Interesting COVID Roster Delimma

[Ray Finkle]

I think it might just be a bit of an unintended consequence here. For example, prior to the season, as a league we agreed that any player involved in a cancelled/rescheduled game can be tossed on the practice squad for that week. Rosters must be brought back to legal status at time of the following Tuesday waiver run. Now, we did this with a tougher scenario than this current one in mind...what if there is a boatload of positive tests on a Sunday morning and a game gets cancelled at like 2pm on a Sunday and most of your roster is already locked? This way you could toss some dudes to the side and pick up a scrub in a different game to plug in so you at least have a prayer. Of course this week, there is plenty of time to prepare and there really is no need for theses actions but oh well, I’m not about to get in the game of differentiating between cancelled, postponed and rescheduled games. It will not be the last time there is some weirdness or unfairness this season.

[abloom]

The platforms that are allowing players now on a week 4 bye to be placed on IR should allow all players on bye for the rest of the year to be placed on IR.

Every owner should have known that canceling games and rescheduling byes were a possibility this year and planned accordingly. Hell 4 years ago (or around then) the week 1 game between TB and MIA (again I think) was postponed due to a hurricane. Switching the bye weeks for those teams to week 1.

Moving bye weeks has occurred before on short notice. It's something that should have been expected.

[Ray Finkle]

The platforms that are allowing players now on a week 4 bye to be placed on IR should allow all players on bye for the rest of the year to be placed on IR.

Every owner should have known that canceling games and rescheduling byes were a possibility this year and planned accordingly. Hell 4 years ago (or around then) the week 1 game between TB and MIA (again I think) was postponed due to a hurricane. Switching the bye weeks for those teams to week 1.

Moving bye weeks has occurred before on short notice. It's something that should have been expected.

Well, isn’t it good that Sleeper or any other platform gives that option at least? If my league didn’t agree to take that action prior to the season I would just sling an email to the league instructing then to ignore the IR status of James Connor, Derrick Henry and everybody else this week as they must remain on your active roster. Later in the year when a game gets cancelled or moved to week 18 or 19 truly resulting in a loss fantasy week, this setting will be a good thing and worth a minor inequity now.

[jcc6fd]

I’m seeing this now as Sleeper giving commissioners/leagues discretion to make their own call, which isn’t bad. I just wish my league approached this specific situation with the altered bye week with my rationale, but I don’t think any of them thought that hard about it.

The fact that the COVID IR designation makes players technically Ir eligible by default means that in dynasty if you didn’t intend to give extra roster space for a change in bye you’d have to make changes manually. I think a lot of commissioners and fantasy players won’t have thought this through like we are and presumably the way Sleeper did before making the decision. I don’t blame my commissioner and this is certainly not something I envisioned at the start of the year when I voted to allow for the extra IR spots.

[sloth8u]

The only argument against just treating it like a bye is the one week notice, usually you can plan your bye weeks in advance. It's just going to be one of those years where things will just not be how everyone wants it to be.

The argument would be that the teams could miss multiple weeks, multiple times a year. What happens when team X misses this week, players continue to test positive next week causing that game to be moved aswell.... You get the idea.

We are going to have to be flexible this yr.

[AussieMate]

The only argument against just treating it like a bye is the one week notice, usually you can plan your bye weeks in advance. It's just going to be one of those years where things will just not be how everyone wants it to be.

The argument would be that the teams could miss multiple weeks, multiple times a year. What happens when team X misses this week, players continue to test positive next week causing that game to be moved aswell.... You get the idea.

We are going to have to be flexible this yr.

I mostly agree, not everyone will be happy how this year turns out, if it turns out.
We can only hope everything is back to a more stable state by next year.

[Eight7Seven]

This seems like an issue created by us scrambling to have an NFL/Fantasy season without properly understanding how that will work in a pandemic.

When you added unlimited covid IR spots, you likely did so under the impression they could only be used for players who got sick and thus missed games they would otherwise play. This situation you described on sleeper is not that scenario. So now you're forced to try an reinterpret the new IR rules with this injury situation.

I would make a poll on sleeper, and let the league decide. Do we want to allow the covered IR spots to be used for postponed games? Yes or No?

Since sleeper designated those players as out, I see no reason why you couldn't place them in your regular IR spots. But I definitely see an argument of why they shouldn't qualify for unlimited additional spots.

[Vectorgod]

Interesting discussion. It seems to me that the whole issue needs to be solved at the league level, no matter which service you are using and what they have used for player designations this week. All leagues I commish are on MFL, and I like the way they have handled it. Communication with league owners is a big key here, along with flexibility and just understanding that this is going to be a screwed up season. The leagues I am in use pretty deep rosters, so we aren't (yet) having many instances of not being able to field a lineup. Since the Steelers-Titans game was called before the first game of the week kicked off on Thursday, we were all good with considering them to be on a rescheduled bye week. No IR stuff necessary, although I believe Humphries has now been given the (C) designation. Generally I would prefer my service to stick to the NFL designations as far as bye versus out, IR, IR-COVID, etc. Your mileage may vary.

[M-Dub]

This notion that Sleeper is doing leagues a favor by leaving it up to them is laughably disingenuous. If you really wanted to, you could easily accomplish this in an MFL league by simply taking 30 seconds to make ALL players IR eligible, regardless of their injury status. The difference is, making that change requires a proactive response by the league/commish (as it should), whereas Sleeper is forcing leagues/commishes to be reactive by arbitrarily changing IR designations on its platform that conflict with the players’ official designations.

Leagues can obviously decide to handle this situation however they choose, but it should be up to the individual leagues, not the hosting platform.

[FantasyFreak]

This notion that Sleeper is doing leagues a favor by leaving it up to them is laughably disingenuous. If you really wanted to, you could easily accomplish this in an MFL league by simply taking 30 seconds to make ALL players IR eligible, regardless of their injury status. The difference is, making that change requires a proactive response by the league/commish (as it should), whereas Sleeper is forcing leagues/commishes to be reactive by arbitrarily changing IR designations on its platform that conflict with the players’ official designations.

Leagues can obviously decide to handle this situation however they choose, but it should be up to the individual leagues, not the hosting platform.