2024 RULES: UDFA bidding

[Goodell]

Once our college drafts are over, undrafted free agents (UDFAs) hit the free agency market. Last year I believe we'd already transitioned away from peak free agency to regular season free agency mode (more privacy on bids to avoid others cherry-picking off other people's research, no signing soon filtering). The only way you'd know a UDFA had bids was if you clicked on their bid page. There are some other UDFA signing rules like a fixed overall signing bonus budget and realistic limits on bids.

It may have been different in some other years depending upon if free agency pages were switched away from peak mode or not yet, and overall scheduling of free agency and draft timing.

But what would you prefer? A more open information UDFA bidding season or more private to reward those who are better at researching those players and not notifying everyone who has bids or not? We'll try to hard code that more for consistency year-to-year if strong support one way or the other.

[Goodell]

There is more support for UDFA happening in the more private regular season mode of free agency, where it is more difficult to cherry-pick other GMs research on players to bid on. We typically switch to that after peak free agency period.

We'll update free agency tools accordingly tomorrow.

With all the drafts concluding by tomorrow, we'll set the start of UDFA signings to be Monday morning at 9AM ET.

For undrafted free agents (UDFA) the most you can offer is a veteran minimum salary and 100k signing bonus max. All teams have a 100k budget for any UDFA signing bonuses, so you have to be strategic with bids if you want to spread that 100k around to many players or all in on one. Once you use up that 100K, you won't be able to counter-bid for any other UDFAs with signing bonus offers. If you know you want to sign someone not in the draft pool, send me a pm.