Off-Season Topics

[Goodell]

Makes a lot of sense, I follow what you are getting at. Very curious on how to gauge something like this.

Whether or not it becomes some kind of points/award, I plan on having more tracking information on team-building activity. Drafts over the years and how they end up being graded. All players in our league have grades and contract dollar amounts in terms of value. Players picked/signed have an off-season grade starting point at the time of decisions and end of season grade as well as grade fluctuations over time. There's something to be said for GMs who have draftees turn into highly graded players, and especially for GMs who have lots of lower round or UDFAs turn into solid contributor grades. For trades there's also player/pick values that can be looked at over time numerically, as well as feedback mechanisms. This domain was originally a site I had people suggest real sports trade ideas with voter feedback on realism/fairness and which team won/lost trades (which player grades can objectively also provide some numeric conclusions on). Ideally some feedback options on submitted trades can help raise flags for review in some cases as well as provide some kind of opinions/reviews on trade decisions that could also be quantifiable.

Don't know if we'll do anything specifically yet, just some thoughts there on how those things could be tracked/awarded for performance in those areas specifically, but things like free agency and drafts and roster building are some of the best parts of the league and I hope to have more content and maybe a little side competition on those areas of GM skill demonstration that all can compete in even if they're trying to rebuild a franchise. Having those elements of a GMs profile can also help if we have more leagues at different levels and GMs moving up to higher levels where demonstrated skills superior to other candidates can help in objective decisions on promotion.

[Knighty Knight]

Thanks for the feedback on futures contract.

I love the ideas about tracking and quantifying free agent and draft moves. However, as long as ratings are only one component. I understand it might be the biggest quantifiable number we have to measure but let me give you an example from my roster. I signed Daryl Smith in free agency when he was rated somewhere around 92. Now he is rated at 82. So on brief glance it appears that his production has declined. In 2013 he had 123 tackles, 5 sacks, 19 pass deflections, 3 ints, 1 TD, and 2 FF. In 2012 he was injured so in 2011 his stat line reads: 107 tackles, 3 sacks, 8 deflections, 1 INT, 2 FF. Also for comparison Luke Kuechly, another top linebacker of mine rated 92, had 153 tackles, 2 sacks, 7 deflections, and 4 INTs. I'm not suggesting that Smith is as good as Kuechly but he was comparable this season. I would count Smith as one of my top off season additions despite his 10 point rating drop thanks to the incompetent folks at Madden. All that to say, we need to be cautious when looking at rating drops when identifying good roster moves.

[Goodell]

Grades aren't perfect, whether we use company X or company Y. And people are going to disagree about the grades given to a player, but for most on the roster outside of skill position players their grade is almost all that matters to the sim. There are humans analyzing the various stats and factors assigning an independent grade value that doesn't involve subjectively trying to improve chances to win here. We could try to have someone else try to come up with different values for player worth spending hundreds of their own time analyzing things and coming to different conclusions on a different value and hope if they were involved here weren't bias toward their own sim team in determining a different grade, but if that conclusion was so much better than the grade we already use we should just switch to using them.

This wouldn't be life or death and we wouldn't give a million dollars to the winner or anything. Just kind of adding to fun and a different way of rewarding moves beyond the game simulator that only gives one bowl winner (if we even do it). But if we did, it would have to be done in a way that was efficient and manageable within our setup.

There's definitely a point to be made that grades aren't perfect answer to player value, but in some ways as it relates to the game here for most of our roster they are almost all that matters in the game here (especially if you're not a QB or RB). Grades aren't perfect, but nothing would be and whoever was deciding the values will have some that people agree or disagree about but for our game to work we have to have a chosen source on player values. To individually come to different conclusions on every player or every transaction differently than the chosen source for player value might not be a manageable process compared to the value we already use that's immediately available without tons of additional workload and additional also imperfect analysis. It's a fair point you make about the grade not always telling the story, but we know going in that grades aren't perfect but we do have to rely upon one chosen source of grades that powers much of the game here.

[RebelFan]

I love the idea about tracking grades throughout the season and seeing what kind of results we end up with when it's all compiled together. I have seen some amazing ratings changes from game 1 to game 17 before, and would really enjoy being able to look those kinds of things up and not just trying to remember what a player was rated when the season started.
Damon Harrison would be a good example from this year, probably started in the 60's, but by the end of the year, he was an 88. Now that's a quality pickup.
I think I might have suggested something like this at some point in the past, or maybe I just meant to and never got around to it. I'm all for it though.
Even if we end up not doing this for GM of the year award, I think this feature would merit existence on it's own. I would think there would be all kinds of cool stats & averages that we could feature with this information and give us all a better idea of what's going on with our own teams as well as our fellow GMs.

[tino38]

I'd like to just throw this out there, I think the borrowing limit of 3 million from the next years cap, and the 5 million carry over from one year to the next on the salary cap should remain the same.

[tino38]

For the players that have the option year on their rookie contracts, if a GM decides to pick up the option this offseason, would we still be able to LTC that player next year or would we need to wait until the option year has expired?

[Goodell]

For the players that have the option year on their rookie contracts, if a GM decides to pick up the option this offseason, would we still be able to LTC that player next year or would we need to wait until the option year has expired?

Teams can LTC a pending free agent, as well as players with one year left under contract. The way we setup "options" for former first rounders it's really just a regular year under contract like all others (just at higher salary). If do nothing, the player will make a high salary that last year if their original contract setup that way. A team would have to decline/cut. Keeping the player at that higher last year salary wouldn't have any impact on whether or not he could be LTC'd as it would be just like any contract in our system. Hope that helps if I understood. But the way we set it up for simplicity and not having to radically change our programming, these "options" are just final year of contract at different amount and treated just like any contract otherwise. They were just setup slightly different in how signing bonus spread over the years to allow that final season to not involve a cap hit as all signing bonus accounted for before that as it's optional if a team didn't want to pay it.

[tino38]

Great yeah that helps! Thanks

[Knighty Knight]

Would it be possible to increase league minimum from 310k to 420k for this upcoming season? With that the roster holds should also increase from $320k and may I suggest a veteran minimum of 730k to discourage rosters under the league limit.

[Ulrich82]

Just a note, the ability to borrow money from future salary cap years was only a stopgap measure in the new CBA to cover the 2011 and 2012 years before the 4 year cash spend minimums kicked in (see here under "2011-2012 transition rules: http://nflcommunications.com/2011/07/21 ... agreement/).

I know a lot of teams have used borrowing here. Maybe we like keeping it around as a cap flexibility option, but if we want to mimic the NFL, we should look to phase out future borrowing starting next offseason. I don't feel strongly either way. Just pointing this out.