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In the past two years, I've tried to combine injury reports, NFL transactions, and other data sources to determine if players were "available" for their team's NFL game for each week of the season. The advantage to this comprehensive approach is that even if a player was on the bench but active to play, he would be available in Sandbox. Unfortunately, this approach has proved to be time consuming and quite inaccurate in its implementation. I want to try something different this year but want to see if this new plan will negatively affect people in unexpected ways.
Proposal for player availability.
Sandbox weeks 1-15. If a player played in the NFL game he will be available in that week's Sandbox game. If a player didn't play, he would not be available in Sandbox that week.
Sandbox week 16. The same rule will apply, with the following exception: if a player played in NFL week 16 AND the player's team qualified for the playoffs AND the player played in the first playoff game, the player would be available in Sandbox week 16, even if the player did not play in NFL week 17. (In short, NFL "rested" players would be eligible for Sandbox week 16).
Sandbox Playoffs
1.If a player played in an NFL playoff game, they are Sandbox playoff eligible.
2.If a player was eligible in Sandbox week 16, they are playoff eligible.
3. If a player on a non-NFL playoff team was not eligible in Sandbox week 16, there is a chance they could become eligible in a playoff game. Odds of return shrink the longer the player was out at the end of the season.
4. Once a player becomes eligible for one Sandbox playoff game, they are eligible for all subsequent playoff games (no new injuries occur in the Sandbox playoffs).
Potential problems:
Maybe your starting QB was benched for a few games due to bad play. He wasn't injured, just benched. He would miss those games in Sandbox. Or, if your starter missed a few NFL games, and your back up actually played decently in the NFL but not the same weeks as your starter was out, you might get screwed over. If this is going to seriously hurt a team's chances of being competitive, we might try to do something to correct that for the QB position. Let me know.
Maybe one of your starting OL didn't start at the beginning of the year. He started playing in week 4 and was great. Even though he was healthy the first 3 weeks you wouldn't have him in Sandbox. Seems like a smaller problem than the QB position.
Most other decent players will at least get some playing time in most NFL games if they are healthy (Chiefs backup DL are an apparent exception), so it doesn't seem like this method of determining availability should penalize other positions too much. Let me know if I'm overlooking something.
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