NFBC Message Boards

"9. Bidding Time Frame: The bidding process starts just prior to Opening Day and ends at the completion of Week 26 (there is no new FAAB period if there is a regular-season tie-breaker game). Bids will be accepted on the league web site from Monday at 3 p.m. ET until Sunday at 7 p.m. ET in each of these weeks. If you are submitting by phone, you must submit your bids by 5 p.m. on Friday. Rosters will be updated by 7 p.m. ET on Sunday with the results of all successful bids and starting lineups for the upcoming week must be finalized five minutes before each game every Monday."



These are the rules. My question is why a phone- in gets cut off at 5 P.M. on friday? After what we have seen the last two weeks these rules have become a joke. Greg, you need to get the brain trust together and think of a fix. At least if you keep Stats.

Originally posted by Walla Walla:

"9. Bidding Time Frame: The bidding process starts just prior to Opening Day and ends at the completion of Week 26 (there is no new FAAB period if there is a regular-season tie-breaker game). Bids will be accepted on the league web site from Monday at 3 p.m. ET until Sunday at 7 p.m. ET in each of these weeks. If you are submitting by phone, you must submit your bids by 5 p.m. on Friday. Rosters will be updated by 7 p.m. ET on Sunday with the results of all successful bids and starting lineups for the upcoming week must be finalized five minutes before each game every Monday."



These are the rules. My question is why a phone- in gets cut off at 5 P.M. on friday? After what we have seen the last two weeks these rules have become a joke. Greg, you need to get the brain trust together and think of a fix. At least if you keep Stats. John, I'm not sure there is a fault in the rules. I think I know where the fault lies and hopefully we have that solved now. But I'll address your concerns as well.



The reason we have phone-in availability for lineups is for folks who don't have Internet access. We allow that for folks who may have Internet problems or no Internet access and they can call STATS' customer service department and we'll set their lineup or changes. The customer service department for that works Monday through Friday during regular business hours, same as KP's customer service department.



Now you can reach STATS' customer service department on weekends and they will try to help. But as some guys have found out, they aren't specifically there for the NFBC on weekends and they may not be able to set your lineup changes for you, which is why we make the cutoff Friday at 5 p.m. in our rules. So it's best to e-mail your requests into the NFBC site or Tom or me, or better yet call my cell phone, which several folks did when there are problems on the weekend.



The glitch in the free agent system started yesterday afternoon and slowed down the process, but it really drained the process during the last hour of free agency. We alerted STATS and this time the problem was found. We allowed folks to e-mail me their free agent requests and then kept free agency open an hour longer this week to enter all of those requests manually. We also fixed the problem after shutting down free agency at 7:00 and STATS is now confident that this won't happen again. I have no idea what the problem was, but I've been assured they know what was slowing down our site the last two weeks and it worked perfectly after we opened it again and manually entered the changes.



The FAAB deadline is 7 p.m. EST each Sunday. But we had no choice last night except to extend it briefly to enter all of the FAAB bids that were requested to us and it obviously allowed some other folks to still get their free agent bids in this week. Nobody gained an advantage and no winning bids were announced ahead of time. It just took longer to work everything out and many folks suffered through an hour or more of a very slow system.



We apologize again for the inconvenience this Sunday and will stay on top of it again. You can see that Tom and I were both in connection with our players and with STATS all last night and it wasn't any fun for us, either. But like I said, STATS feels they have found the problem and hopefully the last few free agent periods will go as smoothly as the first 17 did. Admittedly, the last two weeks haven't been fun, but we did what we could to fix the problem and still allow everyone to get their free agent bids in.



We'll update the rules where needed, but in this case the rules weren't the problem. The system was the problem.