Maintain integrity of a blind bid free agency?

[Duke Jackson]

Hi there,

We're creating a new salary cap league but hit a bit of a snag and was wondering if anyone might be able to offer some advice.
To fill out rosters before the new season, we want to implement a blind bid process where owners will submit a player and salary they're willing to pay.
But this process would include the people who are going to make the determination as well...commish, admin.

How do we keep the bids blind so that nobody can see them until it's time to make the decision? We don't want the commish seeing the bids before he makes his own. Other than maybe everyone just submitting an email at the exact same time so they're time stamped, might there be another way to do that? I thought about maybe using google forms or something but wasn't sure if you could put them on a timer where they couldn't be opened until a specific time.

Thanks.

[PenguinHunter]

I have a few ideas:

1) Is there a way to password protect documents on Google docs? If so this would work. everyone's documents gets submitted... then once they are submitted everyone will email the admin/commish the passwords.

2) The best way to do it is if everyone lives in the same city or close together... then have them print it and take everyone's hard copies together. Have a bit of a get together and get everyone's list submitted in person.

3) Obtain outside assistance from a co-worker or friend that is not part of the league. If there is someone that is willing to help that would be great. the added benefit of this would be that they could even put all the lists into a spreadsheet and then the comish and admin wouldn't know whose each list is when they are deciding. This would require a bit of work from someone but I think it would be fair and reduce any potential biases.

[MathCrusader]

My first thought is that you should probably just trust your commish (or else the league probably won't work anyways). But if security is a big issue for you guys, then the easiest way that I can think of is this:

- Everyone writes their selections in some format (probably Excel or something similar)
- Everyone password protects their file on their own computer (make sure you are password protecting using something standard so that everyone can unlock it later)
- Email the (password protected) file to everyone in the league
- After every team has emailed their file, then everyone should share their passwords and then you can all unlock everyone's files.

This may be more hassle than it's worth, though... and there may be problems if someone "accidentally" password protects their file with the wrong program or forgets their password, then they'll have access to everyone's files while they re-send their list--which leads to the possibility of them looking at lists and changing their file. To fix this, you can get everyone to send the password only to the commish first, then the commish unlocks the files and sends the unlocked files to everyone, then he can send his password to everyone so that everyone else unlocks his (in this system, only the commish is responsible for ensuring that he doesn't "forget" his password, but you have to trust that the commish won't look at the files until they're sure everyone's password works).

With Google Drive/Docs, you may be able to check the last time stamp that a file was edited, but I don't like that idea because if someone screws up, then there's no going back because everyone has already seen everyone's list--and what do you do then?!

In the end, you'll have to trust someone. If you all know each other and can get together, then that's obviously the best way so that you can see what each other are doing. There are other ways of doing it, as well. For example, I have done something similar before and we just sent the lists to a 3rd party that we all trusted and then that person emailed us all of the files once they were in.

Good luck! (And do let me know what you decide to do--I'm always interested in clever solutions to these problems)

[Duke Jackson]

Hey guys....definitely appreciate the input.

It's likely the requests will be coming to me and/or my buddy so hopefully I'm trustworthy lol...just wanted to add a layer of security. But I understand the necessary trust points you made too.

I really like the idea of sending to a neutral party....that person can then release all at once when it's time to process.

thank you....and I will update with what the final call was too

[Pengwin7]

Neutral party works well, and really... you just need them to do two steps:
1. Create a dummy (new) email address and a password of their choosing. Inform league members to email their bids to that email address.
2. On "Declare Day", that person can just let everybody know (via email, or text) the password to the collection email account.

Then, your whole league can log-in to same email account and review all the emails and timestamps.
People like to "see the source" rather than have to trust.
Every league GM will be able to see all the different times and email that came in.

[LawMan]

Neutral party works well, and really... you just need them to do two steps:
1. Create a dummy (new) email address and a password of their choosing. Inform league members to email their bids to that email address.
2. On "Declare Day", that person can just let everybody know (via email, or text) the password to the collection email account.

Then, your whole league can log-in to same email account and review all the emails and timestamps.
People like to "see the source" rather than have to trust.
Every league GM will be able to see all the different times and email that came in.

This is what I was thinking as well. Everyone emails to a central, new, password protected email account. on Declare Day everyone can open them all.

Although, if you are all in the same City an opening party would be pretty awesome too in my opinion.

This sounds like a pretty interesting idea, if we tried it in my league the mind-games on how much certain players were worth would be off the charts...

[lucafen4]

that team that decides to value bet everyone and doesn't win a single bid? is it possible?

[Duke Jackson]

I love the central email location. I think it'll be fun too...finding out who you got.

I do think it's possible someone bids and loses out but that's part of the strategy I guess.

[stevegamer]

If you are using Excel for bids, this is easy. The goal is to have the bids be sealed, yet verifiably in.

1. Set up a sheet with a blank first page, and a second page where bids get put in with team name as tab title.
2. Set it up password protected with the default password chosen by the league.
3. Everyone enters the bids, hides that sheet and changes the spreadsheet password.
4. You then email the sheet to the person doing the work to open the bids.
- if they are neutral, they get the passwords to open all spreadsheets, move bid tabs into one main multi-tab sheet, and send it out to everyone.
- if they are not neutral, they publicly send their bid sheet out at the deadline to everyone. Then they get the passwords from people and open the sheets and do the work.

The site you are using might have this sort of functionality, I know it existed at one time for fantasy baseball.