*S24 Rule Summit Review

[infinitempg]

Excellent review! I do like seeing what people think about the rules and how they went, and since you're a former HO (twice) and former GM (more than twice?) it's a pretty good viewpoint. That being said I do have some thoughts

2. Changes to User Hall of Fame, including- 2/3 to be inducted- 3 ballots before being removed from the ballot- current nominees are grandfathered for next season. Users can be renominated.
17-1

Adding to the number of possible inductees is probably a good thing. One per season has created some interesting problems, including voters who have purposely voted against extremely qualified nominees specifically because they wanted someone else to go in. Now there are a variety of reasons that this is just messed up as hell. But unfortunately our options are limited in regards to some of those things. But the system could be improved by allowing more than one entry per season. The system created a situation where one person sat down and decided that he was going to vote no on the person who is universally one of the most enduringly popular figures in league history, helped build the league, and also literally paid our fucking bills for 2+ years. And while I have my own personal negative feelings toward the level of simple minded selfish mercenary mindset it requires to do that kind of thing so that the person you want to get in can "win"......we're here to fix the system. Not the voters. We already switched to a committee for that. Hopefully.

So....increasing the number of users who can get in during any given season will help mitigate some portion of these issues. Beyond that I'm not necessarily onboard with dropping people after three ballots because it's a pretty arbitrary culling just for the sake of doing so. It doesn't really accomplish anything. The ability to be renominated is nice though. Opens the door for players to finally have that option as well after many seasons of that possibility being argued against. I would have likely voted in favor overall as the rule does significantly more good than harm. Unlike some voters. This one still needs to be approved by the head of the committee and I'm hopeful it is. 

As the head of the committee and proposer of this rule, it's going into effect immediately lol

If you look at this past season's ballot for User HOF, we would have had 3 inductees rather than the one. I've always said the 3-2-1 rule was going to be re-evaluated after we went through it, and this is what told me it's broken for sure. The reason that users will be kicked off after 3 seasons is to clear the ballot a bit - a lot of users were getting 0-2 votes and that tells me they are clearly not going to make it in. Renomination was important to me (and somehow I forgot to write it in the original proposal - so I made sure Bex edited it haha) because users shouldn't be punished for being nominated too early in their careers or for the oversight of committee members.

4.Inactive players with 57 TPE or less are not required to be in the ISFL draft. Players fitting this criteria will be auto-retired upon end of the DSFL season.
14-4

The counter to this argument that I heard came from a GM who noted that multiple players have been these IA players and gone on to great earning and involved players. I've also heard this is about lazy GMs. Well...as the person who usually calls bullshit on GM bullshit (and will further down) let me defend them on this one. Drafts are grueling. And long. And time pressured. They are stressful and require a crapton of work. By the time a draft reaches the people who will be affected by this rule, most teams are kinda worn the fuck out. Days have gone by. Days that often feel like weeks. It's the kind of crunch of time and effort where someone pausing for two hours to make a decisions will be remembered later as a tragedy. That's not random. That's a thing that happens every so often. I have personally been on both sides. So when teams get to the players who put in either zero or nearly zero effort before just leaving the league...it gets dicey. And to fully disclose...I am literally the reason why a rule was passed several season ago forcing teams to use each pick. I have a history of simply passing when I'm done. After the rule passed the champions of said rule pretty much directly called me lazy and selfish (technically they said it about GMs who pass but you know...not exactly a  lot of subterfuge going on here). Which then turned into trading away the rest of my picks for comically minimal value. Apparently a random pick button was created after I stepped down. Because the people in question aren't actually part of the league. They said no thanks and walked away. So GMs are at the end of their hard work, not quite at 100% efficiency anyway, and now being forced to take seriously these players. So no...I do not buy into the idea that GMs are lazy for this. I support not having to draft players who aren't really there to begin with. 

I do not however like the second half. At all. Forcing DSFL team to retire them is not something I'm onboard with. Also..you're not the DSFL. You really shouldn't have a say in this and you don't actually. The second half had no business being there and was passed by people who really don't and should not have the authority for it. The DSFL leadership can and should openly ignore the 2nd half of this rule and declare it void because those who passed it had absolutely zero shreds of a single solitary right to do so. And it would be wise for ISFL GMs to remember that as excited as you may be with the new rules that remove budget updates and IA drafting, and as much as these changes may give you a bit of extra free time.....you STILL don't make rules for the DSFL. I hope DSFL HO makes the correct decisions to simply ignore a completely illegal ruling as it pertains to them. 

I agree with the viewpoint that this isn't a GMs-are-lazy situation (as I've said previously). The way I've pushed it is "save us please" (as I've also said previously). I know people have proposed having them be undrafted FAs instead - which is something I've proposed in the past and had shut down.

As for the this-is-illegal-to-the-DSFL part - the DSFL Rules Summit last season actually passed a rule that makes all IAs ineligible for the next season unless they return to activity:

Players that are determined to be inactive at the time of the Ultimini lose their DSFL eligibility for the upcoming season and may not be permitted to be on their team’s depth charts. Should the user return to activity, they regain their DSFL status and may be added back to the depth chart. The exception to this rule is QB players.

So if anything, this is coming in line with their previous ruling.

5. The free agency thread will be posted at the conclusion of the final set of regular season games. A player becomes a free agent if their contract has expired, or when they choose to exercise a contract option. A team may discuss a potential contract with a player as soon as they become a free agent, even if that player's team is still in contention, but may not sign new players until the conclusion of the Ultimus.
9-9

Hardly the first time there has been an attempt to push up free agency. It will not be the last, either. It might be the one that came closest to passing though. In real time the end of Ultimus is when free agency begins. In recent seasons, signing free agents has been pushed back some time even while you were able to talk to them as of the end of Ultimus. The behind the scenes start of the ISFL Draft is general about 36 hours from the end of the Ultimus, historically speaking. So free agency has always been hectic, confusing, silly, and disjointed. Pushing back when free agents can actually sign has made it worse. If you ARE a free agent, you basically can only start talking to teams after the Ultimus and have an extremely short window to actually check out your options before teams begin drafting. Which almost always leads to some or most of your options disappearing as teams start drafting players to your potential spot and removing themselves from the running. A proposal like this one attempts to alleviate this somewhat by pushing it back to the end of the regular season, which now takes place a week earlier than the Ultimus (and previously took place 5 days before). There has been literally months of discussion at this point about how to improve this situation which basically sucks for everyone. Dozens of attempts at finding a cure have come and gone. And the main culprit isn't one you can really fix. And in fact, most people won't really delve into what the biggest issues is and for good reason. Because the thing at fault is YOU. 100% you. The players of the ISFL simply cannot abide an offseason of any length. It gets dicey about three days into the offseason regardless of how much work needs doing. Don't believe me? Look HERE at the offseason schedule. Look at how many things are packed in tightly to a very short time period. And keep in mind that there are a shitload of unseen or glossed over tasks going on behind the scenes here. Three programs that require a full set of graphics. Including the award process that started after the regular season ended on July 17th, moved to GMs/HO for voting, by the 26th, then had to be put together for a presentation on the 28th. Plus the two drafts, which also require a ton of work. before the ever get to graphics. Scouting. Trading. Pre-drafting. Also..every department has to do its end of season work. Which mean Audits everywhere. Including entire regression groups. Offseason recruitment and introduction of new players. I'm really only scratching the surface here. Offseason should easily be 4-5 days longer and it would STILL be a crunch. God forbid any job group wants to take a few days off during the offseason. But the player base of our league simply would lose their collective shit. It's happened over and over. 

So.....among many other consequences...we get a frankly anemic and ridiculous free agency. And we get rule proposals like this one, born of desperate energy to try to improve things for both teams and players. Most of whom also clamor for a better free agency setup. I salute the attempt. I argued in favor of a rule much like this one with different wording and I would do so again. 

The original proposal from eph and nunc was that legal tampering begin at the trade deadline. We changed it to regular season - so expect this to make a comeback.

9. EXPANSION DRAFT PROTOCOL

* Each existing team may protect as many as 9 players from its roster.
> A full roster (including 1 user OL) requires 19 user players; 9 protections allows an existing team to protect just under half of its starting roster.
> Players from the most recent draft class are automatically protected and do not count against this total.

* Alternatively, a team may forego any number of its protections for an equal number of free agent passes.
> A non-expansion team may only sign as many of its own free agents as it has free agent passes available.

* Any contract option must be exercised 24 hours prior to the start of the expansion draft.

* If a protected player chooses to exercise a contract option, that protection instead becomes a free agent pass unless the team specifies otherwise.

* An expansion draft lasts 12 rounds total.
> As stated above, a full roster (including 1 user OL) requires 19 user players; 12 selections allows an expansion team to fill just under two-thirds of its starting roster, not including rookie draft(s).

* The maximum number of players that can be taken from an existing team's roster will be equal to the number of expansion teams being added to the league.
> This ensures that no existing team suffers too lopsided a loss to expansion.
> This does not include the expansion teams' GM players, who need not be taken through the expansion draft process.
11-7

To give a little background here, expansion rules have previously been set by HO. To the best of my knowledge, that has not changed. If GMs were newly invited to be part of the rulemaking process for expansion that would be a new and interesting direction and I'd love to hear HO's explanation on what made them make this kind of change. To my best knowledge however, that has not happened. Yet, we find ourselves here staring down a nearly passed rule in an area where GMs have previously lacked the authority to do so. And yes..I heard a bit about this rule as time went on. Snippets of original plans and compromises and arguments over it. So let's break this down for those who see this list and whose eyes begin to gloss over.

I'm going to use a hypothetical S25 expansion here to make it a bit easier to put into terms that you can wrap your head around (rather than having to generically say Season X or something else that makes it feel like an abstract algebra problem). So let's presume we expand to 14 teams in S25 this means that the two expansion teams (and its always two by the way). So now each existing team would be able to automatically protect 9 players per this proposal. Previously it has been 7 total protections, with a progressive ability to add a new player to protect every time a player from their team is chosen. So the existing teams start with 9 protections and since this proposal does not specify the ability to add any more as the draft goes on, I'm going to assume that teams are unable to do so. So after those 9 protections (including protection slots for free agents they wish to keep) the rest of the roster is open to be picked. Except for players who were selected the season before in the draft. In this case S24 draftees would be inelligible for an expansion team to be picked. Most of the middle you can safely ignore because its about technicalities related to free agents and contracts. It exists solely to keep a team from letting go of their players into free agency and then re-signing them once expansion draft is over. The things cited in this proposal are not really new or adding anything to the existing procedures. 

The most important parts here (outside of adding 2 new protection slots) are limiting the number of players who can be taken from a team to 2. The actual proposal fancies it up by using language about how many expansion teams there are, but as I've said before, it's always two. We had an expansion based on the number of players in the league doubling and it was still two. Everyone knows its going to be two. No one in the league actually believes that a four team expansion is ever likely. Why am I harping on this point? Because the intent of adding that clause was to limit the amount of players who can be lost by any team to 2, when previously it was 3. I won't try to speculate on WHY the author went out of their way to try to disguise this, but that was clearly the intent. There is a short blurb that says it ensures no team suffers to lopsided an loss. By going from 3 potential losses to 2 guaranteed losses. Each expansion draft is 12 rounds meaning each team gets 12 players. In previous drafts, with the limit of three per team that meant that at times teams ended up losing only 1. It also meant expansion teams had choices they could make based on an available pool. No actual additional players were moved because the number of rounds remained the same. Teams also had more flexibility with the ability to add protections as they lost players.  There is also one final change proposed here that is worth noting. In this version, expansion GMs would not be required to use one of their picks on themselves. Previously they had to, which then allowed the team losing a GM player (and likely a big part of their team) an extra protection by default. This proposal strips that from them by not requiring GMs to pick themselves.

So who benefits here? Well, most of all the really good teams benefit. They get more protections, which bad teams are unlikely to need as many of and they're guaranteed to not lose 3 players, which again, bad teams usually don't need to worry as much about. Beyond that, the teams who don't lose a GM player also benefit tremendously here. Before it was considered that someone who is chosen to be an expansion GM is likely a major part of a team. CoGMs, War Room members, locker room leaders, and RainDelay. Losing them is a huge blow and having that automatic pick allowed them to lose a little less. Other teams who suffered no such loss are now on the same playing field. 

Who loses out here? Well, expansion teams lose choices obviously. The limit of two per team coupled with the need to build up a roster of about 20 players fast means that those choices of which 12 players to take are very important to the foundation of a new team. Removing that and forcing expansion teams to feed more heavily from bad teams really only drags down the have nots. And that's without going into rumors I have heard that the proposal at one point allowed for 10 protections and/or teams could only lose 1 player apiece. 

I can however speak as the league's most successful expansion GM when I say that this proposal is about 80% hot garbage. The new benefits aren't really benefits and the burden of the draft shifts very noticeably towards there being extremely weak ability to build any kind of roster and also the teams who are struggling most having to pay an increased share of the cost. I would go further and say that if you ever wanted to know why HO sets the expansion rules and GMs don't, this is a pretty good example to answer that question. the entire thing is designed to benefit only existing teams and mostly the ones that are currently strong. If public results of voting had actually passed, you would likely see this being written, championed, and voted for primarily by such teams. Granted, things like this are why that measure did not pass. This isn't really an expansion draft ruleset. It's a terms of surrender handed to two brand new teams. Thankfully wiser heads prevailed, if barely. Once the hooplah over this dies down, I'm considering referring to it as an attempted coup for fun. 

I can't say anything on how HO will approach expansion now that GMs basically relinquished their right to say how it goes, but I can tell you I supported this proposal. I think the two biggest differences between now and the last time are (a) there are two more teams, so each expansion team will still get 12 players and (b) there is a lot more talent on each team than the last time. IIRC, last expansion each team had about 6-10 players over 500 TPE each. This season each team has about 11-14 players over 500 TPE each. I think COL has the most at 16-18. The talent pool is a lot bigger for expansion teams now, so I think there is an offset here. Additionally, the proposal was never losing only 1 player, I can tell you that. That would be ludicrous.

We're looking at the GM problem in HO as well. That's a tough problem because teams who lose players to GM shouldn't be unfairly punished. This proposal does give them an extra protection over other teams. Either way, calling this "80% hot garbage" seems a bit unfair to me - though I understand the bias of me being on a "good team" (imagine saying COL is a good team an IRL year ago lol) and you possibly seeking an expansion team (based off your sig lol).

10. Position switches will allow a player to change everything about the player including height and weight, but it still follows the TPE distribution guidelines.
16-2

I had to actually look this up because off the top of my head this doesn't actually do anything. Research shows that what its replacing is a rule subset that said if you were too tall or too short for your new position, you could change your height to the maximum or minimum respectively. So this is a pretty slick little replacement that just allows people to pick their height as they see fit. This is my favorite kind of rule. It's simple, it allows for freedom, and it replaces an overly thought out rule that didn't really add anything. This one is a no brainer for me. Nice to see the original writers are presumably still in a voting position though, judging by the 2 no votes. 

I think the two no-votes were because this would (in theory) allow people to change their names as well for free. We're probably going to close that loophole before it goes into effect.

12. All players selected in the expansion draft cannot sign with their original team the following off season through free agency (trades acceptable).
7-11

As you can see there was quite a bit of contention here on the expansion proceedings, including this effort to ensure that a player cannot immediately return to their previous team after being picked. Which would have the effect of stopping teams from leaving someone protected with the knowledge that they would shortly return anyway. Consider this to be part of the attention being paid to attempts to circumvent expansion via contracts and options as well. 

I'm personally not sure where this idea that options on player contracts are clearly meant to circumvent expansion. You and I have both been GMs - even back in S14 when I negotiated contracts I always always always threw an MO/TO/PO on the last season. It gives players more freedom to leave if they wish or take on a cheaper contract if they want to stay, plus gives me as a GM the ability to cut off someone who goes IA a season earlier. This does nothing to stop SLM's famous 30M contract in season 2 either, which was a clear attempt at circumventing expansion.

1. Get rid of MVP award and replace OPOY and DPOY with OMVP and DMVP respectively
6-23-1

A suggestion I've heard before that is based upon defensive players basically never winning MVP awards. This is one of those things that has a solid logical basis but just doesn't feel right to a lot of people. Don't be surprised if this one pops back up every few seasons while slowly increasing in popularity. Or a defensive player wins an MVP. 

My main reason for proposing this was to get rid of the degeneracy between MVP and OPotY. I've been warning everyone that it would happen for seasons now, and it finally happened. That being said, the bias towards offensive players only furthers this problem, so I'm surprised that it received such few votes.

3.HO does not vote on awards and pro bowl.
12-18

A proposal that was put forth by HO itself. According to a member of HO they thought of it before the Hippo award voting travesty, as well. Usually the movement we see is for GMs not to vote on awards or to remove it form the GM/HO group entirely. So this one is more amusing than anything. A good result on it I feel. 

You could just say my name I don't mind lmfao

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Overall, it's good to hear opinions from people on this stuff, especially when they disagree with you. I think 99% of us want what's best for the league, we just disagree on how to get there.