The League

I asked this question to MFL support because several NFL UDFA's this year actually may have some value and we may want to draft them but they are not in the database. Their official position is that since the vast majority of UDFA's never actually make an NFL team they wait until late August to see who sticks before adding them to the database.

However they did say they will review them next week and may add a few of these rookies.

In the meantime, if we want to draft one that isn't in the database the commish can manually add the player and then if they get added to the database later on the commish can remove that custom player and then add the "real" player to our roster.

However I just noted something in the constitution:

# Only Rookies that are on currently in the MFL data base may be selected in the rookie draft.

So I take it this means that UDFA's cannot be drafted in our rookie draft if they aren't in the database yet?
What happens if middle of next week a few get added and thus those with picks left could then draft them but those with earlier picks may have wanted to but couldn't because they weren't in the database?

I know it's pretty late to bring this up but could we just contact the commish to manually add (and draft) an UDFA rookie if a team wishes to draft him so that it's fair to everyone?

I remember trying to get BJGE added to the player pool in June or July of 08 to no avail.

That rule has been in place since our league began for a couple reasons, as commish I didn't want to deal with manually adding players, and it is my understanding that you still can't delete custom players. Secondly trying to keep track of "placeholder" players wasn't something I really wanted to have to deal with having done so in another league before. That said our league had smaller rosters and only a 2 round rookie draft at the time we began.

I personally still don't think its necessary and I would rather not deal with it but I'm not super opposed to it if we wanted to change the rule for next season. As it stands now though, only players that are in the MFL database are available to be drafted. Its possible that they could add players during the draft but that's just the way it is for now.

I wouldn't mind amending the rule in the future to say that only drafted Rookies are eligible for the rookie draft and all UDFA's would be considered FA's in our league as soon as they are entered into the database. That would eliminate the problem that they get added in the middle of the draft and save us any additional admin work.

braven112 wrote: I wouldn't mind amending the rule in the future to say that only drafted Rookies are eligible for the rookie draft and all UDFA's would be considered FA's in our league as soon as they are entered into the database. That would eliminate the problem that they get added in the middle of the draft and save us any additional admin work.

This is probably the best thing. That way if they are added during the draft they can't be brought up. But when they are added to the database someone could bring them up in the auction.