Extend UFA Signing to Friday In-Season

[Jacksonville Jaguars (Jordan)]

Under current rules, you may open a UFA bid from Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. ET to Thursday at 5:00 p.m. ET while we are in-season.

I propose that we extend this period until Friday at 5:00 p.m. ET. This allows GMs an extra day to gather information on injuries or other player news and act accordingly. This would still give Roster Managers ample time to process these signings. 

Players on NFL teams which have already played that week (i.e. Thursday Night Football, Thanksgiving, etc.) would not be eligible to be signed on Friday. Bids on these players would open up the following Tuesday.

[Jacksonville Jaguars (Jordan)]

Something to note: due to many schedule changes last year because of COVID, we ended up extending the deadline to Friday for multiple weeks, and it it worked well in my opinion.

Simply gives an extra day where signings are available instead of only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

[Cincinnati Bengals (Chris)]

Apr 21, 2021 16:01:24 GMT -5 Jacksonville Jaguars (Jordan) said:

Under current rules, you may open a UFA bid from Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. ET to Thursday at 5:00 p.m. ET while we are in-season.

I propose that we extend this period until Friday at 5:00 p.m. ET. This allows GMs an extra day to gather information on injuries or other player news and act accordingly. This would still give Roster Managers ample time to process these signings. 

Players on NFL teams which have already played that week (i.e. Thursday Night Football, Thanksgiving, etc.) would not be eligible to be signed on Friday. Bids on these players would open up the following Tuesday.

As I mentioned in the Discord, I would be offering a revision to this post, due to the fact that I think the original neglected perhaps the most important part of the proposal/something that Jordan and I discussed in past. Instead, I thought I would just post down here. PLEASE READ this before voting/consider changing your vote if you feel so inclined after this:

In 2020, under the reality of COVID-19 and how it impacted our league, League Managers were forced to do things we'd never had to deal with before. That was equally true of each team's GM as well. Unfortunately, the result of the new protocols in the NFL last year, and this league's QB Rule, it made it difficult and sometimes impossible to know whether or not a team in this league would be entering a given week with a starting QB or not. The same was true of any player that ended up in the COVID protocols too late for a GM in this league to do anything about it, as many were announced on Friday (After the closure of our FA period), or later (And in this case, there's really nothing we can do about it other than a QB force add by the league).

[Cincinnati Bengals (Chris)]

Apr 21, 2021 18:30:32 GMT -5 Jacksonville Jaguars (Jordan) said:

Something to note: due to many schedule changes last year because of COVID, we ended up extending the deadline to Friday for multiple weeks, and it it worked well in my opinion.

Simply gives an extra day where signings are available instead of only Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

To take what Jordan said above a step further, and I think the most important/noteworthy aspect this proposal would play in our league, is to allow fantasy managers the ability to have one extra day to prepare for what might face them in a given week/weekend, especially re: COVID. Despite the unpopularity of parts of the COVID rule, this doesn't come with the so-called "loophole" that allowed fantasy GMs to exploit the circumstances of a player going on the COVID IR by bidding an effectively unlimited (In terms of our free agency's history) amount on a player they knew they wouldn't have to keep. Instead, it allows us to account for the reality that we will still have some semblance of COVID-19 this season--and perhaps beyond--and will allow GMs to add an available QB of their choosing to their roster, at the salary amount (If they need to go higher on a bid with another QB-less team), and duration of their preference, rather than a force-add. The same would be true of adding a player to their roster/potentially IRing/cutting a player and replacing him with another player, in the circumstance of having a non-QB player announced as out, or IRed, or COVID protocoled on Friday.