Rules Change: Draft Reduced to 16 Rounds

OK, no changes mid-season. Usually.

But I completely forgot to post about this change because we did it pretty close to the draft and there was a lot of e-mail traffic about it. But, to be official about it.

This change was made to a) help speed up the draft, b) and because we felt like few people really cared for the last bunch of draft picks any ways.

A one-time windfall of $2 million was given to each team to help soften the blow, but this will not be permanent.

The Rules Committee also decided to look at the impact of this move mid-season and decide wether or not to try to propose any further reduction for the 2009 draft. So consider this your chance to think about it ahead of time. I'll let everyone know when the decision is imminent.

Roster Size

We discussed reducing roster size a couple slots.

The idea was put forth based on the idea of freeing up more talent in the free agent market. But there was skepticism that anyone useful would be shaken free by reducing a couple roster spots. Many teams don't even carry a full 20 player load during much of the season and those of us who do often have some random junk at the end of our benches.

Darin suggested that we could reduce the roster size to 2 and the league still would not see much talent coming off his roster. However, no one else was willing to cut roster size that far :)

Receiving Yards, Safeties, Blocked Kicks, and Drop Kicks

Proposals were on the table to make receiving yards more valuable, bring back points for safeties, and add points for blocked kicks. Roger suggested we add points for drop kicks. He was kidding.

We chose not to make any adjustments or add any points for the above.

Rule Change: INT and PD

Rules committee has finally been pushed on this issue.

INTs have been dropped in value from 6 pts each to 5 4 pts each.
and
PDs have increased from 2 pts each to 3 pts each.

To a large degree this was done to counter the loss of points to defenses and DBs in particular with INTs going down. The INT drop reduced total defensive scoring by 1/2 pt per game on average. The PD increase more then compensates for that. Overall, this change should increase defensive pts by 1 1.5 per team per game. This should not be too damaging to over-all balance since offense gained a bump last season due to the yardage bonus scheme.

It may also make DBs that aren't tackling machines more consistent by shifting more of their points to the more common PD from the less frequent INT.

New Starting Roster Spot for Special Teams

Just kidding. Someone (no one wanted to claim the idea in the light of day) made this suggestion at some point in our process.

We killed it.

Rule Change: Kicker Scoring

Kicker scoring seemed a popular subject this offseason with proposals to make it harder to get the 4 pts FG (moving the threshold from 40 to 45 or 50 yards) or making 50+ worth 5 pts.

Various schemes for penalizing kickers for misses were also discussed. Everything from sliding scales based on distance to including PAT misses were discussed.

In the end the committee approved a proposal to subtract 1 pt for every missed field goal of less the 40 yards.

This is expected to result in very little gross scoring changes but may have a couple point affect in specific games. The game rationale is that the missed FG most likely resulted in better field position for the non-FG-attempting team in addition to failing to score the 3 pts for the FG. 40+ yard FGs were exempted because they would have had a larger affect and we did not think it fair to penalize kickers for missing those kicks.

Tight Ends

We talked about adding a TE spot to the starting roster.

The negative aspects mostly centered around what, if anything, it would add to our love of FLOF and more importantly the impact this would have on roster sizes, the draft and a need to counter-balance defense with an added starting roster spot on that side of the ball.

The proposal was shelved for this off-season.

Long Term Contract

The NFL Draft reminded the members of the Rules Committee that we had work to do. So we tackled a hold-over idea from last year to have long term contracts.

This Forum Post has some details on the thinking here.

But in the end, we didn't think this was an idea that people would use or get much value out of, so it was ditched.

Rules Committee Underway: Welcome Haydn, Analysis of 2007

We are officially into the off-season at FLOF. In past years I've noted Rules Committee reports on the Forum, but I'll use the home page blog this year cause you can also comment here and it seems like a better place to do this.

First order of business was to welcome Haydn to the star chamber. Oops. I guess its not really a star chamber if you know who's in it. Anyhow, he asked and we could not think up a good reason to keep him out. So we are up to four now: myself, Darin, Roger, and Haydn.

Next we reviewed some of the big changes from 2007: revised free agency schedule, negative yards adjustment, bonus points for yardage and tackles, and points for return yards.

The free agency schedule adjustment (moving back the day when original bids are due) and the negative yards adjustment (starting to pick up negative points at -1) were deemed non-controversial and we quickly moved on.

I then crunched some numbers from 2006 and 2007 to see what affect the return yards and bonus points for yards and tackles had on the universe. The bottom line is that those two years (only years in a 12 team league) do not provide enough information to make a major change yet so we will see what happens in 2008.

That said, I produced some great data I will share. First, fun charts:

These charts chart all scores from that year. The left most score was the lowest of the year, the right most was the highest.

As you can see, scores went up last year, almost completely due to an offensive increase. I believe the affect of bonus points can be seen where the gap between 2006 and 2007 gets bigger at higher scores. To a lesser degree you can see this in the defensive scores where 2006 defense was actually better until the top 16% of scores although this could have other causes.

When you get into the weeds of the bonus scoring (outside return yards) we see that it didn’t all work out as planned. We targeted the bonuses to kick-in 35% of the time. We then based the levels that the bonuses would kick-in based on 2006 data. However, rushing yardage went down and passing yardage went up while receiving yardage and tackles remained pretty consistent.

For rushing yards the bonus was achieved only 25% of the time. Passing yardage bonus was achieved 45% of the time. Receiving bonus occurred 40% of the time and tackle bonuses kick-in 33% of the time.

My sense is that much of this was NFL based. Seemed like there were more pass happy offenses and a lot of big name RBs had horrible years.

Certainly the passing and rushing yards were the farthest off. Looking at 2006 numbers, the thresholds we set would have been triggered 33% of the time for rushing and 32% of the time for passing.

If we tried to re-calibrate the passing and rushing thresholds for 2007 numbers, 2006 numbers would have produced very off results.

Looking at return yards specifically, we see that fewer then 35% of all team box scores included any return yards last year and less then 25% of team scores got any points out of that at all. No one got enough return yards to get any bonus pts out of it. Net result was that return yards accounted for 0.67 pts per team per game in 2007.

In the end, this is a long post to announce that the Rules Committee does not see any need to make changes here at this time.

Next we will tackle a hold-over concept from last year: the long term contract.