We appreciate the input.
As we were conceiving of the game, Kevin and I were worried about long periods of inactivity where there wasn't much to do, causing people to lose interest. This period would coincide with the NFL season. So we decided to put free agency during the NFL season to keep people involved with Sandbox during those months. Both of us are kind of excited about the format of free agency, where the players will be rolled out slowly over the course of the NFL season. It adds a bit of a wild card to the strategy as you have to weigh the risk of passing on a player available early in hopes of getting perhaps a better player later on. Also, if one of your stars gets injured in the NFL, in-season free agency give some hope of signing a replacement. We also want to complete the rookie draft before the NFL season starts, so as to really test people's ability to manage an NFL team, so by doing free agency first, it would delay the start of the rookie draft.
We are going to roll with our current plans this year. If it doesn't work well, we will look into tweaking things next year.