Defenses, Roster Sizes, and Draft Night

Hey jerks, ​ After a lot of hemming, hawing, and few phone calls, I've decided to flex my Commissioner Muscle on a couple topics: ​ One, our league will be an IDP league. ​ Two, our roster size will be 28 players deep. ​ Take a deep breath.

From the get-go, I wanted this league to be an IDP league (Individual Defensive Player). This means that instead of picking a Team Defense (as you're likely more familiar with,) we'll instead draft individual defensemen, just like we do wide receivers, running backs, and tight ends. I believe this adds another level to managing your team, and if we're gonna do this thing, let's do it right. For our inaugural year, we'll have three positions to roster for our IDPs: 1 Defensive Lineman (DL), 1 Linebacker (LB), and 1 Defensive Back (DB.) ​ Adding these three positions, and removing the team defense, brings your active roster size to 11. A rule of thumb for dynasty leagues is to take your active roster size and multiply it by 2.5. Rounding up, that brings our entire roster, including bench spots, to 28. Here's the breakdown: ​ 1 QB 2 Running Backs 2 Wide Receivers 1 Tight End 1 Flex (RB, WR, or TE) 1 Kicker 1 Defensive Lineman 1 Linebacker 1 Defensive Back 12 Bench Spots 5 Taxi Squad Spots ​ Total = 28 Man Roster ​ Some of you probably got wide-eyed, but here's the reason why: in the real NFL, there isn't a humongous pool of players to pull off the waiver wire or in free agency. Players are mostly traded or are moved up from practice squads, but belong to specific teams. We want to replicate this as close as possible, thus having a larger bench of 12 players, and a taxi squad of 5 players (I'll have more on that for those unfamiliar this week.) This will promote trading amongst each other, and provide a larger pool of players to pull from or hold onto over the years. ​ NOW FOR THE IMPORTANT PART ​ Because our rosters will be twice as big as your average league, and because this is our start-up year, our draft on September 9th is going to be 28 ROUNDS LONG. Doing the math, if everyone took one full minute per player-picked, that's 336 minutes total. Which is 5.6 hours. Eff. Now, we know that most all the picks won't take an entire minute, but be prepared for a long draft, I'd image 3.5 hours or so. That's the bad news (if you wanna call it that. I think goofing around on zoom with a few cocktails and drafting a huge team sounds awesome.) ​ The good news is we only have to do this ONCE. All future drafts will only be the rookie class and will be much shorter. ​ I hope this doesn't sound too daunting to everyone. Personally, I'm very much looking forward to it. Let's use the next two weeks to get prepared so we can make the draft go smoothly. Despite COVID, I want this to be the most kick-ass league any of us are ever a part of. Let's kick it off right. ​ -Asa