If it's on a weekday, 4pm wouldn't work out so great for me or others I'd imagine. I'm fine with 4pm on a weekend though.

I think the auction is going to be a slow, slow, slow process. As in, three+++ days. There's just too many people involved, and too many players, for us to realistically do it quickly.

Yeah, I assumed that too. Not only will it take multiple days, but starting it on a weekend where we can get everybody relatively free would be a great way to get it going. Then perhaps 12 or 24 hours to allow the last bid on each player to expire? We would probably have to start sooner than a week before the season in this case.

I only ever invisiged it being over a series of days. Hence my question. The auction draft can be when it is suggested in the table above - i.e. for ALL of it. A week's FA basically.

The last time I talked about it with Dan, one idea was that we keep a main page where players are initial put up for auction. Perhaps we randomize the order in which teams get to choose the player put up. Then we create a separate page for the bids on that player. When the time limit runs out on the last bid the auction is up.

I'm thinking that we might need more like two weeks to do this auction if you are going to be able to fully participate in it. To catch all time zones, each player put up needs a full day of bidding. Otherwise, if the time limit were set to something like 6-12 hours auctions would come and go while you were asleep or at work/school.

However, there's still the problem that keeping bids open this long doesn't mean they'll end in one day. If the bids keep rolling in, one player could last two or three days. Then how could we get done in time?

Another idea comes to mind: Say each day we hold one round of the draft. Each player in turn chooses the player they want to put up for auction that day. The whole round of players is selected before any of those auctions begin. Then each player secretely submits a bid in a silent auction and after a deadline each day we see who gets the players.

On its own, the silent auction has its PROs and CONs, but it's one practically idea to help us complete a draft before the season begins.

Any interest in this idea at all?

I don't really like the auction draft. It's not very efficient and if there is a deadline, then everyone will be arguing who got the highest bid at the last possible second, and if there is no deadline, then a bidding for LDT or Tom Brady could last forever. And the guy that gets screwed out of a bid will be screwed once again because he was counting on grabbing that player and in the mean time, all the other quality runningbacks/quarterbacks are gone.

Also, some people won't know what they're doing. The rules aren't the easiest to understand so theres going be 2 or 3 people that bid way too high on high draft picks and have no money left over for anyone else and we're going to have to redo the whole thing because their teams don't count and there's going to be complaining and bitching.

I think we should just do a standard live draft. Go to Yahoo or ESPN, have everyone join the draft, pick players and once the draft is over, void the league and move over the teams here and play here. It's easy, simple, theres no complications, no unfairness, no one gets screwed, everyone knows what they're doing, and easy to track who has what and if anyone is breaking any rules by drafting too much of the same position.

The auction does make it difficult, because you never know whether to bid for a player or not. You can bid, e.g. for the top 3 RBs, and get 0 of them, then you end up with 0 RBs. It will make it very awkward.

A live draft is the simplest way of doing it, granted. I think we should do that if no other option becomes viable.

I think we should have an auction. It lasts until a designated finish time. The bidding page(s) will show the price bidded, and when the bid was made. After 3 days without a bid, then that player goes to that user. The highest bidder gets all players at the conclusion of the auction period. But make the option to sign him then optional (to avoid the 10 RB scenario). Then for 0 penalty, you can drop players. They then become Free Agents, starting the following day. In which case, I think you should start the auction very swiftly.

Yea that works but it would take forever. Maybe I'm just being too pesimistic about the whole thing I don't know. Maybe it will turn out fine. I just see the live draft so much easier and headache free. And the live draft via yahoo or espn still makes it challenging because it's not as clear cut as drafting the best available player; you have to think 3 or 4 years down the road. For example, you don't want to pick up marvin harrison in the first 3 rounds because he'll be so old by 2011.

I think we should try some sort of auction system. But make it finish a week before the season, so that if it all goes wrong, we still have time to rush into a Yahoo Livedraft! It has to be worth a shot first.

Great idea. I'm down for that because we can always fall on the backup plan.

Do you understand that the whole premise of the rules is basing player market-values on some type of auction? If we do a live draft, then we may as well not even be here. We can go sign up for the simple rules and live auction on any site right now. We are here specifically to give these rules a try. That simply cannot happen without having an auction to seed the league rosters. If the "backup plan" is to just jump to yahoo, then the backup plan is really to not do this and just have another regular league that happens to be made up of people from this site. I kind of set out to stick with this and do more than that. What about other people that signed up for this league that we haven't heard from? Are you also here because you're genuinely interested in the rule-set or do you just want to get into another league, anyway, anyhow?

Well, you give contracts to players. So you have as many keepers as you have players with contracts of 2+ years. There really is no minimum or maximum roster size, you just need to decide what to do with your limited resources (money under the cap).