Rule changes for the upcoming season.
DT UPDATED RULES
There will be no games played during Opening Round
Competition Costs
- Entry Fee: $20 per coach ($360 total)
- Admin: $30 for UF
- Premier: $250
- Runner-Up: $80
Key Dates
- Trade Period - Saturday February 17 9am AEST to Sunday March 3 6pm AEST
- Keeper Deadline - Sunday March 3 9pm AEST
- Draft Begins - Monday March 4, 9am AEST*
- Season begins - Thursday March 14 (Round 1)
- Mid Season Trade Period - Rounds 12 to 15 (the bye rounds)
Bye Round Rules
For Rounds 2, 3, 5 and 6
- Opening Round Scores will be utilised regardless of whether they are injured or suspended. As long as they played in the Opening Round, they are fine to be selected and their opening round score will count towards that rounds games.
For Rounds 12, 13, 14 and 15
- A player that is injured or suspended during the bye week can still be selected as long as they played the week before.
- Bye scoring will be a players season average.
Injury List Rules & List Sizes
- You can only hold 30 players on your list. There will be no LTIs, they must be managed within your list.*
*Coaches need to be mindful of this to ensure they are naming a full team weekly.
Team Selection Rules
- There will be rolling lockouts every week (just like DT). You are free to adjust your lineup throughout the weekend.
- We will be going to a 5 forwards, 7 midfielders, 1 ruckman and 5 defenders team setup with 4 bench players selected per week.*
*Coaches need to sort their lists out to accomodate for this.
Free Agency Rules
- The waiver system will no longer be used.
- All players will become free agents and are able to be bid on as per previous F/A rules.
- FAs will be held the night before the first game of every round (including round 1) to give all coaches the opportunity to see team selections and fill any gaps they have for the upcoming round.
Refer to the below link for the further info.
Ladder Positions
- It will be as per normal, however, instead of using percentage as a tiebreaker, the ‘points for’ will be used.*
*this should smooth out any lucky / favourable scheduling from playing teams out of form.
Draft Time Limits
- For the first 5 rounds, the time limit will be 12 hours flat from the time of the last pick.
- From round 6 onwards, the time limit is reduced to a 5 hours during the day.
A typical day is considered 8am to 11pm. During a regular day you have 5 hours, but if your pick comes up at 8pm, you have until 11am the next day to take your pick. Obviously, that should rarely be the case as long as you check in three times through your day. - Whenever possible, send someone some contingencies if you’re expecting to be away from Blitz for a long period of time.
Not Attempting to Field a Full team Rules:
Not attempting to field a full team is the following:
- Not fielding 5 forwards or 5 defenders in your 18.
- Not naming players selected in their AFL teams as your emergency. Even if they are picked as emergencies in their AFL teams, they should at least make your emergency list. You shouldn’t be taking 0s and having players outside your 22 scoring when they could have been named as emergencies.
- Due to the lack of midfielders and rucks, these positions will be dealt with extremely leniently.
However, if one is available in the FA pool (that is selected in their AFL’s team at the time of FA selection) and you neglect to fill your gap, you are effectively not attempting to field a full team. If one is selected before your pick, you are granted leniency.
A few things of note:
- We do not expect coaches to delist their premium players who are injured. So some discretion will be given for teams with injury riddles.
- If you have bench players that are languishing at lower levels and under performing, we expect these players to be thrown into the FA pool. If they are smashing it, it’s fair enough to hold onto them. There will be some discretion here, but it’ll be up to the coach to put forward the defence that the player is of value and shouldn’t be included in the FA pool.
- Some leniency will be provided during the elongated rounds when the last game/s of the round teams do not come out until very late in the round.
Example: Player X plays on Sunday but Monday games are yet to be released. You have Players A, B & C expecting to be selected for Monday’s game but want Player X’s score in the midfield. Players A, B & C are expected to play in the forward line, but due to the rolling lockout, you may play this position short on the field if one of them isn’t selected.
How are we alerted?
The admin group don’t have time to scan every team, every week and try to decipher whether coaches are not attempting to field a full team. So we need coaches to call it out and alert us.
- it’s up to all coaches to look at their opposition (or other teams if you like) that week and alert the admin team of any behaviour that looks like their opposition is not attempting to field a full team. Please sent a PM to @You_Shall_Be_Smoten, @Allblack and @Blummers32.
What happens next:
- We deliberate as an admin group and consider whether a warning should be required.
- If we believe a warning is required, we will PM the coach separately and advise of the warning.
- The coach will have the opportunity to ‘explain themselves’.
What are the penalties?
- Each coach will have 2 warnings without any further punishment.
- Once a coach reaches their third warning, their earliest draft pick will drop 5 spots.
- For every warning after that, your earliest draft pick will drop a further 5 spots.
One thing of note:
- Warnings are reset every year, so every coach start at 0 from the first week of games.
- We may choose to bypass the warnings in the last two rounds of the season.
Using empty spots on the field as bench loopholes
- AFL Fantasy does not replace empty spots on the field with bench scores. We encourage the use of blank spots as loopholes to gamble on a bench players scores, so admin will override aadjust the scores accordingly to replace the bench score with a blank spot on the field.
Any other rules will be added in this post through the season.