In the inaugural ottoneu Fantasy Football season, a team over limits would still score points, despite having too many players or not enough cap space. I’ve just pushed out a small change ahead of the season to clarify this situation. As (now) described on the rules page:
If a team has more than 20 rostered players or not enough cap space to roster 20 players, the team will be locked out of normal activities until a player is cut or moved off the team via trade. These activities include:
Accruing points in any weekly matchup. Players will be moved to the bench if their NFL game starts while their ottoneu team is over roster or salary limits.
Setting lineups
Offering or accepting trades
Bidding on auctions
If you do see a team accruing points while over limits, please reach out via email or on this thread.
I like this change for football, the weekly lineups and head to head nature make football a better option for scoring lockouts than baseball in my opinion.
I like this change as well. And having this rule clearly laid out will mean it’s on teams not to do something like start an auction and then go on vacation over the weekend, leaving their team to go over limits while they’re not around to correct it promptly.
It also helps that in that situation auctions are only 24 hours now, so there is less lag time in finding out if you need to cut a player to get legal.
Is this change being considered for baseball in 2017? I would be all for not scoring points with a illegal roster if you could somehow set a 48 hour “grace” period. Due to daily lineups baseball probably needs a small window to correct the issue before scoring is forfeited
On a semi-related note, Justin and I had an interesting discussion about kickers that led to a question about teams being UNDER limits. The football rules don’t seem to place the same explicit responsibility on teams to field a full lineup as the baseball rules. Is this a tweak that might come in the future? In a recent draft I left without a kicker, because I was planning to cut a player and pick one up, but Justin and I realized that while this is a common tactic in some other leagues it could lead to problems if someone decided to punt (ha) their kicker position during the season to rebuild - moreso than in baseball because of the head to head matchups.
We are one week in and this rule is already causing problems in my league. One team wasn’t able to cut players in time for game time today. The auctions ended middle of the day on Saturday and they are on the west coast, so the timing is kind of hard.
Another team is going to start auctions 24 hours before games start on Thursdays, Sundays, Mondays, on the off-hand that someone ends up winning an auction right when players lock, causing players to just get benched.
I think we’re going to have to move back not benching players, even though I personally believe having a team over limits is one of the ‘worse’ things you can do in ottoneu. As owners in my league have pointed out, it is entirely too easy to go over limits, and some leeway is necessary for a year-round multi-season game like ottoneu. I’d love to hear more thoughts on this, but I’ll be removing the extra-punitive benching of players immediately.
Commissioners should always feel comfortable reminding owners to get under limits if they are being abused.
I am in this league and I’ve seen this back and forth. My suggestion is to lock out auctions beginning sometime during the weekend - maybe 12 Noon et on Saturday so as not to interfere with rosters on Sunday and reopen auctions on Monday. This would be fairly similar to a standard waiver wire cycle on a standard yahoo or cbssports league. Also need to take into account London games that start early Sunday, so an earlier deadline (maybe Friday at 11:59 pm et) is needed.
There is the obvious concern over a late scratch for Monday but I believe owners should be prepared for any possibility. With a 20 man roster there is no excuse not to have a safe play in case you have a risky play (ie: questionable player for Monday night). That is part of the game.
Ottoneu has a rule that rosters must be in balance by the start of Sunday games. I don’t see a reason why Owners can’t follow this. If you roster is out of balance, suffer the consequences.
I’m in 100% agreeance with illtrill. Perhaps the auction timing could be adjusted as suggested, but ultimately this is on owners. I think staying under roster is a meaningful part of the game, and shouldn’t be overlooked because owners essentially aren’t managing their team with a close eye. Keep the original rule IMO, no points if over roster.
I think the idea of locking out auctions over the weekend is a decent one, but I do think over time that will be something owners learn - not to start an auction that ends close to a game start time. It sounds fair to remove the benched players rule though - will teams accrue points if they’re over limits now? I kind of like a system where maybe the owner doesn’t accrue points while over limits, but if they fix the problem during the game, then they don’t lose out on the points. Although I realize that may be more difficult to code.
Teams will accrue points if over limits right now.
When would the game be considered ‘over’? Monday night? Tuesday? After all the games for the week are over? I’m interested in this, but the devil is in the details, as they say.
Yeah, it would definitely be tricky. In general I like leaving the responsibility on teams to just not start an auction at a bad time. So now it would basically be on the commish to call out a team if they notice someone attempting to game the system over the weekend? I think that’s cool - that’s basically what we have in baseball and for the most part teams don’t try to take advantage of their leaguemates.
As a new owner, I was directly affected by this rule change in Week 1 when I won an auction that ended after the 1pm start time and before the 4pm games on Sunday. I have definitely been managing my roster diligently, even making sure that players that I had traded were not in my roster well before the trade went through just in case I lost them and didn’t have a chance to change the lineup. I think there are a lot of fair points here and I agree owners will learn the rules, but I don’t like moving the players to the bench. I think there are plenty of other ways to penalize rather than cost a team a win if they inadvertently were over the roster limit. How about cap penalties for every few hours that the team is over the roster limit? This would mean the team might have to drop an additional player to get under the cap space or get even more creative. I think the solution should be something that has to be cleverly managed by a team rather than an outright penalty that could cost them the win.
What’s the current status of this? I wasn’t able to find any posts about this rule change being reverted, but the Rules Page no longer includes the bullet point about accruing points. I would assume that this means that over-the-limit teams will accrue points, is this accurate?
Maybe later I’ll start a football rules thread since I don’t think there is one yet.