It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Football!

All right! With August and the NFL pre-season just around the corner, it's time to revisit the Predicate Pigskin situation.

1) Dramatis Personae. We're back up to 20 teams for the coming season. Taking this year off will be misskaz, mvelinder, and squorch; joining us as rookies will be hunter, patientfox, and Arcane. We'll be divided into four divisions of five teams each, as follows:

• Fried Soup Division: Ajax, bitterpants, wurd, KingDead, and Acefantastik
• Your Mom Division: Cy Guy, mule, cdseiler, notyou, and Arcane
• Stabby Action Division: letsgomiah, patientfox, jbou, erik, and byrne
• Caption This Division: stankow, Osomatic, SHT, Irish, and hunter.

(If you don't like the division you're in, they're not set in stone, so let me know if you want to switch and I'll move people around. As long as there are five teams in each, I don't care who's where.)

2) Schedule: I'm hoping to have the draft on Saturday, September 1st. (That's the day after the final preseason game.) One advantage of Real Time over Yahoo is that, if you want, you can log onto the site while the draft is going on and make picks yourself when it's your turn. I've currently got it set to start at 12:01pm EST -- so I think about 7pm for stankow and 9am for the West Coasters -- but that's not set in stone either. If some of you want to try and draft live, I'm happy to change the start time to one that works for as many people as possible. Me, I'll be out of town, so I'm autodrafting regardless. :)

Once the season starts, we'll have 13 weeks of regular season and 3 weeks of playoffs, just like last year. Everyone will play their divisional rivals twice (accounting for 8 of the 13 games), and five teams from other divisions. I haven't dreamed up a full schedule yet, but I have some vague ideas about what to do...feel free to make your own suggestions.

3) Playoffs: We'll be using the same playoff structure as last season; 8 teams will advance to post-season, and the two with the best overall record will receive a Week 1 bye.

Since we're doing divisional play this season, my initial thought is that the top two teams in each division should be our playoff teams, regardless of record/point total. But I'm open to the argument that a second-place team with a crappy record from Weak Division X should yield pride of place to a third-place team with a good record from Strong Division Y. The schedule is completely under my control as Commish, so we can do it either way -- I'll put it to a vote if several people assert that as their preferred option.

4) Draft Order: While Real Time allows this to be either randomized or set to a specific draft order, the draft order will be known beforehand. I'll be sending out a league email, and possibly posting here to Predicate, by Friday, August 24th, letting everyone know what the draft order is, in case you want to use this information in setting up your pre-draft rankings. As far as whether you want it based off last year's standings or completely random (or randomized-with-lottery), consider that discussion open. :)

5) Trades and Pickups: To avoid some of last year's ugliness, there is a new bylaw in Predicate Pigskin, to wit:

(a) One trade per team per week. This can involve
multiple players but only one other manager (i.e. if you
want a three-way trade, you'll have to spend two weeks
making it happen.)

In order to enforce this, this year all trades will be processed by the Commish, namely me. (To be honest, I don't think I understand RTS's waiver system well enough to try and set it up to happen automatically, and thus I'd rather do the work myself so that I know it gets done properly.) This also means that you won't necessarily have to deal with a 2-day lag between a trade being accepted and having it go through (unless I have a really good excuse. :)

As far as picking up and dropping Free Agents, I'm going to leave that open to all -- it'd be too much work otherwise, but please bear in mind our OTHER league bylaw this year:

(b) The team who owns a starting NFL player has first shot
at claiming his backup if the starter goes down to injury,
providing that the backup is still in the Free Agent pool
at the time of the injury. The player must be claimed by
midnight EST on Thursday during the ensuing week, or he is
considered up for grabs.

As a Commish under Real Time, I have a lot more power than I did under Yahoo, so I can (and will have to) yank players off your roster if you try to get around this one. If you're not sure whether a player you're thinking about adding might be covered under this rule, check. If you're new to the sport and not sure where to check, ask me.

6) Scoring Changes: I've made a few new ones this year, mostly to correct things I overcompensated for in last year's scoring changes. :)

a) QBs now get 1 point per 10 yards rushing; other players still get 1 per 20. This adds incentive to taking a running QB who doesn't always throw for a lot of yards, like Vince Young, Daunte Cu--, er, Michael Vi--, um. Well...Vince Young. :)

b) QBs now lose 3 points for losing a fumble instead of only 2; this is because Real Time doesn't allow me to set a penalty for QBs taking sacks. I was planning on lowering the penalty anyway, and I think this way is fairer: the line has to share some of the blame for sacks, but hanging onto the ball is definitely the QB's responsibility.

c) QBs (and anybody else who throws a pass) now get 1 point per 33 passing yards, rather than 1 per 50 like last year.

d) WRs (and anybody else who catches a pass) now get 1 full point for every even-numbered reception, rather than half a point for each. So 3 catches gets you 1 point, 4 catches gets you 2, etc. This is how I wanted to do it last year, but Yahoo's rules didn't allow it.

e) Kick/punt returners (generally WRs or RBs) will now earn 1 point per 50 total yards on kick/punt returns. This adds incentive to some of the second- and third-string players who aren't going to get a lot of points by traditional means but are good special teams performers.

f) A couple defensive scoring changes: 10 points for a shutout, 0 points for allowing 17-20, and -5 points for allowing 35 or greater. (There are other classifications too, I'm just keeping it short.) New this year: only points scored while the D/ST are on the field count against you. So safeties and fumble recovery/interception TDs don't impact your D/ST point total.

g) "Madden Play" bonuses: Also new this year, we'll award 1 additional point for a Rushing TD over 50 yards in length, or a Receiving TD over 65 yards in length. (Passers get nada because QBs have already gotten enough of a helping hand this year, methinks.)

That pretty much covers everything I can think of so far. If you read all of this, congratulations! If you didn't, obviously you like surprises, so congratulations anyway!

Your suggestions and commentary are hereby requested and required. :)