I didn't actually end up selling in week 8. I started looking into it, then went on a bit of a tear, then slumped again, at which point I actually started in earnest. That was probably around week 12-13.
Mike, you're right about the challenges of selling early, but there's a first mover advantage that you have to consider as well. If you're going to sell, you're better off doing when you have the most options available, and when the trades you're making have the biggest impact on the buyers' bottom lines. As time passes, the prices for rentals goes down.
Have we? I don't remember this.
In addition to the E's this year (and I didn't follow his actual transactions closely), I recall several teams doing this last year. This may have been motivated in part by the perception that Matt winning was a foregone conclusion, or at least that the only team that could challenge him was the E's.
Matt, your small sample size empirical data lines up pretty well with what you'd expect*. For simplicity's sake, you can probably assume a 1/8 chance to win the title as a wild card (getting through 3 rounds at 50% chance to win); it's going to be lower than that, but how much lower exactly (due to the superiority of the higher seeds) is hard to say. Anyway, if you then assume that the potential seller in question is in a race with 3 other teams for their playoff spot, that goes to 1/24-ish (around 4%).
*You are doing the math wrong, though. 2/11 isn't the chance to win as a 5/6, because there are two such teams every year, and only one of them can win the title. If you want to look at them together, it's 2/22. It's still 5/22 to make the finals, though, because they can't face each other in the semis. If you plug 2/22 into chance to win the title instead of 1/8, you get a ~3% chance to win the title instead of ~4% in the scenario I outlined.
So if you're in that position and you're not confident that your team is any better than your current competitors, let alone the other playoff teams, and you have the opportunity to make trades that you think put you in a strong position to be a top-4 or so team the next year (or several years)... well, it's fair enough if you say that's not what you'd do, but I don't think it's fair to assume no one else would, and I'm not prepared to say it doesn't make sense. But if we devalue keepers, it will make less sense, which is part of what I'm aiming for with my proposal.
You're right that the Junior Playoffs idea would give teams that fall short a consolation prize. But the other thing it would do is give teams that are at that same decision point even MORE reason to make a big sell trade, as if they hit that sweet spot their team winds up that much more likely to be elite next year (without any offsetting increase in their chances this year).
Granted, most of what I don't like about that proposal (and most of the others) is the inelegance. I'm with Freeman in wanting to keep things simple and streamlined. Most of the ideas are more of the patch variety and tend to fail by that rubric.