Kansas City Appeal

[frazzle14]

I have thoughts that might make everyone unhappy.

The rule is 100% clear and it was the correct decision to impose punishment. Not knowing the rules isn't a good excuse, and GMs are the ones responsible for this kind of thing.

That said, the rules do not define what the punishment should be, and the fines imposed here were completely disproportionate to the magnitude of the offense. While the rule has a great intent, the spirit of it is to keep people involved and invested in their player as long as they are active even if it might lead to a competitive disadvantage. While I can only speak for Kansas City's case, that spirit was clearly not violated, as the active players saw plenty of playtime and stayed invested in their players even when technically behind on the depth chart. Especially given the positions involved (RBs in a backfield committee), the active players were still an integral part of our gameplans. The new GMs inherited this depth chart from the previous ones and were still getting the hang of all of their responsibilities. While that's not an excuse, it at least is further evidence that there was no malicious intent at work.

In addition, the only reason that the inactive player had gone inactive was because they had hit the DSFL cap and didn't know they had to maintain forum activity, but they still watched all of the games and participated in the Discord locker room. It's worth considering why both teams were able to get their inactive players to have meaningful forum activity within 24 hours of the punishment being posted so that they were able to submit the exact same depth chart (now legal) for the games 2 days later.

If HO or the appeals team had understood these facts, I hope they would have realized that the infraction was just a failure to understand the activity rules and not any kind of malicious attempt to bury an active player on the depth chart. I would consider that a single rules violation (that had ramifications on multiple depth charts) rather than a repeated violation. Imposing a per-game fine for that violation makes zero sense to me, and Matty getting 85% of his GM pay for the season fined for it makes even less sense than that. HO called this a lenient penalty.

Disappointed that the simplest possible approach ("They broke a rule, therefore fine them per game, great work everyone!") was taken in the initial punishment, and disappointed that the appeals team signed off on that approach.

I also hope that these rules are given a thorough rethinking going forward. They give teams weird incentives (it would have been competitively advantageous if the GMs had "helped" Waldo to go IA, which obviously is even more against the spirit of the DSFL than what actually happened) and they're extremely counterintuitive with regard to capped players who are happy to stay at the DSFL level. I get that we still want to keep those people involved but enforcing meaningless forum activity probably isn't the best way to do it.

I’d like, upvote and retweet this if I could.