2017 Off-Season Update

[Ben C.]

Yes, I saw that line earlier today. But here is the full statement you made when introducing the poll, which was labeled "UDFA Bonus Cap." (emphasis added by me)

There was some frustration expressed last off-season regarding undrafted free agents and the bidding wars over them that can get out of control. Sometimes it's something where the smarter teams avoid the most ridiculous situations while letting other teams learn from their mistakes the hard way, but there was also some discussion about ways to address rules to improve situations.

In the NFL there's a signing bonus cap for a team's undrafted free agent signings. In 2014, for example, teams got $80,362 for total UDFA signing bonuses. Sign as many undrafted players as you want, but their combined signing bonuses couldn't exceed that limit.

We previously did an off-season rules discussion poll on that which went 50/50:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1193

It would require building of some additional programming tools, but assuming that's doable this poll will gauge interest in a new mini-game within the off-season team building game that treats undrafted free agents differently than other free agents right after the draft, where our sim teams can't spend unlimited amounts on ridiculous contracts for undrafted players unlikely to even make their NFL teams, but instead would force sim teams to use more strategy to decide which UDFAs they wanted to prioritize within their signing bonus limit amount.

One thing to keep in mind is that UDFA contracts started to get larger with some NFL teams circumventing that with salary guarantees, etc. and who knows how the UDFA contracts will shape up in reality this year.

The league believes this could be an exiting new addition to off-season team building game play, and end all the annual complaints about overspending on UDFAs by instead turning that into a new bidding event with it's own rules that attempted to mirror NFL restrictions on UDFAs that would result in more realistic UDFA contracts.

If this proposed change is supported, it would only go into effect this off-season after the draft if programming could be updated to allow for that. All UDFAs would get a standard rookie contract salaries, with a signing bonus amount based upon competitive bidding among teams that have an equal limit on the amount of signing bonuses they can give to UDFAs. After June 1st, any UDFAs that didn't get a bid in that new UDFA bidding process would turn into normal free agents on the market like usual for the rest of the season.

In addition to being in the title, you refer to the signing bonus six times in the explanation and mention the salary limit once. That's why it was confusing and seemed more like you just wanted to put a cap on the signing bonuses.

[Troy S]

Understandable that there might be some confusion, and I agree and will work on clarifying more as I can. But in this case actually I wasn't quite sure of the exact details 100% until I got it working last night as I had to make some adjustments for things to work as hoped. Wish things were different with this new element, but like a lot of things throughout this work-in-progress and always hopefully improving league, we take a new step and then evaluate how it went and adjust as needed for the next step. We'll try to work on being clearer when we can, but sometimes new features will be a little bit of trial and error toward improvement.

The focus is/was definitely on the signing bonus total being capped, even though all getting a standard rookie contract was mentioned in the details of that. Without that, the cap on tiny SB in comparison becomes somewhat meaningless in terms of creating competition within SB cap limits and replicating the realistic NFL UDFA environment if massive unrealistic annual salary offers blow any kind of small SB element of bids out of the water. Then there really isn't any strategy or cap if it's just keep raising salary unrealistically higher and higher. That didn't accomplish anything in terms of hopes for the new feature. It always part of my proposal (even if not overly emphasized) that we'd get away from those old unrealistic offers and toward more standard rookie salary deals for UDFAs with fair competition within a rookie sb cap. Perhaps I assumed too much in the understanding of the intentions of the new cap to keep UDFA bids more realistic and within a capped bidding environment.

I'm still not quite sure how it'll look going forward into the future. Hoping to learn a lot in the coming weeks for how it works out.

My expectation is that things might either:

- Just be tweaked slightly, primarily involving the bid score with these smaller SBs. I had to change how UDFA bid score worked in testing counter-offers with these smaller amounts. It was easiest to implement efficiently last night to swap out the bid score requirement to a lower amount of bid score improvement just for UDFA bids to not require massive counter offers. I think perhaps we might need to tweak that more still, but I moved the bid score counter requirement from 5% higher regularly to more than half as much at 2% for UDFA counters. Also allowed people to do some small salary increase in the bidding so long as it stayed within rookie amounts lower than veteran minimum, in part because of some confusion yesterday about this also including rookie salary levels and not unlimited salary. That also seemed realistic as increasingly NFL teams are doing a little more with annual salary to entice UDFAs. In reality that's mostly guarantees which we don't have outside of SB, but allows our sim teams to also give a little more in salary for their counter bids.

- Or simplify things a little more toward original proposal where all UDFAs have standard rookie salary (450K) and competition just on bidding up signing bonuses toward equal caps. I'd have to do more of a re-working of the bidding and counter approvals just for UDFAs, but it could be something like salary always stays the same and SB counter increases must be at least 10K or something.

- Or maybe do away with it, but I really think it's an improvement on several levels so we'll likely tweak before going backwards. The league doesn't want UDFAs to insane contracts as we got sometimes in the past with fake money. The league does want more competitive balance and not just the smart teams signing up all the UDFAs without limit. The league does want realism with UDFAs under reasonable salaries and like NFL teams that can't scoop up all the UDFAs but have to work within a SB limit and prioritize who they go after. And the league does want more opportunities for strategic game play, not just dumb brute force out-bidding people with more overall cap space so signing a lot of unrealistic deals for UDFAs.

[Ulrich82]

Two points:

1.) Troy, in one of your previous posts you mention that teams have ways of getting around this, mostly by offering more guaranteed money on the salary side. This year, NE gave Harvey Langi a $15k signing bonus and guaranteed $100k of his salary. Let's be clear, for us, that is equivalent to a $115k signing bonus. Teams do this annually to get around the SB cap. We've invented a system to try to mimic the NFL, but we lack the same freedoms the NFL has to implement such a system.

2.) I want to start by saying "Thank you" to Troy for putting this site together and all the work that goes into it. I appreciate that it's a labor of love, and developing features have to be weighed against the cost of your time. However, I don't think anything not finalized until 9pm should go into place the next morning. If the details were still in the air that late, then we should have scrapped it for this year, communicated the change, gotten feedback from members, and consider implementing it next year. It's clear to me from the message boards that a lot of people did not understand the system being put in place. Robroach has been asking the same question on this since it first came up, and myself and other people have dismissed it because we did not understand the full effect of this.

For example, a few things that I think we needed to consider:
1.) scrapping limited bids for UDFA with this new system
2.) Much smaller minimum increases
3.) Instead of forcing ourselves to a $100k limit to mimic the NFL incorrectly, maybe we should have set the limit to $500k to fold in the guaranteed salaries that teams offer every year. Then we get the best of both worlds. A reasonable cap that also mimics how the NFL actually works.

[Troy S]

Appreciate that, but disagree on some points. I proposed a change to this system. It's a game-within-a-game in the NFL in reality with that UDFA cap, and that's GREAT for my vision of what this league is based in reality and around team-building competitions. As I learned about this in the NFL, I always thought it was great for here. Didn't get enough support first time we discussed it in the past, but got more support this year and as such we announced it was coming months ago and giving it a try.

When voted in March, I mentioned we'd implement it if I was able to get it in place. Had to delay the start of UDFA by a day, but was able to implement it. Whether it was completed 5 months ago or 5 minutes before it started mostly just impacts me behind the scenes, and I'm all for it and advancing tools that I believe are good overall. As it impacts others, one way or another at some point this offseason no matter what exact date ended up being whether yesterday, today, tomorrow or a month from now, if it was doable it was going to be implemented as voted and announced previously. The only question was when, and I pushed to get it going as soon as the draft ending as I could once working. One reason beyond that's what we always do putting UDFAs on the market soon after the draft is that we're about to head into the quiet time and when GMs take a little break until the regular season so wanted to get this going as close to the draft ending as I could. This really isn't a wait around operation. It's a fun, free league, where we make tweaks to game play almost every year. We try things and adjust as needed to keep improving ahead. I tend to side with expressions about some over-emphasize the importance of players nobody drafted as we've seen some ridiculous things about UDFAs in past seasons, so it's also a good area to do a little experimenting to see if game play can be improved without it dramatically shattering anything with players who mostly won't have huge impacts on average. I understand some aren't for it, but it was supported in a league vote prior to this off-season and we aimed to implement it if possible.

We might have delayed things again if it wasn't working, which wouldn't have been a big deal perhaps, but I had already delayed and it was working in time as intended (at least for now with future improvements possible) to not have to delay again.

There are some suggested adjustments that I agree with, or at least could be part of discussions about potential improvements ahead. To your list:

1) Unlimited bid for UDFAs. Not having the always present bids per day would be a much bigger change to me, and would lean in the direction of less fair to those who weren't online immediately at the start. Limiting people to 5 bids allows others to jump on later without everything already decided immediately if bids are unlimited. It's something to think about, and I get the frustration perhaps in putting in 5 bids and then having to wait, but lots of cons I think for people who sign on later tonight if people were bidding unlimited all day otherwise.

2) Smaller minimum raises. Some really complain about being nickled-and-dimed on counter bids otherwise and we mostly raise the bar for counter-bids each year instead of lowering them, but I agree there will have to be some tweaks to the counter-offers for UDFAs like we tweak free agency a little most every year. Like many said, though, I don't think the higher barrier now is stopping a lot of counters right now, though, as I've been countered three times myself already and I expect we'll have a lot of counters still but I do tend to agree it probably should be adjusted ahead.

3) I think increasing our cap to 500K in your example because of our differences from NFL guaranteed salaries might make some sense as one of the tweaks to consider for the future, sure. I added in the ability to raise salary slightly in counter offers as a way to reflect some of that, but a different approach of raising the overall guaranteed SB cap could make sense.

[vikingfan]

You all need to relax. The determining factor is guaranteed money. They are all 3 year standard deals of 465K, 555K, and 645K. No normal team in their right mind offers anymore. Most players get no signing bonus. Teams adding 18 players usually give 4-5 a bonus.

[jerrydlux]

Definitely need to take a step back and remember we are dealing with UDFAs. It's been said before but 256 picks went by. This isn't peak free agency and sim impacting players are being discussed. Let's remember to keep it fun.

[Jared A]

I love the new set up. I've already blown most of my SB money. This is a great way to ensure that teams don't sign 30 UDFA's... just because they have the cap space.

[jerrydlux]

I would imagine there is also a date when the UDFA just fall into the regular FA pool...so you just need to stay active and be ready.

[Ben C.]

I love the new set up. I've already blown most of my SB money. This is a great way to ensure that teams don't sign 30 UDFA's... just because they have the cap space.

It's certainly interesting. I haven't used any of my SB money yet. I got outbid on the two guys I offered a SB on, and now I've just moved on to guys that won't cost me as much.

[Royce R]

Liking the new system, ive been outbid on 2 guys. I haven't read everything that was posted before me yet but will say it might be cool to have smaller bid increase needed for this portion of FA. Also backloading deals is impossible on these guys due to maximums and minimums.