2021 Off-Season Update

[Goodell]

Depth charts are active now from the links on the team pages. Make sure to keep an eye on that during the off-season as your team adds/subtracts new players.

[Goodell]

As announced earlier this month and mentioned frequently and all across the top banners of our football pages for weeks... Free Agency opens tomorrow morning! April 28th at 10 AM ET.

If you're not there at that exact time, don't worry. Free agency runs from now until the end of the regular season in the winter. You get 5 bids to use every 24 hours. Once a player doesn't get any counter-offers for 24 hours, then he's signed. There are no do-overs in free agency. The only time we will manually get involved in the bidding process is if you tell us immediately after that you made a mistake adding an extra zero. The best advise is to just enter your data using commas so you don't make that mistake. It takes the numbers with or without commas.

As we instituted in recent years, there are no 1-year deals on the first day of free agency. That helps prevent under-market minimum deals from slipping through early, and reflects reality where veterans don't usually sign 1-year minimum deals on the first day of free agency, but see how things go before setting for that if nobody wants to offer more.

Now's a good time to look at the free agent lists if you haven't yet (clicking Free Agency link at the top of the page) and get a plan together. Also make sure you sign any pending free agents to LTCs, as they aren't eligible for that once free agency starts and they hit the market tomorrow. Double-check your franchise/transition tags, let me know if any issues, and check that all your RFAs are at the intended levels (if you set any for 1st or 2nd round tenders). All RFAs that weren't tendered higher will be at original draft round compensation based upon their actual NFL draft round in reality (or no compensation if undrafted in the real NFL). I hope to go through and fill in all those real NFL draft rounds tonight before people bid on RFAs.

Teams probably need a plan this year more than any other with the salary cap decreasing and budgets tighter. Every year people get emotional about their bid wars and end up wrecking their salary cap in some cases for years by over-spending. If you're new or not totally confident, stay away from high signing bonuses as much as you can as you are 100% going to pay every single penny of that and there is no way to get rid of that or transfer it to anyone else. Signing bonuses are going to be 100% paid for by the signing team one way or another. Huge signing bonuses given to players who bust or get hurt or retire or get suspended, etc. can wreck a salary cap for years. There is no getting out of a signing bonus here.
Have a plan, have a price, and build your team fiscally responsibly. Those that do likely win the most over the years.

There are probably two main strategies when thinking about plans: bidding as soon as possible or patiently feeling out the market in hopes of being on top of your bid wars at the end of the day. If you use all your bids early, you'll likely get out-bid quickly and possibly not end the day ahead in any of the bid wars, but you get your bids refreshed earlier once 24 hours passes. If you use more patience instead of blindly jumping in first, you may be able to avoid throwing your limited bids away on players that are being over-spent on and can focus on more obtainable targets as the markets start to shape out.

You get unlimited bidding on all your own team's UFAs. It's perhaps wise to jump on putting bids for those in earlier so that they are more likely to get through the rush of signings versus days later when the players available dwindles. Either way, though, with unlimited bidding you can sign your guys if willing to pay market price.

There's another strategy that rebuilding teams or those with very little salary cap should consider, especially if it becomes apparent that you're not going to be able to afford to sign your UFAs. You can get compensatory picks in the 2022 draft for UFAs lost this off-season. But to do that, you have to ensure that you don't sign more UFAs from other teams than you lose (tagged players, RFAs and street free agents cut with no unlimited bidding do not count toward UFA counts). There is a counter for that on the main league homepages, free agency page, and your team roster. You can only max out at 4 comp picks, and that's only if you have UFA losses (by grade) that were not balanced with similar UFA signings and are among the top 32 UFA unbalanced losses. You can get an idea about that by clicking on the more details link on the comp pick chart on the league homepages once signings start happening. If you don't have the money, are rebuilding or don't want to over-pay, why not pick up draft picks for UFAs lost and focus on building through the draft instead of the checkbook since you don't have the cap space to do so?

Don't bid on any RFAs or franchise tagged players unless you're willing to give up the compensation required. That can be as much as 2 first round draft picks.

If you have a restricted or tagged player, you can click on their bid page to update their compensation levels (like if you're willing to take less than 2 first rounders for your franchise tagged player that nobody's bidding on after days).

Make sure to do your research before offering big money (especially guaranteed signing bonuses), as we honor all real life injuries, retirements, and suspensions. The player grades listed now are from the end of last season, but once we get closer to the fall, new batches of grades will come out and they may be different. We're also going to try to incorporate PFF grades, keeping all players at a base of their Madden score but raising some players if PFF has them graded much better. So more than the grade listed today, bid on players you think will be good or improve ahead. You're not paying for the past, but future performance.

Let me know if any free agency questions, and good luck to everyone spending that money starting tomorrow morning.

[Goodell]

In preparations for free agency, went through all the leagues to find restricted free agents (RFAs) that hadn't been tendered yet to default them all to original draft pick (the lowest level). There can't be RFAs with no compensation level set. If you bid on a restricted free agent with original round compensation, you'd have to give up a draft pick in this year's upcoming draft based upon their actual NFL draft round if the team didn't match the offer. Only RFAs who were undrafted in the real NFL have no draft pick compensation, only matching rights.

If you don't want your RFA to be original round tender or have the original tender value, before free agency you can still change their tender from the bottom of the team roster page such as turning them into UFAs. You can also rescind that from their bid page once free agency starts.

[larry linke]

When free agency starts will the available free agents be listed by team like last year ?

thanks

Larry

[Goodell]

A reminder that players with grades of 85 or over at the time of signing or new contracts with 10M+ SB will have a 1-year no-trade clause added to their contract. That was added in past seasons, as just not realistic for elite players to sign big deals with a team that intended to immediately trade them away.

[Goodell]

Now that we're past the first day of free agency, you can now make 1-year bids. All players can be signed to 1-year 660K minimum deals (young players can get 3-year 660K offers).

[lucky7jc]

Now that we're past the first day of free agency, you can now make 1-year bids. All players can be signed to 1-year 660K minimum deals (young players can get 3-year 660K offers).

Hey I'm having trouble matching an RFA that was signed. I tried refreshing the page and no luck. It's Alexander Johnson from my team, on Roto, etc it's AJ Johnson but I will match the offer.

[Goodell]

Now that we're past the first day of free agency, you can now make 1-year bids. All players can be signed to 1-year 660K minimum deals (young players can get 3-year 660K offers).

Hey I'm having trouble matching an RFA that was signed. I tried refreshing the page and no luck. It's Alexander Johnson from my team, on Roto, etc it's AJ Johnson but I will match the offer.

Thanks. There may be some things like that which may have problems this first run through on the new server and programming version. Thanks for letting me know. I believe that may be fixed now. If not and you're still not able, send me a PM. thanks!

[lucky7jc]

Now that we're past the first day of free agency, you can now make 1-year bids. All players can be signed to 1-year 660K minimum deals (young players can get 3-year 660K offers).

Hey I'm having trouble matching an RFA that was signed. I tried refreshing the page and no luck. It's Alexander Johnson from my team, on Roto, etc it's AJ Johnson but I will match the offer.

Thanks. There may be some things like that which may have problems this first run through on the new server and programming version. Thanks for letting me know. I believe that may be fixed now. If not and you're still not able, send me a PM. thanks!

It worked upon refreshing the page with the confirmation page. So I clicked to match, it went 404 error, and then I hit refresh and it showed me the success page, not a refreshed so everyone needs to make sure they are selecting the appropriate action.

[Goodell]

The draft tools have been activated. You should be able to go in there and rank players in your draft queue. You can also see the draft time window deadline for your picks.

It's important to remember that if you aren't online before that time, the system will select your draft choice for you at that time based upon either your player rankings or the highest available player from actual NFL draft order if all your player rankings have previously been selected.

It would be great if everybody adds at least one player to the queue so I can see that on the GM directory pages for each league and see which GMs may not be ready for the draft yet as it approaches and can reach out to them.