2013 RULES: RFAs to UFAs

[Goodell]

Currently, if you have a free agent with 3 years or less experience (a restricted free agent) you have to tender an offer to the player which allows you to match any offers on that player or receive compensation based upon the amount tendered. If you decide the player isn't worth any tender amount, you currently have to cut the player and make him an unrestricted free agent on the open market.

First-round tender $2.879 million
Second-round tender $2.023 million
Original round tender $1.323 million
Right of first refusal tender $1.323 million

There have been suggestions to also allow another option of letting that RFA become unrestricted but without the team having to cut the player, thus keeping him with that home team affiliation and allowing his original team to have the usual unlimited bidding rights they have for all their other UFAs with expired contracts.

In the past, it didn't seem like a big deal and if a player wasn't worth the smallest tender then the thinking was he probably wasn't a player the team had interest in keeping anyway so they should just cut him if not worth minimum tender.

However, as tender amounts have risen over the years and teams becoming even more strategic about every available roster spot, it's probably not difficult to adjust the programming to allow another choice for RFAs (to have them be UFAs with team affiliation) and I don't believe it's against any NFL rules and is somewhat seen in reality where this year we've seen at least one RFA not be tendered and re-sign for less than the tender amount with original team.

Not a huge change here, just would allow teams an extra opportunity to keep young players even if they deem them not worthy of an RFA tender by giving them unlimited bidding rights for the RFA turned UFA.

An argument against it might be the lowest tender is just "rights of first refusal" which is essentially what we have anyway with a team's own UFAs with the unlimited bidding for keeping your own, so a team would be getting essentially that rights of first refusal still (keeping him as their own UFA) without having to put in that lowest tender amount.

[charlie813brown]

I think right of first refusal and unlimited bids are not the same thing. First refusal means after bidding has stopped, you can agree to that price or not. But home team bidding, means i have to bid, which can be used to drive the price up by other teams.

[tino38]

Some guys would much rather just bid on someone in FA rather than using a RFA on someone