Practice Squad
Practice Squads are now on the site! The commish can turn them on by going to the roster settings page and choosing the number of practice squad spots. These work a little bit like the IR spots in that they don’t count towards the total roster number and are just in addition to them. Here’s how the rest of the practice squad will work:
Adding PS Players
- Players can’t be added to the practice squad prior to or during the auction, it’s exclusively post-auction/in-season. This of course means that there are no multi-year contracts on the practice squad
- Players can only be added though the same process as normal FAAB adds, except now on the Add/Drop page there’s a radio button to select ‘Active Roster’ or ‘Practice Squad’ for those players that are eligible.
- To mimic the NFL as closely as we could, a player must have been in the NFL for two full seasons or less (so players going into their third season are eligible, those going into their fourth aren’t). We also added a ‘Practice Squad’ filter on the Player/FA page so you can see who all is available that is eligible.
Activate Player
To activate a player on your practice squad, you simply go to your lineup page and select ‘Activate’ from the dropdown menu. This will pop-up a confirmation screen that tells you the contract terms of activation and you can select to continue or cancel. You do need to have an open active roster spot for this option to appear. There is no method for deactivating a player from the active roster to the practice squad. The only way to add players to the practice squad is listed above. This also means that rookies that were drafted in your league can’t be put on the practice squad.
Poaching Players
In the NFL, Practice Squad players can be signed by any team to their active roster so we naturally built something in as well. You can attempt to poach a practice squad player from someone else’s roster to your active roster from that team’s contracts page (can’t however poach a player that is locked for the week). Click the ‘poach’ button and then you’ll submit what is basically a FAAB bid to acquire that player. However, the team that currently owns them does get the right to match your request first. When you submit that request, it will send an email to the current owner of the player stating that someone is trying to poach the player and the contract terms. They then have your FAAB Wait period league setting worth of time to activate the player to their own active roster. If they do that, the poach request fails and if they don’t then the poach request will process.
Off-Season
Practice Squad players will be cleared off your rosters in February when we roll the site over for the new season. They are not eligible to be tagged or extended in anyway.