Fantasy 'team' competition for 2014

Just had a quick look at this years calendar and I think the plan is now to open the game for entries during the TDU, try and drum up support during the Tours of Oman, Qatar and Algarve in February then run a trial event during Paris-Nice at the start of March.

Official calendar (depending on what gets included in the fantasy game) would look something like:

Classics (mid March to mid April):
Milan-Sanremo
Gent-Wevelgem
E3 Harelbeke
Ronde van Vlaanderen
Paris-Roubaix
Amstel Gold Race
La Flèche Wallonne
Liège - Bastogne - Liège

Giro d'Italia (May)

Tour de France (July)

Vuelta a Espana (September)

Classics wise we'll just include whatever ends up in the game so stuff like E3 may/may not be in there but we'll see.

Another option may be to include any women's races in the game as a separate event that runs all year long?

Seems to be a little bit of interest so I might push ahead and try and formalise some simple rules.

Out of interest, what races would everyone like to use?

I'm basically thinking:

- Classics (as a whole, so MSR through Paris-Roubaix all the way to L-B-L etc) as one competition so you'd fix your 'squad' of players for this entire competition
- Giro d'Italia
- Tour de France
- Vuelta a Espana
- World Championships (road race, individual time trial and team time trial)

What do you think? Want to keep it simple, stick to the bigger races, and make sure that it doesn't become too onerous for the captains to pick teams. Anything else that stands out for you as a 'must have' race?

Plan is that each 'team' would set up a private league just for team members to join, that'd allow the captains to easily see race scores etc and mean that individual team members would have pretty much zero additional work (other than to let captain/teammates know when they want to be excluded from the racing).

Depending on take up a race squad will be made up of 5-9 players with a couple spare to allow rotation. Ideally I'd like to have a minimum of 5 separate teams so if we get 40 players it'll probably be 5 teams of 8 players and a race squad would be 6 players per race.

More players would result in either bigger teams or more teams.

Make sense?

I'd considered either a draft style comp among the captains, random pick or some kind of 'salary capped' system where your team can recruit anyone but there's a limit to how many players you could have over a certain overall score. Either way there needs to be some system in place to stop all of the top players just ending up on one team.

The easiest method may be a random pick but with a seeding system. Based on overall or grand tour performance we'd seed the fantasy players and put them into groups so that each team can only have one from the top seed group, one from the second seeding group etc to spread out the 'best' players across each team.

I had also considered a post Tour transfer window where you can drop non-active players and pick up others not attached to a team but I think that would depend on whether it was needed at the time.

Oh, and based on Ghedebrav's terminology I'd possibly suggest two rules on selection:

1. Every player in a team must feature in the squad for at least one race
2. Every player must be left out of the squad for at least one race

That means that everyone gets to be in the squad for at least one race and nobody can be included throughout meaning you have to tactically choose when to pick/drop your players.

Yeah, I got in a bit of a mix using the terms 'players' and 'teams' so its not the clearest explanation.

Other than having a handful of players to 'run' the teams there shouldn't be a great deal of extra work needed, you just join a league for your team and then I do a bit of maths after each race.

The team 'owners' or 'captains' would be the only ones with any responsibilities, they would have to 'pick' their team ahead of each race.

On the other hand, we could just have 9 players per team and each one competes in each race. Whatever people are happiest with.

Yeah, it'd only run on free to play races to try and open it up to more people. Grand tours and free entry classics.

If it wasn't clear then try this as an example using three men teams as an example:

Team 1, drheaton, Gkam, Dave Atkinson
Team 2, wig_billy, TERatcliffe, Stumps
Team 3, Enrique, livestrongnick, JAndrewHill

We'd use some combination of each players scores over the race to determine which 'team' wins the race so either sum of each players total score, sum of of the middle scores (excludes the best and worst to avoid one player carrying a team etc) or something along those lines, scoring is open to debate.