It's time: Steemit Fantasy Football

The league is created, and now we just need to fill it with contestants.

The draft will be:

Thursday 23rd of August, at 6pm EST (3pm PDT, 10pm UTC)

If you can't make the draft and want to play...

You have options!!!

sign up, and find a friend to draft for you
sign up, and pre-rank your players and let the computer draft for you
keep reading for the possibility of a 2nd league

To sign up...

Just comment that you want to play, and leave an email where I can send you the link to the league. We'll need the 5 SBD buy-in, which you can send now or any time before the draft.

Prize Pool

The prize pool will be everybody's 5 SBD (so 60 SBD) plus any rewards that we make for league content. I'll post at least once a week with a league update, and all of the liquid portion of the rewards for that post (whether in STEEM or SBD, however it gets distributed) will add on to the prize pool.

Everyone else is welcome to make posts about the league that go towards prize pool too, if you want to.

The payouts will be:

playoff champion: 50%
playoff runner-up: 20%
playoff 3rd place: 10%
regular season points leader: 10%
participation ribbons: 10%

The participation 10% will be divided among everyone commensurate to how many wins you get in the regular season. So even if you're low in the standings there will always be a reason to want to win each game.

I'll keep the prize pool in the "savings" portion of my account so that it's easy to track how it's doing.

League

League is set for 12-teams max, with 3 divisions. Four teams make the playoffs (each division winner and a wild card). Playoffs are weeks 15 and 16.

(Sorry if you hate divisions. But it works out pretty well with 12 teams; you play your division twice and everyone else once.)

It's Head-to-Head weekly matchups. There was some talk of doing Roto instead, but it turns out that isn't an option in Yahoo!

Scoring

Positions are: QB, WR, WR, RB, RB, TE, W/R/T, K, DEF, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, BN, IR

Scoring is standard-ish but with a few tweaks:

Kickers are nerfed to not score too many points (1 point for FGs, 2 for 50+ yards, 0.1 for extra points made, and -2 for extra points missed).
DEF is tweaked a little, like 1 point for "3 and outs" and "4th down stops", and only 3 points for touchdowns. It's basically trying to tone down the wildly high outcomes where a DEF scores like 37 points and is the pivotal player.
QBs get small fractions of a point for completions and for 1st downs and for 40+ yard completions, and negative 0.1 points for incompletions. Points per yard are dampened from point per 25 yards to point per 50 yards, but with a 1 point bonus at 300 yards, another 1 point at 400 yards, and 2 points at 500 yards. Overall it works out where their value is about the same as the default (the top guys project for close to 20 points per game), just tweaked in that way.

You'll be able to look at the full scoring rules from inside the Yahoo! league page, but those are the notable differences from the default settings.

Receptions are 0.5 points.

Contestants...

Like I said in the teaser post, it'll be vaguely first come first served, but with precedence to anyone who has been active on my blog or is an active Steem user or has already commented saying they want to play.

So if push comes to shove it'll be some imperfect balancing of those things.

I really want everyone who wants to play to be able to play.

Unfortunately leagues can be just only so big because there are only so many NFL players :(

SO....

2nd league

If there's overflow, I'm going to create a 2nd league.

The two leagues will be separate entities. There will be a champion of each league. And then, we can have a "Super Bowl" sort of clash between the two respective champions. They'll battle it out in some sort of NFL postseason type of contest.

So even if it seems like the first league is filling up, we will hopefully have space.

If you actually PREFER the second league, because this draft time doesn't work for you, feel free to say that. And you can also suggest draft times or dates that work well for you.