Hey everyone! Please read whatever is important to you!
Unseen Labor
I’ve been slaving away in the fantasy football mines this week so that I can get everything ready for a spectacular 2024 fantasy season! Here’s a list of what I’ve done so that you, esteemed fantasy owner and friend, can enjoy it as much as me:
- Upgraded to the 2024 MFL site and paid for the service. ONCE AGAIN THEY HAVE RAISED THE PRICE. It now costs $109.99 per year, but with the early bird discount I paid $89.99. Still, this is a price increase of $30 over just a couple years ago. Fellas, keep your eyes open for other league management software. If it can do everything we need (contracts, IDP, etc) for less, it might be worth switching. For now, freedom isn’t free, so please pay me $20 in league dues.
- Here are some things you can find there:
- 2024 Draft order, reflecting previous trades of draft picks. Imagine being like Adam and not having a single draft pick.
- League Awards with fresh banners, hand crafted by yours truly. If you won a banner last year it will now show up on your team page!
- Complete List of Free Agents. I’ve sorted by “own percentage” but you can sort however you damn well please. There’s some big names available (at least for now, some of them might get franchise tagged.) It’s never too early to prepare for the free agent auction.
- New division alignment! Remember, our divisions are based on last year’s all-play records. So the top four teams from last year are in the Gold.
- Updated Rosters. Hey squad, I had to manually remove every player whose contract expired, and then I had to go in and edit all the salaries to reflect the annual raises. I also had to note which players were holding out. It’s a lot of work, but I do it for the community.
- In case you missed it, Adam and I posted a new Immersion Cast about the draft order. It’s only 4 minutes long and probably NOT worth your time, but we did talk about trying to make time this season to host a weekly show (possibly a video version and audio-only version for those of you who are sickened by seeing our stupid faces.) As always, everything’s better with you involved, so it would be great to get a different owner to join the fray each week. I so appreciated the people who stepped up to write a weekly article last season, and perhaps an Immersion Cast can replace the Weekly Review, as we pivot to video.
- I updated the Hall of Fame pages. I have been using pixlr.com to make the banners and logos and whatnot, because it was a nice little free website that got the job done. TURNS OUT it’s not so free anymore. I had to invest $12 so that I could use it for the year because I’ve already invested so much in the templates housed there. That’s how they get you.
- I also updated the Database. If you’re a fan of spreadsheets and databases then we should get a beer together and I can tell you all about it. Suffice to say, it’s an extremely time consuming process (even with all the time-saving hacks I’ve developed over the years) to update each newly completed season. Honestly, MFL should be able to make these reports available to us on their end, but since they don’t, I’ve taken it upon myself to do so, because it’s fun. You learn a lot when you’re poring over the data. For example, did you know that Matt Giorgianni is the only Original-8 owner without a title? Haha, good for him for sticking with it.
- I’ve also made a bunch of reports that I’m going to tell you more about below.
League Year – July 1st
The league year is July 1st. That means I need the following information from you before then:
- Please take a look at the 2024 Option-Eligible spreadsheet and let me know if you’d like to pick up the 4th year option on your players or decline it.
- Let me know if you’d like to apply the franchise tag to any player with an expiring contract (assuming they didn’t get the tag last year.) You can apply one tag on offense and one on defense (or none at all, it’s your day, man.) Don’t know which players have expiring contracts? Look at the 2023 MFL site or the 2023 salary cap page. Franchise tag prices are based on position:
- QB: $38.53
- RB: $66.51
- WR: $62.96
- TE: $33.70
- PK: $1.83
- PN: $1.16
- DT: $14.64
- DE: $23.28
- LB: $17.92
- CB: $9.87
- S: $9.23
- Player Cuts: please let me know via email which players (if any) you’d like to cut from your roster. Designate them as a pre-July 1st cut or a post-July 1st cut. What’s the difference? I’m glad you asked:
- Pre-July 1st cuts will count against the 2024 cap. Instead of kicking the can down the road, you’ll take your medicine now and be done with it. The advantage is that the cap hit will be based on the 2023 salary, which is somewhat lower than the 2024 salary.
- Post-July 1st cuts will count against the 2025 cap. The advantage is that you don’t pay the hit this season. The disadvantage is that it will be slightly higher and you’re just pushing your problems into the future. That’s how you end up with more than $100 in cap penalties, like Ryan.
- Recall that you can restructure players with high salaries that did not perform well last year, provided some conditions are met. Please refer to the rulebook to brush up on how it works. You can also watch this video Adam and I made a couple years back that explains it. You can refer to the 2023 Top Salaries spreadsheet for the Top-5 and Top-10 salaries at each position. Email the player names you’d like me to restructure. This has to happen before July 1st.
Looking Past July 1st
There’s no immediate concern here, but do take some time to check out the 2024 Holdouts. You can sit tight and see if they make it through training camp unscathed before you do anything. You can also restructure your holdout players, even after July 1st. Just hit up the rulebook for a reminder about how it works.
The auction will begin on July 1st. I think we’re all pretty familiar with how it works, right? I’ll be traveling to England this summer, so I initially thought I’d have to push it back. But we’re flying out before then so I should be situated enough in my “flat” to do the auction (though I’ll be in the future…I’ll really have to puzzle out how the time difference will affect it for me so I don’t lose out on the sweet sweet free agents.) I would also love to get a proof of life from everyone before then. Please let me know if you can’t participate on July 1st. Basically, you’ll have to be able to access your email once every 24 hours to make it work. If you can’t, because you’ll be in a cave or something, let me know. I can easily push the start of the auction to something like July 15th (or even later if needed).
The rookie draft will be an email draft again and I have it set for August 1st. Again, let me know if you won’t be able to check your email once every 24 hours. We’ve done these over the course of the past few years and they don’t take as long as we have budgeted for them. If needed, things can be pushed back. Communicate with me if that’s the case.
After the rookie draft we’ll do some blind bidding for free agents before we get into the regular routine of the season.
Email is My Friend
Please hold off on doing anything on the MFL site until after July 1st. If you want to cut players, email them to me. I have a few weeks in limbo where I have to update both the 2023 salary cap page and the new 2024 salary cap page, and trust me, email is much better for me. If you and a buddy work out a sweet ass trade, just email me the details and we can put it in later. I’m going to be out of state in a couple weeks and then out of country after that. Hopefully you have everything you need for now, but if you don’t, just send me an email or text. Happy Football Offseason!
© 2024, Josh Hammond. All rights reserved.
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