If it were done all at once, you could only reasonably expect to win one or two. You couldn't put bids in on all of the good ones, you would end up getting none.

I am in a hockey pool in which we have a "free agency" process that works a lot like this. Good players often slip through the cracks.

Sure you could. Bid the minimum on all. You may not get any or you might get lucky. Twice.

I would try that for sure. Minimum plus a dollar that is :) I've gotten some very cheap free agents in my hockey pool that way

See? You and I both know that good IFA aren't going to "slip thru the cracks." You pretended, for a moment, that they could but you knew it wouldn't happen.

It's possible that they could, so a mechanism for if it happened would be nice. patrickm885, I volunteer Yastrzemski world to try a BETA version of this IFA process out on. I'm sure my troops would go for it.

we have 15 members in our hockey pool. I'm not sure that a 2006 Chris Drury (or whenever it was the he was a free agent) would have slipped through if we had 32.

Ok, the crappy IFAs that nobody signs after 3 years could become minor league FA.

The current process is not broken. You can either bid on the best guys that come out early and blow your wad or you can wait to bid on the later guys and hopefully get more than one at a bargain. The problem is the tankers that alot a ton of cash to salary and transfer it to prospects while their ML team sucks. If you are in a good world with a good commish this shouldnt happen for multiple seasons. Right now everyone has a fair shot at IFA's depending on their budget strategy. Why not keep it the way it is, enforce league requirements, boot tankers, and quit ******** about it?

Because people like to *****. Kinda like you like to ***** about people ********.

I thought we were having a nice, productive conversation. It is my opinion that the IFA process could be improved, so there.

Yes I agree it could be improved. But the process of how it works is not broken. If there could be something put in place to deter tanking that would be great. But there are going to be good leagues that don't have this problem that are going to be effected as well as those that seem to have this problem. It seems to me like some guys on here are more concerned with fixing the broken leagues than they are in maintaining the already good leagues. Why don't those guys with the problems just join a good league and leave the bad leagues with tankers to everyone who likes to tank? Sooner or later some of those tankers will stop tanking and start winning and there will be fewer tankers. Sounds simple but it just might work.

in my opinion, the IFA process doesn't work well at all. It would be better if it were considered broken, then at least steps would be taken to fix it.

When you've got people dropping their IFA scouting to zero, because they know (correctly) that there is no use even trying to sign an IFA if they don't have at least $20 million to spare, it's not working properly IMO. I think it would be good to devise a system that would make it so that all owners feel that they have at least a shot at getting some talent out of the process, and also be able to afford to put some money towards ML FAs as well. As it is, there is a direct incentive for rebuilding teams to not spend a penny on ML free agents, because the current system allows for the best IFAs to always go to the highest bidder, no matter what. As mentioned earlier, this leads to good ML talent being unsigned, thereby diluting the ML talent level, and allowing for the creation of low-budget juggernaut type teams loaded with multiple franchise players.

i didnt read this entire post, so forgive me if this is stupid, but wouldnt an easier fix be to put a minimum cap on player payroll? say 50 million