FanGM

As most of you have already, please make sure to visit your team roster page and check-in for the new year. Those who don't we'll have to look into possible GM replacements.

Some off-season activity is now active. Teams can franchise/transition tag a pending free agent. They can sign long-term contract extension for pending free agents (or players with only 1 year left under contract). They can cut players to free up some cap space heading into free agency. Teams can sign only 1 LTC all year, so think on that carefully before making any decisions. Once you sign a deal, there is no going back on second thoughts later.

Restructuring should be available soon. Trades will open up prior to free agency starting. Not sure exactly when yet, but thinking sometime in the week ahead depending.

The last day to either tag or LTC a pending free agent is: April 13. That's two weeks before free agency starts. We'll start up free agency on Monday morning 4/14 at 8am ET.

Previously you were best able to view the details for traded draft picks (such as who they originally belonged to) by rolling over the "i" info graphic next to the pick on your team roster in Internet Explorer (more universal when we first started years ago) -- as well right-clicking to inspect element or view more properties in other browsers.

It should be easier to view details of listed draft picks now by CLICKING on the "i" for upcoming draft. That'll open a new popup window with those details, as well as a form where you can search for details of any other pick (like what happened again to my 1st rounder).

One reason trading isn't opened quite yet is because I want to finalized the draft order prior to trading so that when people exchange picks there isn't any confusion about the overall pick value. I'm working on updating our draft order estimator to use current ordering methods and generate those values for me quickly automatically for future years and league expansion, as I used to have to do some last detail tweaks manually in cases of many team tie breakers or old scripts not showing playoff team order correctly after rule change there in recent years. Still some work to do on that. Thank you for your patience.

Awesome news...ready to get rolling

Part of setting the final draft order includes divvying up the compensatory picks, and that's always a bit of a pain matching up the UFA signings vs UFA losses and sorting by how many eligible picks available for teams and assigning by balanced values. That's finished now, though, so will be popping in the overall draft values for rounds 1-7 tomorrow. That'll allow us to also turn trades on with full knowledge of draft order and pick values probably later tomorrow also.

Comp pick info (only 32 comp picks and all leagues had more eligible picks than slots available, only the top UFA losses that didn't have balanced UFA signing received picks). http://www.fangm.com/football/comppicks.php

Actual draft order for 2014 has now been calculated and entered into the system so that when teams start trading picks, they'll know the actual pick involved before completing a transaction. Let me know if any problems noticed. Playoff teams at the bottom of the round with tie-breakers by strength of schedule, and teams involved in tie-breakers alternating through the various rounds.

http://www.fangm.com/football/draft-picks.php

Want to give that a little time in case problems pop up so that teams aren't trading pieces that aren't listed correctly, but plan on working on trade availability more tonight to have available soon. thanks.

Trades are available, but especially to start keep a close eye on transactions and let me know if any problems.

Reminder that free agency begins on Monday April 14th at 8am ET. As always, teams will have 5 bids per day to put toward other team free agents, and unlimited bidding to try to keep their own.

When thinking about your bids, make sure to keep your salary cap in mind. During the off-season only the top 51 salaries on your roster count against the cap. Teams are limited to 90 players on their roster during the off-season, and must cut down to 53 players prior to the regular season starting in the fall. Also keep in mind you'll have to pay draft picks.

Roster restructurings are also now available. Teams have 2 of those for the year that cuts a player's salary in half this year and defers that to their last year under contract and adds some signing bonus to the player. This usually cuts a players stay on your team short with that ballooned last year salary so be careful restructuring contracts for a player you want to keep long-term, as well as it adds guaranteed signing bonus so makes cutting the player more expensive in the short-term, so those best apply to an overpaid player you expect won't finish his contract on your team in the long-term. A players contract can only be restructured once.

I didn't quite finish it before trading was opened, but I plan on adding some options on the list of trades on the homepage for teams to raise red flags on trades that should be considered for being vetoed. Moving ahead as we add more leagues and more GMs, it's important that we have more of a process for that to ensure competitive fairness. I've added some notes to the trade tools that advise against any trades moving forward that involve elements outside of the trade tool. We'll have a little flexibility on that for now involving past agreements as we transition to tighter enforcement of rules, but moving forward conditional trades or teams trying to trade future draft picks not part of the trade tool will NOT be enforced by the league and with the new ability to raise red flags on trades for closer investigation, every trade needs to be fully complete within the allowable rules of the current trade tools and stand on it's own under higher scrutiny of allowable transactions within the rules. More on that as I finish up some of that programming to allow more feedback and bringing controversial transactions to the league administration attention. Just a head's up on that as you consider and negotiate future trades that we'll be tightening the enforcement of rules and attention to that ahead to avoid league fairness and other issues. Thanks

First red flag goes to DFFL SF.

Reminder that today is the last day to franchise/transition tag or LTC a pending free agent.

Quick update that our site was off-line and not accessible for a bit this afternoon. Our site is hosted at HostGator if you can't access the site and wondering (usually they'll post something on Twitter/FB about problems). There have been more of those outages in the last couple of months since a datacenter switch. It may be something to look into long-term, but for now it's affordable previously fairly reliable hosting.

I paused free agency for a moment when it came back up so I could see which free agents would have their clocks expire while the downtime to give them each a little extended time on the clock for those past time. A handful of pending signings past time were extended a bit.

This serves as a good time to put this out there, though, that I won't always be around if outages happen during peak activities. For free agency purposes where teams have 24 hours to put in a bid on a player, it's one reason to not always purposefully wait to the last minute, or at least know there may be risks in that.

I'll do what I can when I can to help the situation, but we aren't going to do massive signing cancellations after the fact either if someone said they wanted to counter at the last minute but couldn't get on at that moment. In order for the league to even operate without massive amounts of manual labor and chaos not knowing if signings are really going to be signings or not, it has to be that way.

It sucked as a Broncos fan when Elvis Dumervil didn't get his fax in on time messing up that signing. Technology problems happen especially it seems when at the last minute and can't afford any hiccup, and if waiting until the last minute of a deadline can't always blame technology only when it could have been done before otherwise. But like those problems happening in real life, we may get them too here sometimes as part of life. Maybe a team really wanted to sign a guy before he inked the deal with another team, but the agent never returned the call due to tech problems with his phone service. Sucks, but sometimes life happens.

Time is perhaps more significant to the draft with smaller time windows. I don't recall any problems in the past with that, but outages certainly unpredictable and if happening a bit more these days I'll put some plans together to try to best deal with that if it happens during a draft. It creates a lot of complications backing out of draft picks already made (as well as gives away team preferences unfairly) so we don't do that, so the best answer there is probably just advising that everyone keep their draft queue lists ordered as best they can in case of problems you'll at least get someone you rated high. Not for just our technology, but being prepared for your own lives taking you away from the computer momentarily at that inopportune time.

Thanks