2021 RULES: Suggestions

[Goodell]

Now that the 2020-2021 football season is over... and whew I am happy to not have to sim any more games for a while... we can get on with the business of off-season rules discussions.

For those new or who need a reminder, now that the football season is over all transactions are frozen and teams can't do anything until a new league year starts. Before we start a new season, we have a group discussion with votes about possible changes to things. Once changes have been decided and we transfer all the financial information for a new season, then we'll start up the new season. Usually that's after the NFL starts up their own new league year in March and after they start their own free agency.

Reply in this thread (or send me a PM if you prefer) with any suggestions on changes for next sim season. We'll start up some voting on bigger topics to see how most players feel about certain things. How everyone thinks is very important and we want to hear everyone's suggestions and opinions on changes, and often we go with what most people want. But also note that it isn't quite a 100% democracy. We have certain founding principles dedicated to NFL realism and also have some constraints on what is possible or not overall.

I'll start with a couple smaller things that I made note of during the season. We'll likely implement these minor changes unless there are strong reactions against them.

- Cleaning up the free agency pool after decades of playing here and adding thousands of undrafted free agents each year. Just will take some time and effort.

- Part of that would include removing retired players (even recently retired players) from the list of players eligible to sign in free agency. Just not realistic for retired players to sign deals with new sim teams and almost never play for them. Will make the free agency lists cleaner, easier to find players, and more realistic signings. No retired player could be signed even if they un-retire until our league also marks them for un-retirement and makes available in free agency again once they come back in reality.

- We've tried playoff averages a couple different ways over the years from dividing everyone's totals by 16 games (unrealistically hindering players who miss any time to injury) to how we do it now on exact per game average. Small sample extreme averages are rare, but when they pop up on playoff teams can be less than ideal. For example, a practice squad RB who played one game in week 17 when starters sat with big garbage time stats gets a high average throughout the playoffs. We've tried different approaches, but maybe a mixture works best where we keep the exact per game average for almost everyone except those rare cases. Wouldn't be too difficult for me to program in a 2-game minimum on any seasonal average calculation. That way even if a 1-game wonder has an unreasonably high seasonal average with their small sample, the two game minimum will cut those 1-game averages in half for their playoff stats to something perhaps more realistic or less impactful. It would keep 99% of the player averages the same but just cut down those rare unrealistic cases to prevent them from being playoff difference makers.

- I hope to finish what I tried to get done last off-season and try to fully automate the system running games for me next season.

What are some changes or suggestions you'd like to see? I'll take some of them and create a forum topic with voting soon. Once we conclude off-season rules discussions, hopefully I'll get the 2021 team finances in order and get new rosters for the new season up in early March so teams can make some decisions prior to free agency probably in late March after the NFL starts theirs. Once I get the new rosters up, we'll also have a GM check-in for the new season and fill in any GM holes prior to our off-season starting.

[Knighty Knight]

I'd like to see a more more realistic plays ran per game in simulations. Every sim seems to exceed even the highest plays per game in the NFL.

[Rumpy]

I imagine this would be hard to do and alot more work, but is it possible to have a Defensive depth chart?

[Goodell]

I imagine this would be hard to do and alot more work, but is it possible to have a Defensive depth chart?

We can look at that. I can understand wanting to do that, but has some perhaps unnecessary problems too.

We don't require hyper-activity to have a team. If you're on vacation or super busy with work, we don't take people teams away unless they are gone for months without any kind of check-in and aren't even prompted to return for big things like when the NFL starts free agency, draft and regular season. So if a mildly active player sets a defensive lineup at the start of the season but isn't winning and doesn't check in a whole lot, that defensive lineup is going to get out of shape real fast with injuries or changing grades, etc. If we had that manually set defensive depth chart determine the grade calculation, then many teams grades would get out of whack during the year. If we had a defensive depth chart but it didn't really mean anything for grade calculations that were done by the system as it is now, then it's kind of just there for "fun" communication without any purpose at all within the gameplay. The only thing that matters on defense are the grade calculations for front 7 and secondary and any sack totals from NFL games unless we massively changed that.

I need to take a look at the depth chart pages this year, finally ensure that there are no/less issues with it using the right mix of players at times, and I can look into some other enhancements there also. Maybe there are some more fun elements to add into it. Ideally the defensive players grades and positions automatically setup the ideal lineup for the highest grade average to use in the game simulator. We could let teams mess with that and start a younger lower graded player over a higher graded veteran or whatever, but it doesn't really mean anything in the computer (that player isn't really benefiting from fake playing time) and then risk tanking implications of teams intentionally lowing their grades used and inactivity leading to horrible unintended grade impacts instead of letting the system pick the highest graded eligible players to make up the front 7 and secondary averages.

[Goodell]

One other thing I'd like to tweak, but don't have a definitive proposal yet to put up for voting, would be some adjustment to how rookie 5th year options and LTCs work together.

If you had a top 10 draft pick and decide to pick up their 5th year option as their career plays out, it drastically bumps up their pay for one more year in most cases to something approaching a transition tag amount for their position. Then after that year, if you decide to tag or LTC that same player to a longer deal, it uses their last year large salary as part of that calculation and requires a 20% higher increase.

To me, it probably makes more sense if you don't have too many other LTC candidates to not pick up the 5th year option but instead LTC them then when it factors in their last year salary that's still pretty cheap on their rookie deal.

But should it be that way? Probably not if we want it to make sense to pick up a player's 5th year option and have it more advantageous to building long-term with them.

We could take a look at the values for those options, but I thought they were fairly realistic at least when we first implemented them. I think the bigger tweak might should be on the LTC calculations from there.

We used a 20% increase requirement initially on LTCs because that's what a franchise tag requires as well as figuring only players getting a pay raise would forgo free agency and sign an extension for more money to stay without seeing their market value tested.

If a player's 5th year option is 10M, then their LTC would be at least 12M base salary (20% increase), which isn't terrible but then you get into the longer options for LTC which compound that salary increase into larger signing bonuses along with that to really rocket the annual cap value. If I have it right off the top of my head, 5-year extension would be 24M SB (additional 4.8M per year against the cap) so 16.8M total each year against the cap from a 10M cap value the year before.

I've always wanted to make sure LTCs weren't under valued and that players were well compensated if they were going to pass up free agency, but I think maybe that's too much in terms of building with young drafted players by picking up their option and then signing them long-term.

Maybe we look at tweaking some of the LTC calculations. It's been a couple of years since we've adjusted that much. Maybe taking out or reducing the 20% required increase and instead make it have to be even a small increase if the player is paid very well already. Or tweaking the signing bonus calculated amounts for the various year options as we initially just used some nice round numbers to setup higher commitment choice values. We should take a longer look at if LTCs generated are reasonably set or if they need to be adjusted a bit. Let me know if you have any thoughts or math on that as we examine it, especially as it relates to drafting and building with young players long-term as should be something rewarded in our GM-based game.

[Goodell]

A GM previously sent a suggestion to me about making it easier to sign your own practice squad players to the active roster when needed during the season.

Unless there's much objection to that, I don't see too much problem with creating a way to sign one of your practice squad players to a default 1-year minimum contract if the tech adjustment isn't too much there. If a team wanted something longer than that, they could still just enter a bid in free agency market as they need to now for all signings. But if they have an injury late in the week and there's a guy on the practice squad at that position ready to jump in, it's probably more realistic that they could join the active roster quicker on a minimum contract basis for the team they're already practicing with.

For better or worse, that gives a little more benefit to those having quality practice squads if they can quickly sign their own when needed/wanted. Those players would still be without a contract while on the p-squad, though, and available for any other team to sign at any time until they had a contract. It would just formalize the practice squad relationship more to the team and give them more of an edge in quickly signing their own. If we implemented that, if that player already had other bids on them in the system from other teams, the home team would have to compete for their contract against other interested parties. But if nobody has any bid on them and they're you're practice squad player and you need them on the active roster at a quick 1-year minimum deal, seems reasonable that teams would be able to do that.

[bpboguta1483]

Would like to see the ability to get a practice squad player on the roster in case of emergency, even if it means paying a week's worth of salary. Nothing like knowing at 9 30 am your player is out and needing a replacement. In addition knowing who gets the sack and an interception would be a nice addition (just a thought) but if it creates too much work than not a big deal. One source of frustration though is knowing you have the best kickoff returner in the NFL in Coradelle Patterson and only having him return 6 KO returns vs 36 in the NFL. Just my two cents....peace all

[sportznut]

I know we're past rules changes for 2021, but I wanted to put this out there, and not start a new thread.

We really need to fix the FA formula, where a GM can put in a bid on a guy at a league minimum one year deal, with a high signing bonus, when that signing bonus is nearly 50% of one offered over a multiyear period.

Established players aren't going to take a one year deal in that case when they're in their 20s. Maybe when they're 40.

The GM is playing within the rules, but its a clear indication that they plan on signing, and trading the player, while eating the entire SB. Yet, the player had another offer out there with nearly double the SB.

[JonC]

I know we're past rules changes for 2021, but I wanted to put this out there, and not start a new thread.

We really need to fix the FA formula, where a GM can put in a bid on a guy at a league minimum one year deal, with a high signing bonus, when that signing bonus is nearly 50% of one offered over a multiyear period.

Established players aren't going to take a one year deal in that case when they're in their 20s. Maybe when they're 40.

The GM is playing within the rules, but its a clear indication that they plan on signing, and trading the player, while eating the entire SB. Yet, the player had another offer out there with nearly double the SB.

I was going to post something similar to this. It's being done for LTC purposes, IMO, and I'd suggest that perhaps we simply don't allow players signed to one-year deals to be eligible for LTC.

[tino38]

I mean then next you may want to stop allowing punters and kickers from signing minimum deals with most of us too because that’s not fully realistic too?