ESPN Commissioners Question

[qocoa81]

Fellow commissioners:
We have a keeper league in its second year and are expanding from 10 to 12 owners. It is a free ESPN league and we are allowing current owners to keep 5 keepers. It is our desire to let the two new owners have eight guys each from what is left in an expansion draft (they would still only be able to keep five guys next year but this gives them a three man boost this season). We would then have a normal draft with random order of all 12 teams.

We don't all know each other and live all over the country and so an online draft is our only option. Because we can't have ESPN do a "predraft" it has been suggested that we (the current owners) all cut everyone but our five keepers and then have an offline expansion draft for the new guys. They would then add their eight new players to their roster.

Now it gets tricky. How do we get ESPN to not skip their first three picks? Do we need to change the number of keepers to eight and have all the existing owners pick up three scrubs. I guess this all works out to this question: Can we add three bench slots (go from 5 to 8) for before the draft and then change the rules after the draft to drop these extra bench slots (move back from 8 to 5)?

TIA for the help.

[Trojan Pony]

From ESPN's rules:

"NOTE: Roster settings can be edited until the draft begins. After the draft is complete roster settings can not be changed. You can not add slots after your league has drafted. You must reset the draft in order to do so."

What about letting the 10 current teams claim 3 keepers each that are LOCKED IN and the expansion teams can't touch? Then the rest of the current teams, including their other 2 keepers, are up for grabs, from which the two new teams can each pick their 5 keepers. Any players that aren't picked by the expansion teams stay on their original teams, whose managers will again have exclusive rights to claiming them as one of their last 2 keepers.

Does that make sense? Though I suppose it would be problematic to add a rule like that after letting the current teams operate under the assumption they had their pick of their 5 keepers no matter what. Ideally, you would have had a contingency plan for expansion teams set in place in your league rules.

Other than that, I'm trying to think of how you could accomplish what you're trying to do... I use ESPN also and appreciate how little flexibility their keepers system has unfortunately. I'll try to think of a better solution and get back to you...

But to answer your main question, no, you cannot edit roster positions after the draft.

[qocoa81]

Thanks for the help. Good catch on that rule. We may need to have 8 keepers with the three slugs and then just conduct a post draft for the last three rounds via email and I'll assign the players manually to the teams. That is the only thing I can think of.