A C T I O N      March 2000

PLEASE NOTE DEADLINES!!!

The trade deadline is Saturday Mar. 18 at midnight Eastern Time. Your 26-man rosters and playing instructions will be due to me no later than Tuesday Mar.28. I will be emailing you a form in MS-Excel that I want as many managers as possible to use in filling out their lineups.. if you don't have or can't read Excel, you'll need to let me know ASAP and I'll send it by regular mail. I want to eliminate the delays that were caused last year by my getting 25 sets of instructions in 25 different formats, some of which were very hard to decipher and/or format due to the many different programs used in making out the lists. I plan to get this season started on time this year, and if it means making out the lineups myself for anyone who misses the deadline, I won't hesitate to do that, so if you want to retain control of how your team plays on the road, get the lineups in before the deadline! Thanks and good luck this season! - Jeff Lowe

I just want to publicly thank Jeff for sending this form out to everyone. Thanks also to Joe Hamrahi, who supplied us with an original form we based it on. I alslo want to thank everyone who sent in their league dues. It looks like that we will have 100 percent paid up by the end of the weekend. I completely support Jeff in having the instructions in his hands by March 28. Anyone who is late will run the risk of losing control over their team on the road and can also count on some kind of penalty when it comes to the draft next year. Trade deadline is a week from today so get those last second deals done before its too late. - Don Cassidy

RULES UPDATES AND COMMENTARY

The idea of losing an unprotected player you can recover a released player is meaningless. If you release a player, he wasn't any good anyway. I feel that if you lose a unprotected player you should be able to recover an unprotected player using the same format that Cassidy just sent out. Let me know what you think. - Grant Coley

I would be fine with changing the new rule to Grant's idea, partly because it seems to make good sense and partly because finally there would be some change, even if not a major one, to the proposal I made that somehow became the rule without a single amendment until now! - David Meese

Hi guys. I just wanted to clarify something regarding some changes in the rules that will take place during the next draft. One of the things we voted on changing is to eliminate the the cap on the amount of the unprotected players a team can lose during the draft. Instead, we voted that when a team loses an unprotected player they can pull back one of their released players. A few owners have notified me that this will make the draft too long. I agree that if we have to contact a manager and ask him to pick which released player he wants to pull back everytime an unprotected player is chosen it may take forever. Instead we will work it like this:

When teams submit the released players list, the players should be listed in the order the owner wants them to be pulled back in the case an unprotected player is chosen off the roster. For example when I lose my first unprotected player, the draft coordinator will automatically pull back the player listed first on my released players list and make him ineligible for the draft. Its not as confusing as it sounds. The draft may a bit challenging the first year but I think after that the system will work quite well. Thanks. - Don Cassidy

Hi guys. Last week I forwarded Grants idea to change next year's draft rules to allow teams to pull back an unprotected player when one is chosen. This would be instead of pulling back a released player. The response to this suggestion was very positive and many managers wrote to me supporting it. Thus, unless anyone objects, we can change the rule. The new rule will read

"Any team that loses an unprotected player can reclaim another unprotected player, making him ineligible for the draft. "

As I stated earlier, when we hand in our unprotected lists, we can put the players in order of importance. When a team loses an unprotected player the draft coordinator will pull back the next highest player on the team's unprotected list. This way, no team will lose more than 5 unprotected players during any draft. Unless anyone objects, the rules will be changed shortly. Thanks. -Don Cassidy

FINAL ROSTERS AND TRADES

These should appear in the next ACTION. With the trade deadline only 6 days away as I write this, it seems repetitive to print rosters now and change them in a week's time.

- Jeff Lowe