Hello Everyone!

I hope everybody is having a decent 2021!

My normal welcome email follows with all the details below that will be a repeat for most, but we do have a couple new managers in the league this year. A big welcome to Evan Dormus (Harleigh's brother) and Gil Salas, a buddy of mine. I really look forward for when we can gather at Matt & Karla's for a live draft again (yeah I'm committing you for future years), but we'll be stuck with an online draft again this year.

Below is my standard email with league rules and organization notes. But I'll summarize some changes this year.
- Buy in is back up to $150 since the NFL proved they could operate during a pandemic. See payouts below.
- The draft will be online through the draft app. This is scheduled for Wed Sept 1 at 7pm PST. I randomly chose this as a weekday, prior to Labor Day week to hopefully make it work for all, but please let me know ASAP if this doesn't work for you and we can reconfigure.
- With the online draft, we will be having to identify our keepers through our team maintenance. The deadline to do this is Monday, Aug 30 end of day. This gives me a day to make sure the correct picks are entered into the draft.
- There was support to move our playoff format to 8 teams with the remaining 4 falling into the consolation bracket. See below for details on all things playoffs.

Chapter 1 - Buy in and pay outs...
The buy in will be $150 this year. I'm on Venmo and/or Zelle or snail mail me a check. My contacts if you need anything are below.

Joey Greenberg
18160 Cottonwood Rd #336
Sunriver, OR 97707
Ph: 503-791-6125
Email: greenberg32@yahoo.com

Please send this in as soon as you can. You'll find a link called "dues" from the front page to see who's paid and what amounts. When you pay, please hit me up with your email so I can keep my records up to date. For most of you, I already have this, but please confirm numbers/addresses haven't changed.

There will be payouts for the 3 division winners of $150 and a bonus of $150 for the 1st place finisher in the regular season (top overall seed for the playoffs).

Payouts are then as follows: From the playoffs, 1st place receives $700, 2nd place $350 and 3rd place $150.

Chapter 2 - Keepers
We will be keeping keepers again this year, no change. You can keep up to two players from the final roster from last year. Any new owners will be taking over the teams vacated. For the players you do choose to keep, you will lose the draft pick this year correlating to where they were picked last year. For example, say I had drafted Saquon in the first round last year. If I keep him, I will lose this year's first round pick. If you are keeping a player acquired in a trade, you will still lose the draft pick from where that player was drafted. If you keep a player that was acquired from free agency (or from a trade where a player was picked up in free agency), then you lose a default 8th round pick. The thought here is to reward a good prior year draft, where maybe a "flyer" was taken in later rounds, and sticking with a player as opposed to picking up a player already playing well through free agency. This also rewards owners taking risks on rookies. You still get a pretty good bonus by only giving up an 8th round pick. If a drafted player is dropped and picked back up, you lose the draft capital on that keeper.

The on-going rule however is that if you keep the same player for 2 consecutive years, that player will cost you a first round pick in the 2nd year kept (3rd year of ownership and beyond). The same goes for a player acquired in a trade where this player has been a keeper for more than one year.

If we run into a situation where two draft picks are lost for the same round, one draft pick will be lost to the next round thereafter. I've attached a spreadsheet showing everyone's last year final roster and the draft pick you would lose for each player kept. This is also posted below if you don't have Excel. Again, you can keep up to two, but you don't have to keep anyone. If no players are kept, you get to pick in every round.


Chapter 3 - Set Up
We'll be keeping the same 3 divisions with 4 teams in each division. Because we lost one of the divisional winners from last year, instead of having them pick the divisions post-draft, I will randomly select the divisions out of a hat. I'll get the schedule straight after this. You will play each team in your division twice. Division match ups take place in weeks 1-3 and 12-14. You'll then play all other teams from the the other divisions once.

I'm not sure if you heard, but they added a week to the NFL season this year? We'll run the "championship" playoffs with 8 teams which will place in weeks 15-17. Top seed plays 8th and so on. The division champs will get the highest seeds with the rest being seeded based on standings and then standard tie breaker from the Yahoo settings after that. Draft order for the following year