Concerning New York

In an effort to sift through the dialogue and bring us up to date:

1. We're gonna have a keeper league.

2. We're gonna have a draft and not an auction for at least the next two years.

Two items really in contention at the moment:
3a) The number of keepers.
3b) How do the keepers effect the following draft.

4. Stats have not been resolved, but that comes next.

My two cents (for the day):
3a) The fewer keepers, the more interesting the draft will become and thus the more interesting the season will be. As Moacir pointed out, we don't have a 40 man roster so no one really is going to be holding on to guys that they think will be good next year and sit them on the bench all year. I don't think that's what any of us was anticipating (and correct me if I'm wrong). The only reason I thought having keepers would be a good idea in the first place was to add another little wrinkle into the season. Winter trades, added strategery, and the ability to hold on to your very favorite players from the year before. I didn't think that we needed to completely turn this thing upside down. Plus, in regards to Pete's comment, the more players we keep the more likely it is that someone will say, "I don't want to keep that many," in which case we don't really have a workable cap. Furthermore, the more players a team is allowed to keep, the more likely it will be that good teams will stay good and bad teams will stay bad (*cough, cough*). Was anyone really completely dissatisfied with the way we have run things that past three years?

3b) Again, I'd be willing to bend on this, but it seems to me that either using a third party system or previous draft order is only going to unnecessarily complicate matters. What happens if you have two 4th rounders? Why are waiver wire dudes automatically 10th rounders? What if you want to keep your 10th rounder? Are the Yahoo!/ESPN/BP rankings to be trusted?

In the end, I'll be fine with whatever system the majority of people want on this one and I'd rather have a system that people are excited about rather than one that people begrudgingly following cause they were tired of thinking about it. As Carter said today, "this league could last until we die." And that, my friends, is what I am working towards here (not the dying part, the longevity part).

Do any of you get the feeling that this is what writing the Federalist Papers must have been like? If founding a nation and deciding a system of government was a completely pointless action, I mean.

-PUBLIUS