as follows, with more in-depth explanations of each detail to be described below. The league shall be a 16-team, 4-division, salary cap league with each player signed to a contract for a certain number of years. The value of a player’s contract shall be decided by one of five methods: draft, unrestricted free agency, restricted free agency, franchise player tagging, and contract renegotiation. Additionally, each player shall be assigned a number of contract years to be treated as a separate cap. As in the real NFL, there will be penalties against the salary cap for cutting a player before the final year of his contract.
League scoring will be performance based with an emphasis on scoring. Rosters will contain 18 active players and each owner will also be allotted three slots for practice squad players and one slot for a player on IR.
Owners
The league will have 16 owners and an alternate list will be made if extra owners are available. The only specification for ownership shall be active membership at the KFFL fantasy football forum. If there are more than 16 interested owners the final membership decision is to be made by the commissioner. The commissioner’s decision will be based primarily on length of membership and activity level on the KFFL fantasy football message board. Any extra prospective owners will be given the opportunity to be placed on the alternate list. If two owners agree, co-ownership will be allowed.
If an owner decides to abandon ownership of their team a substitute owner will be found from the alternate list. Additionally, if an owner is classified an absentee owner, an owner is involved in a collusionary trade, or an owner’s participation is inadequate, a league vote can be called for by the commish or any two owners. If the league votes to replace an owner a new owner will be taken off of the alternate list.
In case of a family emergency or when an owner knows they will be unable to handle their team for a set period of time, an owner has two alternatives. In either case the owner must alert the commish or asst. commish before the current week’s game. Then the player may either chose to have a stand-in owner manage their team or use the weekly player rankings at
www.footballguys.com. If a stand-in owner is requested someone from the KFFL fantasy football message board will be selected by the commish or asst. commish to run the team until the owner returns. That stand-in will only be able to select starting lineups, however, and will not be able to trade or add/drop players. If the weekly rankings at footballguys.com are chosen a starting lineup with 2 RB’s and 3 WR’s will be chosen.
Salary Cap
Each team will be restricted to a
$115,000 salary cap. A team’s total salary cap number is made up of the total salaries of all of the players on the team’s active roster, IR, and any cap penalties the team has incurred.
The player on a team’s practice squad does not count against their salary cap. At no time during the NFL season is a team allowed to go over the $115,000 cap, and any trades or free agency transactions a team makes must be made in observance of the cap. During the UFA and RFA bidding teams are allowed to have bids out exceeding their total salary cap. See the bidding section of the rules for further details. The 24 hour grace period also applies to teams taking over players under renegotiated contracts.
Any other violation of the salary cap will be the fault of the team(s) involved and the offending transaction will be reversed. Trading of salary cap room or salary cap penalties to another team is not allowed. There is no maximum salary an individual player may receive, but there is a minimum salary of $300 for all players. If a free agent acquisition is reversed due to a salary cap violation that player must clear the waiver process before becoming a free agent again. Waivers, salary cap penalties, and how a player arrives at a specific salary cap number will be described below.
Initial Draft (Left in in case someone else wants to use these rules for their league)
The initial league draft is to start
March 10th if possible. The draft shall be held at antsports.com if possible, but in all likelihood will be held at the KFFL website in a specific forum set up for this league.
The initial draft shall be held in a serpentine manner with the #1 team picking first in the first round, last in the second round, and so on. After the initial draft, player acquisitions for the rest of the season shall be handled by the rookie draft and free agency rules. The initial draft setup is only going to be used to get the league up and running. An internet-based random number generator shall determine draft order for the initial draft. The person with the highest score shall be given their choice of draft position. The person with the second-highest score will then get their choice of draft position and so on until everyone has a draft position.
One of the unique aspects of this league is that every draft position has an associated salary cap value. That value for each position can be found in an excel file in the commissioner’s control. The concept behind the values associated with each draft position is twofold: First, the overall trend is that players picked in the early rounds have a very high salary cap value and that value decreases in a trend approximating an exponential function. By the 13th round all players picked are making the league minimum. This is a trend very similar to how the real NFL draft works. At the end of the draft each team should be left with one or two high-priced studs, a solid group of well-paid starters, and almost all of a team’s backups will be making the league minimum. This mirrors how the real NFL works. The second goal of the initial draft is leave each team with an equal salary cap number at the end of the draft. For that reason each group of two rounds decrease at a linear value. That value is very high in the first few rounds, and decreases until finally leveling out at the league minimum. Since the draft is serpentine that method leaves each team with the same cap number in the end.
If each team keeps their original draft picks they will end with a total salary cap number of $102,830. That value is well below the total salary cap of $115K. Trading of draft picks in the initial draft, rookie draft, and future rookie drafts are all allowed. If a team acquires draft picks with associated salary cap numbers exceeding their cap limit that team will not be allowed to pick players in the draft with cap values that would put the team over the cap. It is therefore in an owner’s best interest to plan for their draft and the salary cap ramifications ahead of time and trade any extra picks away.
Rookie Draft and Initial Rookie Draft
The normal draft process for the league shall be a rookie-only draft. The rookie-draft will consiste of three rounds. Draft order for the rookie draft will be based on reverse order of finish in the league, and will not be serpentine
except for the initial year of the league. All other years the draft will be a normal draft with the #1 seated team picking 1st in each round and so on. Teams with similar records will be seated using the league’s official tie-breaking system.
As with the initial draft, there will be a contract value associated with each pick in the rookie draft. Unlike the rookie draft, however, the total cap implications of each team’s picks are not equal. The cap value of the first pick is quite high while the value of the 16th pick is the league minimum. Those values can be found on the official league spreadsheet containing draft information. A team is allowed to trade their pick(s) in the rookie draft for players, other draft picks, or a combination of the two.
For the initial year of the league the rookie draft will follow a serpentine draft order since no previous records are available. It is important that everyone notice that the values associated with the top few picks
WILL cause their team to exceed the salary cap if they keep and plan to sign all of their original draft picks. Again, those teams are encouraged to trade draft picks.
If the timer expires on a draft pick, the pick will be skipped. The owner of any skipped pick may use that pick to make a selection at any time afterwards, choosing from the players who are still left on the board at the time. The draft pick's original salary still applies. For example, if the 2nd overall pick is skipped, the salary associated with the 2nd overall pick is given to the player selected with that pick, no matter when the selection is made.
Signing Contracts
When a player is drafted or acquired as a free agent the player must be signed to a contract within 24 hours. There are two components to a contract: salary and years. Further, there are two types of contracts: straight and bonus. The salary of a straight contract is the amount bid or the assigned draft slot’s salary. The salary of a bonus contract is the bid amount or slot amount discounted by 20%. The extra 20% is guaranteed money equal to 20% of the annual salary multiplied by the years assigned. This figure will be used to assess penalties if the player’s tenure with a team ends before the contract expires. Once a contract is signed by notifying the commish and/or the league, the contract is fixed and may not be altered.
During the regular season a player acquired as a free agent is automatically assigned a minimum contract of $300 and 1 year. Players acquired via trade come with a predetermined contract that cannot be altered by the new owner except to convert salary to bonus money. Players acquired during the offseason have to be signed within 24 hours of a winning bid.
After the end of the year on a date decided by the league contracts are “cycled”, and one year is rolled off of each player’s contract. At that time, any player with zero years left on his contract becomes a free agent, and any player with only ½ a year left on his contract becomes a restricted free agent. (Half-years are no longer used.)
Free Agents and Waivers
All free agents and waivers are bid on in an auction-style bidding process. A separate thread on the league message board will be started for each player, and owners will have an opportunity to bid on players by posting a message with their bid. Bids must be made using the following increments: $100 increments until bidding reaches $1,000; $500 increments from $1,000 to 10,000; $1000 increments from $10,000 to $25,000; $2000 increments over $25,000. Final rights to a player will go to the highest bidder when there have been no new bids for 48 hours. If bids continue for too long it is at the commissioner’s discretion to announce an ending time for the auction. (We do not need to watch a stud player’s value rise in $1 increments to $20,000.)
Only 5-year vets in the final year of their draft contract can be RFAs. That means that the only players eligible to be restricted are ones that got a contract of 5 years when they were drafted. To restrict a player, the owner gives him a tender offer equal to the average of the top 16 performers at the position. This sets the starting point for the bidding. The original owner can match the highest bid. If the original owner chooses not to match it, he/she gets a draft pick equal to the round the player was drafted.
(For transition, any player with a half-year contract will be restricted according to the old rules preserved here. That means no compensation; you only have the ability to match the highest bid. No new contracts would have half-years. Also, anyone with a half-year contract on a player that would be eligible for restricted status under the new rules can choose to drop the half-year as long as that would result in an original contract length of 5 years or more.)
Restricted free agents will be bid on in a separate bidding period before unrestricted free agents. The restricted free agency period shall be held after the NFL’s rookie draft. The owner controlling the restricted free agent will not be allowed to bid on the player, and at the conclusion of the bidding process the controlling owner has the option of retaining that player by matching the highest bid. The owner has 24 hours to make this decision. If the controlling owner decides not to match the high bid then the high bidder gains rights to the player and must sign a contract within 24 hours.
After the restricted free agency period ends unrestricted free agency will begin. Unlike restricted free agency, the rights to unrestricted free agents immediately go to the high-bidder when there are no new bids for 48 hours or a commish appointed time arrives. The player must be signed to a contract within 24 hours.
During the season a system of blind bidding and FCFS (first come first serve) waivers will be used for the waiver selection process of free agents. All blind bids will be due Tuesday night at midnight. FCFS waivers will begin 9am ET Wednesday.
FCFS transactions are locked at the start of the player’s respective game and all FCFS transactions are locked at the start of the first Sunday game. For example, if Player A is scheduled to play on Thursday/Saturday, his FCFS availability is locked at game time and therefore he is only available for blind-bidding or until FCFS transactions reopen the following week. All other players are available for FCFS until the first game on Sunday.
If a player plays on Thursday or Saturday, you will still be able to pick that player up on MFL until the first Sunday game. BUT by our rules you won't be allowed to - that is one thing MFL cannot do.
All players acquired through blind bidding waivers are signed to a one-year contract at the highest bid salary. All players acquired through FCFS waivers are signed to a league minimum contract ($300, one-year). Any cuts made to accommodate an acquired player are subject to cap penalties if applicable.
All players released during the season must first clear waivers before becoming free agents. The waiver process is similar to the free agency bidding process except it ends 72 hours after the player is released
OR 24 hours before the first game of the week, whichever is longer. Any owner interested in a released player can start a bidding thread on the league message board. The owner releasing a player, however, is unable to bid on that player during the waiver process. If no bids are placed on a player that player is again designated a free agent, and the original owner can again acquire the player as a free agent.
All free agency will be frozen after the regular season and before the start of the first playoff game for all teams not in the playoffs. These cutoffs for picking up free agents will be at the conclusion of the Monday night game the week that this rule pertains to each team. For non-playoff teams this will be week 13, for playoff teams the Monday that they are eliminated from the playoffs. Playoff bound teams may make acquisitions up to the point they are eliminated from the playoffs. Free agents picked up by playoff teams when the rest of the league is locked out from making pickups may only be signed to one year contracts.
Bids over the cap and associated penalties
Owners have 24 hours after a successful bid to clear up the cap space required to fit a newly acquired FA on their roster and under the salary cap. (Meaning teams are allowed to have bids out that, if successful, push a team over their total cap.) If an owner does not clear out the cap space in time, a 20% cap hit is assessed (based on the value of the contract that pushed the team over). No bids may be placed when a team’s cap is not in order. Teams must honor contracts to all acquired FA’s by clearing out enough space to fit them legally on the roster. This means that FA’s acquired that push a team over the cap may not be immediately cut in a “change of heart” until that player has been on the team’s roster fitting under the salary cap.
Franchise Tags
An owner can franchise a player for the average of the top 5 salaries at the position OR 20% over his current salary, whichever is greater. This is a tender offer that sets the starting point for the bidding. If the owner chooses not to match the high bid, the new owner gives up a 1st in the next draft and a 1st in the following draft. If an owner does not have those picks available, he/she can not make a valid bid. If the new owner has multiple picks in a round, he/she gives up the highest available. If no one bids on the player or the original owner chooses to match, the player is signed at the highest bid (or tender offer) for 1 year.
Contract Renegotiations
Owners may renegotiate as many contracts as they want. To renegotiate a player's contract, the owner simply creates a bidding thread. The owner may match the highest bid, but does not receive compensation if he/she chooses to let the player go. If the owner matches the highest bid, he/she may assign up to 5 contract years. However, the owner is still on the hook for the guaranteed money from the original contract. Any guaranteed money from the original contract will be prorated over the life of the new contract in addition to any new guaranteed money. If the player's contract is terminated prematurely, penalties will be assessed for that full amount. If the owner chooses not to match the highest bid, any remaining guaranteed money will immediately be assessed as a salary cap penalty.
Guaranteed Money
For a bonus contract, 20% of the total contract value is guaranteed money that is prorated over the life of the contract. The owner is always responsible for this money. For example, if a player is signed to a $10,000 contract for 2 years, the guaranteed money is $4000, or $2000 per year. If a player is signed to a $40,000 contract for 5 years, the guaranteed money is $40,000, or $8000 per year.
