Hello group. I haven't written anything here in a long time, so I figured I'd post an update while we are still a little over a month away from the draft. First, I want to welcome the newest member to the league: Scotty! He will be taking over for the previous manager of The Killing Fields: John Olsen. I had to make the tough decision to boot John out of the league after watching his team slowly fall apart. He went from a contender in the inaugural season of The Rad Dynasty in 2023 to a bottom feeder in 2024. He missed the draft, he didn't set his lineups, he didn't make any waiver acquisitions. He left injured people in his lineup. His team set a record for futility when it comes to points scored. It was basically an unattended team all season long, and an easy win for anyone who matched up against him. And we can't have that. So out goes John and in comes Scotty. Scotty is a great guy. I worked with him for several years. He's also a terrific fantasy player. I think I've seen him win 3 times now. He's always a formidable opponent week to week. If anyone can turn around The Killing Fields, it is him. Give him a hand. (BTW, feel free to change the name of the team if you'd like to).
The draft will be on August 3rd. I will be sending individual reminders to everyone as the week approaches. Most teams currently sit with 21 players on their roster. After you made your cuts earlier in the year, I added your Taxi Squad player to your team. So that put a lot of you back over the roster limit. Never fear, you have until August 2nd, the day before the draft, to send me the name of any players you want to cut. If you don't send me anything, I'll just drop your Taxi player to get you down to 20 players. You MUST have a minimum of 15 or a maximum of 20 players on your team heading into the draft.
If you forget who is on your team or how many players you have, click:
This page also lists your draft picks in the upcoming draft, as well as contact information for other members of the league if you are looking to make any trades.
Since we are so close to the draft, I want to make sure everyone knows how this works. Using the Yahoo website instead of the app is highly, and I mean highly recommended. I find the app to be completely useless. To get to the Rad Dynasty Yahoo page, click the following link. Please note: you probably need to be logged into a Yahoo account to see the webpage:
When you get to the home page, you get an overall view of the game site. You can see weekly schedules and standings. At the top of the page you will see this:
This is a very important thing to familiarize yourself with. Click on "My Team" to see your current roster. You won't be able to make any adjustments because the draft has not happened yet. What we want to look at for draft purposes is: Draft. Hover over it and it will bring up a dropdown menu. Click Draft Results. This will give you a visual representation of how the draft will work.
It shows the draft order for the first 5 rounds of the draft. After that, you will see that players will start filling in certain teams draft selections. Those are the keepers from last season. It is essentially putting them on hold and then auto drafting them after you pick 5 players in the live draft to fill out your team. That's assuming you kept 20 players. If you only kept 19 (like Ned) you will have a 6th round pick, and then you team will start auto filling after that. If you only kept 15 (like My Team - my Uncle Pete) then you get a whopping ten picks in the draft before the auto-filling begins. As of right now, he picks in round 6 with Ned, and then picks by himself rounds 7 through 10 while everyone auto drafts around him. So at the end of the draft, he kind of gets his pick of the litter as to who to take. He said he wanted to do a rebuild of his team, so I hope it goes well!
On this page, you may also notice an option that looks like this:
It defaults to "Round." What you want to do is click on "Team." It will then bring up all the upcoming draft picks for each team. Again, you will notice that your keepers will show up as automatically filled in for each team. This gives a pretty good visual example of how this all works.
Let's use Bluth as an example:
Very straightforward. You can see the picks he has in the upcoming draft. You can see how the rest of his roster auto-filled. To me this is the best way to view the draft and prepare for it. If Bluth were to drop down to 19 players before the draft, he would gain a 6th round pick. Like, if he drops Josh Downs, all those keepers move up one spot and then his 6th round pick will show up as empty. I'll use ned and his 19 keepers below as another example:
See how he has a 6th rounder now? I hope this is all making sense to you.
Last visual example is for my uncle who only kept 15 players. You'll see how he has 10 draft picks. Ignore the numbers assigned to them, by the time we get to the last few rounds, he will be the only one picking while everyone auto drafts around him. So essentially his last 4 picks will all be consecutive.
Hopefully these examples helped make things clear on how the draft will work. I hope I did not make it more confusing. Anyway, I thought I would show these examples so that everyone could look at them and have a visual representation of how the draft will look before it happens.
Last thing before I leave is to implore you to log into the actual Yahoo website instead of the app. It makes things so much easier. There are a lot of things to click around on, like Players. To me, this is the best and easiest way to look at remaining players and use the dropdown menus to sort through them. Of course, you won't be able to add anyone until after the draft. But this is a nice way to see who will be available to draft from and how Yahoo ranks them.
I'd suggest familiarizing yourself with the Yahoo page, and clicking on all dropdown menus to see what they do. Research is a good one. Matchups will take you to your next matchup, but everything will show up empty because lineups can't be set yet. On the League's front page, you can click Schedule under League Members to view everyone's schedules. There's a lot of stuff to explore that will make your fantasy life easier in the future.
See you all on August 3rd for the draft, and I will be sending out reminders and asking you to drop down below 20 players if you are currently above that number. Bye for now.
