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Originally Posted by Billfred
Well, since it seems there's enough buzz to get this off the ground, I'll ask a few questions of the group.
The first is the method of picking teams. Three options I can think of:
1) Team at event. For example, you wouldn't draft 1293, you'd draft 1293 at Palmetto. Simpler to assign points to, but adds another layer to drafting (as you're shopping regionals as well) and has a chance of backfiring as teams drop and add competitions.
2) Average score. Here, you'd just be picking 1293. Just what you think it is.
3) Some other funkified scoring system. If it's implementable, and seems fair enough to all concerned, I'm open to it.
Then there's the question of Championship vs. No Championship. After a bit of thinking, I'm in favor of it, even if it adds another layer of trickiness to scoring.
Finally, there's drafting methods. To keep with the spirit of things, all trades would naturally end at Kickoff. However, I've thought more about teams that drop out or in, and I think there's a few ways to play this:
1) Allow folks whose teams dropped to pick another team once event payment deadlines have passed. (GP would be in full effect.)
2) Have everyone create a list before Kickoff with their backups, several deep.
3) Pick from the List of Fate.
Thoughts?
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I would be in favor of the "average score" method, or some other scoring system that allows you to draft 3 teams, for the entire season. Yes, it will be imbalanced, and not every team will be equal... but I think that adds a great dynamic to the game. Do you pick a team that's only going to one event, and hope they do really well at that event? Or do you pick a team going to 3 regionals and the Championship, and hope that their average performance is better than that of the one-event-wonder?
Drafting by event could be interesting (do you choose a team's Week 1 regional, when competition is lighter, or Week 5, when they've had a chance to compete and improve?), however, I think that a whole-season approach would be much more manageable for participants during the draft process. If you have to go through every team, and every regional in which those teams compete, there would easily be two to three times as many draft options to sort through. By limiting it to the team for the entire season, it greatly reduces the draft pool, which should make it considerably easier for players to decide on a picking list. Even reducing the numbers this way, there are still more than enough teams in FIRST to fill a FF league, so why not make it easier on everyone, and just pick by team, for the whole season?
As far as accounting for dropped teams, if you draft by team, not by event, the problem solves itself. Unless your team backs out of FIRST entirely, you'll still have a team competing and earning you points, and, with an average score system, it won't put you at much of a disadvantage (if any at all). If a team did withdraw from FIRST, I would say the drafter would be allowed to pick from any team still remaining on the draft board at that time.
So, for those two reasons (reducing complexity of draft, and eliminating the drop problem), I am strongly in favor of a whole-season, average score (or similar) system. I think it will be the easiest to manage, and the most dynamic choice.