2018 RULES: LTC Tweaks

[Goodell]

There have been some discussions about LTC recently, so here's a poll to gauge the support for expressed ideas.

There will always be some difficulties in having an automated way of generating LTC values by a computer. I am not going to make that some kind of subjective, human-generated value, though, because there are problems with that too and the only way I can keep the league running long-term given time restrictions is to have the systems run as many things as possible to reduce manual labor involved.

Because some here and GMs in reality disagree with the value of a player, at times, compared to the grade value assigned to them, we'll always have some cases of a player making more in reality or people thinking they should make more than the computer says they should based upon averages of similarly graded players here. There may be ways to better deal with that with rebuilding everything and making mass changes someday, but this off-season won't be a time for that. So we have to make due with the best small tweaks that we can. Trying to find a good balance for a fair generated value for a wide variety of different players liked or unliked by many but graded similarly.

There might be an 80 grade player, for example, who many think should be graded higher and his NFL team with huge salary cap space gives him a massive deal. There might be another 80 grade player at the same position who many think is over-valued and his NFL team might be looking to replace ahead. In an automated, objective system with the same standard for all, they'd get the same LTC value being same graded players at same position. And that may (perhaps rightfully) upset people, but we need a computer-driven system that generates a fair mathematics value based upon the numbers alone, not people subjective differences of opinion.

Like real life, not everything ends up being fair always even though we want to strive for that where we can. Sometimes it can't 100% of the time, like reality. Sometimes that can be part of the design of the game and dealing with different situations too. Some great players will give their NFL home team a nice discount playing ball with their front office wanting to stay (or get what many see as favorable LTC values). Some other NFL teams will have their great players demand much more and have great interest in hitting the market to get the most cash unless they get over-paid the same as others similar to them (or getting a higher LTC than you think is fair for a variety of reasons impacting that calculation). Whether you have a player like the first or the latter isn't always in your control as a front office, just like whether you get a good LTC value or one that's beyond your expectations. Sometimes the real agents come back with fair offers and sometimes they are unreasonable. It's just part of things here and in reality. You have to just make the best decisions for what's given.

[Goodell]

CONCLUSION: I suspect more will vote on this as people get messages to come back, but seems to be going in a pretty strong direction. Currently 24 to 12 for staying at 50% versus increasing for QB minimum LTCs. While more may vote, we need to move on this to enable LTCs before free agency starts.

I personally can see both sides here. While most support staying the same, and we won't have time to make big changes this off-season, I do think there are some examples of players who will get lower than expected LTC values. I expect, though, most of the best deals will probably get long-term options chosen, which adds a ton of guaranteed SB greatly increasing their costs beyond the base.

As I said before, getting either a lucky or unlucky LTC value for your player (for a variety of factors) is not unlike reality for real front offices. Sometimes a great player wants to play ball and takes a sweatheart deal favoring their home team, and other times a front office gets a player/agent who are over-demanding and dead set on finding their value on the market. Sim teams will probably get a couple of both kinds of luck with LTC over the years, like NFL teams with players/agents. But we still want to make league-generated contracts as fair as we can despite some of the challenges in that.

I do see that some players could get much lower LTCs than might be expected, so I see the side of those wanting the minimum to be raised. I also see strong support to not raise it. I think a fair thing to do in this case might be to keep it SIMILAR to where the bar is now, but make a small increase to recognize some update to that figure might be needed over the years as we compare LTCs to real contracts.

So I think a SMALL raise to 55% (just a little above the current 50%) might be a reasonable compromise here. LTC no-trades remain the same.

[RebelFan]

I thought off season rule changes always took effect in the following year.

I might have handled things differently with Smith last year if I had known there was going to be a markup this year.

I know 5% doesn't sound like much, but my team doesn't have much cap space to begin with.

[Goodell]

Most off-season rules discussions are done so before a new league year opens and implemented that upcoming season. There are some exceptions for things we think teams need to plan well in advance for. I guess there can be arguments made whether that change is something that needs to be planned a year in advance for. Some things like changing cap carry-over aren't implemented immediately because nobody knew about that change during the past season so would apply to the next season. Most things, though, like adding an extra contract restructuring during the season, adjusting free agency bidding limits or processes, adding a UDFA spending cap, adjusting some of the game simulation details, etc. usually are discussed before the season and then implemented in that season ahead. We didn't talk about UDFA spending cap last off-season, for example, and then implement it years later. It was discussed before the league opened and then implemented weeks later in that off-season.

If a ton of people are upset about that 5% change, they can contact me to discuss, but keeping LTC QB values down as low as they are in some cases seems like it might be more cause for celebration. The last time QB minimums for LTC was discussed in 2016, a vote was held in the off-season before free agency and implemented that very same free agency period like many of our discussions. I was impacted personally with that, as I had a lower graded QB myself who got a huge real life contact that was massively above a tiny LTC value here that would have been generated otherwise before we implemented that minimum bar for starting QB reasonable salaries for league-generated contracts. The bottom line with LTCs are that since they are league-generated we want to make them fair. LTC values for a future season are also difficult to plan into the future for. Once we switch over to a new league year (just happened days ago) those LTC figures will change because they are based upon a new season values.

Head's up a year in advance that it's something that could be looked at again next off-season if some of the upcoming contracts look out of whack because the league wants league-generated options to be fairly priced and not drastically unrealistic from what's happening in reality where we can in what we control.