This is my annual (
) request to allow leagues to set their own custom keeper deadline. More than anything, this would allow each league to set a much later deadline much closer to their auction date, which essentially gives leagues the ability to extend the off season and trade up until the later deadline, and better avoid (or at least prepare for) common Spring Training injuries.
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There are many small things my league mates and I wanted to be different from the Ottoneu Leagues, so we made a custom league at CBS. It’s not ideal, you have to do a ton of work to make a custom league happen on their platform, they just give you the freedom to manually modify everything, but we love the league format we came up with that was inspired by Ottoneu. Not to sound like I am encouraging you to leave Ottoneu, but that’s one solution. Maybe as an additional league?
I defected from CBS years ago and have no plans to go back. I’m confident some of these customizations will come to Ottoneu as it grows.
A common calendar is one of the biggest drivers of the Ottoneu community - decisions made around the same time every year. I can see a power-user case for customized deadlines and even a regular user argument for more general flexibility, but making deadlines flexible actually removes some of what I think is special about Ottoneu.
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Maybe the answer is moving back the deadline to 2/15 (example) then - for everyone?
I just remember a lot of uproar a couple of years ago when lots of leagues kept an expensive Darvish at the 1/31 deadline, only to see him go down with TJS 20 days later (I don’t remember the exact date). Don’t want to over generalize based on that one example, but a keeper deadline closer to the start of the season would seem to help not hurt.
Still have to leave enough time for all leagues to select a draft date, of course…
As someone who plays in a bunch of different leagues I like the uniform deadlines and dates. If each league had their own dates I would miss really important deadlines and that would suck for me and everyone in the leagues. If dates are universally pushed back I’d be cool with that, but I definitely don’t want them to be different in every league.
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The keeper deadline is way too early. No league is drafting in February. Why has the end of January been arbitrarily decided to be the keeper deadline? It makes no sense.
Actually, some leagues do indeed draft in February. We drafted on Feb. 12th last year. It is somewhat painfully early, but it does indeed occur.
Why have a keeper deadline? That’s what I keep wondering.
Auction day should be the keeper deadline. And to add some proactivity to it, I would make the “keeping” an active choice and the “cut” the default. The second the auction starts all players are cut except for those you have actively selected to keep.
Ottoneu rules can then ensure that the “keep” choices return a legal team (e.g. you can’t select to keep players/salaries that put you over the 40/$400 limit).
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Why have a keeper deadline? That’s what I keep wondering.
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You need a keeper deadline to do any sort of planning for the auction. If there were no keeper deadline the smart move would be to make all your cuts 5 minutes before the auction starts.
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Well of course. And everyone would have to prepare accordingly.
I think 2/15 would be a better keeper deadline because it allows a couple of weeks of prep before the earliest drafts, but I would definitely keep the keeper date consistent across leagues, whatever date you select. I think this decision needs to be made in conjunction with the new common deadline for renewing a team, and the question of how that fits with the schedule for arbitration, which is the start of the new Ottoneu season. If renewal were standardized to 10/15, then I could see pushing arbitration to 10/31-11/30 and keeper deadline to 2/15, preserving the 11 weeks of off-season trading time.
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