I thought it would be useful to have a thread to discuss using Strat Draft for the IOD.
For those of you not familiar with Strat Draft, it is at www.stratdraft.com Login credentials were sent around last year as we have used the site for dispersal drafts and to recruit experienced owners. If you can't remember/find your login information let me know and I will have it resent. You can also poke around the site without logging in.
The main advantages of using Strat Draft is that it would allow us to not commit 4-5 hours on a Saturday evening for the draft and would ensure that those who cannot logistically attend within that timeframe actively participate in the IOD.
The main disadvantage of using Strat Draft is that the draft will take several days to conduct instead of one evening.
IF the league decides to use Strat Draft for the IOD, I am open to the particulars but having used it for several other leagues I think the best method is along the following lines:
- Each pick will have a 30-minute window that is assigned at the beginning of each day. Assigned pick times will only be between certain hours (say, 9 am to 9 pm Eastern).
- A team can pick whenever its' time is up. Autodraft can be set to either make a pick as soon as your pick is up or not until it would be a time violation.
- If a pick comes up outside of the normal hours, the team can make that pick but won't need to.
- No times would be adjusted during the day. So if your slot is 4:30 pm, that would stay your slot even if all the picks before you were made at 9 am.
'All questions/comments welcome. This would obviously be a fairly big change from past procedure so I want to make sure that everyone is fully informed.
Per the Calendar, we would finalize votes on this Nov 6.
We have had the IOD on a set night for decades. I look forward to it and even though I am busy, if given months notice in advance, can always make it work. I dont see the problem with it and would hate to see it change. It is one of the things I like best.
I prefer to keep it live (though I supported using Strat Draft last year as a one time thing because it was a struggle for me to make it, and my proxy also had an issue)
I am in favor of using Strat Draft, as it is extremely convenient. With a family, it is very difficult for me to put aside a night to conduct the IOD, particularly since I already have to do that for the auction draft. I play in several leagues, so the strain on my time for various drafts is very significant. The IOD is a perfect draft to use Strat Draft.
I will say that I personally am heavily in favor of using Strat Draft for the IOD. I've used it in other leagues and find it very easy and intuitive to use and vastly prefer the idea of setting up my picks in autodraft and then checking in when I can to see how the draft is going to setting aside 5 hours to do the draft one evening.
It also alleviates the fact that every single year there are multiple owners who cannot make the IOD and thus have to rely on others to make picks for them.
This is likely an issue only for me, but I also would greatly appreciate not having a mad scramble every time one of my picks is up because in running the draft and checking to make sure that drafted players aren't already owned I generally don't have time to anticipate who I will pick in advance.
While I definitely appreciate that people want to keep the "community" feel of the league (and I fondly remember the old days of literally having everybody in a room), I don't get any of that from the IOD. The more freewheeling C/FA does give me that feeling and I can't think that that will every be anything other than a live chat, but the IOD is really just a list of names being read off with the occasional "you took my guy!" interjection.
