jeffbayliss

Mike, FYI, the 8/9 update and 8/13 update still show Richard Marshall, Donte Whitner, and Bernard Pollard on their old teams.

Just saw Whitner still on Buffalo not SF on today's update, too.

On a side topic, Mike, not worth a new thread, the last few updates still have Richard Marshall on Carolina, not Arizona. Didn't notice any others not listed on correct team yet.

Mike - Is FFT going to be doing a baseball cheat sheet compiler this year like last year, or was that an experiment gone awry?

Thanks Mike!

You'd have to understand our league's rules and draft, and how our bidding normally goes. I'm sure it is unique. In our auction draft, the top players available, about 4-6 each year, will go for $100 to $175. Then a handful from $40-$99. Most of the rest go for $1-$10. We can protect up to 8 of a roster of 32. Then if we want to keep them longer, we have to sign them to an increased salary contract for up to 2 years more. Then they have to be thrown back into the auction. I take Compiler, remove the protected players by assigning them a non-default custom allocation key with the %'s all zero (making these players have no stats and don't show up on the cheat sheet). Then I play with the Ranking Method and Custom Baselines until the Values reflect the huge dollar gap between the top 1-3 players in QB, RB, and WR and the rest of the available players (we do our IDP players and Kickers in a closed serpentine draft a week prior to the auction draft, so they are removed also). Last year I ended up going into the draft with an Overall Ranking Method of Median Player Drafted, with baselines of 1.2 QB, 1.5 RB, and 1.2 WR. This was just what I came up with to best represent what I thought would happen for our auction as far as player values. i.e. in QB, only Culpepper was available among "studs" (glad I didn't get him!). His Max bid was $167. The next QB was Brady at $74. M. Harrison and Owens were the top 2 WR available and they came up in the $60's. The third WR on the list was Clayton at $25. Last year was the year of Stud RB, as Tomlinson, Holmes, James, Alexander, and McAllister were all available (I got LT). They all had above $100 max bid, a couple of others were in the $40-60 range, the rest less than $10. During the draft, I have a separate simple Excel league roster spreadsheet that I fill in as the draft goes on that keeps track of the number of positions left to be drafted and how much total money is left. I link this roster sheet with Compiler, which automatically updates the players left per team, and the salary cap per team in Compiler. As players are taken I remove them from the cheatsheets using the non-default 0% key. Then I recompile and see how the dollar values look after each player goes off the board. I may change tiers and Ranking Method during the draft, or tweak baselines. I ended up last years draft using the Last Starter Drafted. This is my way of re-valuing players based on the money left, positions left to fill, and the players left on the board. There must be a madness for my method, as I finished 1st in our Head to Head competition, and 1st in our Overall Category Ranking competition last year! Of course trading McCown for Larry Johnson after McCown's two big games (and before Holmes got hurt) helped! I can now keep LJ for two years at $21! Sorry for the long wind, Mike, but you asked!

Mike - This new 2006 pop up upon hitting the compile button is a bit annoying for us auction drafters. Either put the note to the side or include the check box that says "don't show this again"! I like to play around with the Rankings method as well as baselines until I get a spread of dollars that I think is representative of our draft, and the "last player drafted" rarely works for me, so I am having to endure this pop-up and hit "No" every time.

P.S. This problem does not exist when rosters are pulled from MFL or Draft Buddy, because when these are used, the "blank" cells in the list have the text left justification symbol in them so COUNTA picks them up as not blank. When the manual roster inputs are used, the blank cells in column 7 really are empty so the COUNTA does not pick them up. The COUNTBLANK picks them up as blank whether the text symbol is there or not. - Jeff B.

Mike- Nice work again with improvements to Compiler this year. I liked the fact that you added players ages like I suggested last year. Adding height and weight was also a big plus. The first issue of Trade Buddy is cool. I manually input our leagues rosters. After I choose two teams on the Transaction page, all the players come in like they should. When I clicked on any drop down cell in the Proposed Trade section, all that shows for choices for a player to trade away are three blanks, the word Player, and the first name on the list. The cell validation is looking at cells M3-M7 for the list. I don't know why the term -COUNTBLANK($M7$M59) is in there. Because team 1 had 24 players listed and there are 29 blanks, it produced a height of -5. When I remove the -COUNTBLANK term from the validation equation, it seems to work fine, which makes sense because the COUNTA term is counting the number of players listed and setting the height equal to that starting with row 7. A question: Will future year's versions have the ability to rank players based on different leagues scoring formats like the Compiler does? Maybe you can bring in rankings based from My FF Today Custom Scoring. Also option to combine WR/TE would be nice! Jeff Bayliss

Hi Mike - A few possible improvements to consider for Compiler for next year (or this year?) 1. An easy one for the spreadsheet (and no work for the Projector!) which I think would be very helpful for all is to add a column for each player with their age, which will also come over to the cheat sheets (I know you are getting tight on this printout, but some resetting of column width, adding a page, or moving the kicker to page 2 should free up some room). When trying to decide between similarly ranked players in the mid-to-late stages of draft, I want to know how old the guys are) 2. Some threads talked about printing problems. In a spreadsheet I developed for scoring my league each week, I included several buttons with print-macros, so the users could choose to print out an individual sheet only, or all sheets at once. The macros can be set to "fit all to page", avoiding the common problem of having the last column print on the next page. This would be useful for leagues with no IDP who don't need the IDP printout. Or maybe the overall rankings sheet is not so useful for an auction league (can save some trees) 3. Our league has a Team Offense position that scores points based on points scored (similar to Defense Points Against, only the scale is reversed. i.e. if they score 0-3 in the game, we get 0, 4-7, we score 1....up to over 40 we score 10). Maybe other leagues have this category, and would be useful to have in Compiler with points scored projections. Maybe this one's a for most. 4. Our league penalizes for FG's missed only less than 40 yards (a loser missing a 22 yarder should score negative, but a guy missing a 54 yarder shouldn't be to blame), so maybe giving the abililty to have different scoring for length of FG's missed would be good. But of course to make it useful, you'd have to add projections for Missed FG length. (Another spreadsheet offered has this breakout, but then just assigns a missed length percentage across the board, they do not do length projections, so it is worthless. i.e. Elam might have 6 misses in a year, but 4 are from over 50 yards. Whereas Morten Anderson isn't given the chance anymore to miss from over 42 yards.) Hey, you said it is getting harder to find exciting new improvements each year! Just trying to help!! Jeff

Thanks Mike - I could have sworn I went into the help guide looking for a write up on this before I posted the question, but obviously missed it. Another great tweaking tool in CheatSheet Compiler.

Mike - I figured it wasn't too critical, but you'd like to know. My guess is that most users don't bother to go into such tweaking detail, and those who do wouldn't notice, as it would be difficult to spot unless, as you said, someone picked a players name for passing that wasn't on the list for rushing, causinf errors to pop up. But, even if they use the "Great-Good-...-Poor" technique, it is still not quite right as whatever they choose for Passing TD distance is also used or Rushing TD distance. So if you wanted to tweak Peyton Manning, for example, for Good Passing distance, but Poor Rushing Distance, you couldn't. (Unless you know how to fix your copy, like I did! But I'm a spreadsheet geek!) Trust me, I know how difficult it is to design a large, complicated spreadsheet and still have bugs get through rigorous testing. I think you have been doing a heck-of-a-job. This is my 3rd year using your sheet (last year was through Champs). It blows away the others I've downloaded in the past, due to the information in it (depth charts, past years stats, bye weeks that you can sort on) and the better flexibility it has (such as the distance TD, customized tiering, and the ability to weight the scoring using different percentages of different sources of stats, saving League Profiles, etc.). No more VBD App for me. I hope the CheatSheet Compiler is around for years to come.

Is there an explanation of the six Overall Ranking Method choices somewhere, and how they affect the Max Bid's in Auction Mode? Do you just experiment with them until the dollars seem to match what is expected in your league, or is there some method to this madness? When I use "Complier Recommended" the dollar values are way off from what they will be in our league. "Stud RB" comes out more realistically, as does "Median player drafted". Jeff

Hello Mike, I think you have errors in your QB rushing TD distance cells, columns QB!BI to BR. The VLOOKUP equations are all looking at column AW to find the basis instead of column BH. You must have copied columns AX-BG with the $AW7 in it and didn't edit to $BH. Jeff