2014 RULES: Free Agency Changes

[Goodell]

Not sure how often this happens though, Onyx. I always wish I had more bids at the beginning of FA rather than wasting one to bid someone else up. I also think that even if that does happen, it's actually realistic. Player's agents lie to push price's up similarly and without agents in the sim, there's no way to do that.

I will be the first to say, if I have extra bids... they're going to raise the teams' bids I feel are rivals.

I don't feel that's the right way, but I feel it happens to me. (turn about is fair play)

Arguably, though, anonymous bidding should make it less likely teams will know what other teams are doing to where the player value drives more of the price than team-on-team combat (for better or worse).

[Knighty Knight]

I voted for no anonymity but only because my experience last year with teams increasing bids ever so slightly. I would hope having your name publicly attached to the bid would reduce those instances, or at least we would know who the douche bag is. Other than that I believe the anonymous bidding stretches out the signing process, which could be good or bad, I like to think it's good for the league and more fun for us GMs. Otherwise, if I could see exactly how much cap room another team had I could significantly increase my bid to knock them out, if they're close to the cap line. Personally, I target a list of players that I already have identified, I won't use bids to artificially drive up the costs unless I'm seriously interested in a player.

[whteshark]

There's alot of Free Agent sniping that goes on. Some GM's don't want to see another team get a good deal and will bid just because they know you will counter. I would be for a return to a public free agent process.

[Strategist]

I voted for no anonymity but only because my experience last year with teams increasing bids ever so slightly. I would hope having your name publicly attached to the bid would reduce those instances, or at least we would know who the douche bag is. Other than that I believe the anonymous bidding stretches out the signing process, which could be good or bad, I like to think it's good for the league and more fun for us GMs. Otherwise, if I could see exactly how much cap room another team had I could significantly increase my bid to knock them out, if they're close to the cap line. Personally, I target a list of players that I already have identified, I won't use bids to artificially drive up the costs unless I'm seriously interested in a player.

The real problem that we have is people increasing the RB by $1000 when he already has a $5 mil contract. So If we just increase the minimum counter bid that would get rid of this problem and we could still have it anonymous.

[RyanM]

Still think we need some sort of calculator that adjusts for guaranteed money. A guy is going to take a contract with $20M in guarantees worth $28M overall instead of a contract with $10M in guarantees worth $32M overall.

[sportznut]

The problem isn't the anonymity, its that the counter bid needs to be increased to make it a realistic counter.

Having private bidding worked fantastic last year, and eliminated the GMs out there who purposely bid against certain GMs, whether they're a rival, or whatever the motivation.

The idea of FA is for players to get fair market value, not to drive the price up to ridiculously high levels b/c of a rivalry or some vendetta.

Privacy accomplishes that.

Now, the idea that someone could counter a 5M per year salary with a 1000K SB, is a major issue. Private/public bidding is not.

That's my opinion on it anyways.

[Strategist]

Still think we need some sort of calculator that adjusts for guaranteed money. A guy is going to take a contract with $20M in guarantees worth $28M overall instead of a contract with $10M in guarantees worth $32M overall.

I do agree with this. SB should be weighted more than over all salary.

[Goodell]

If we're going to do free agency someday, we'll have to arrive at some thoughts on possible options that aren't overly complicated to build into the system while re-writing scripts and isn't overwhelming to our GMs trying to figure out their bids. We started with something basic to get going and want to take it up a notch to overcome some loopholes exploited but aren't looking for rocket science too complex for anyone to know what bids beat other bids either.

Trying to come up with a couple different options to look at and throw some examples into to see what might work best.

OPTION A: Total value matters. Guaranteed total matters more. Cap hit per year also matters. With percentage of guaranteed multiplier.

Total contract value
+ Guaranteed $ (Signing Bonus so that gets counted twice as also in total above)
+ Cap hit per year
x Guaranteed percent multiplier (1+ percent guaranteed)

Examples:

Bid 1: 5yr $5m/yr with 5m SB -- 6m/yr cap value (5/30 = 16.7% guaranteed)
Bid 2: 5yr $2m/yr with 20m SB -- 6m/yr cap value (20/30 = 66.7% guaranteed)
Bid 3: 2yr $1m/yr with 12m SB -- 7m/yr cap value (12/14 = 85.7% guaranteed)

Bid Comparison by model above:
Bid 1: 30 + 5 + 6 = 41 * 1.167 = 47.8 score
Bid 2: 30 + 20 + 6 = 56 * 1.667 = 93.4 score
Bid 3: 14 + 12 + 7 = 33 * 1.857 = 61.3 score

So bid 2 would have the highest value in this model with the most guaranteed money. Not the highest cap hit per year, but highest total guaranteed and higher overall value than shorter bid with higher hit per year. The shorter bid would successfully counter the first longer bid as a raise despite lower overall total because it has more guarantees. The #2 bid would counter all and have highest score because of it's mix of both strong overall total value plus strong guarantees.

Some might think Bid 3 should be the highest value since highest cap hit per year. This would be a case where Bid 3 with higher hit/year would be successfully countered by a bid with a lower hit/year in Bid 2 (but higher overall guaranteed values where player gets the most guaranteed for sure with Bid 2 even and that would be preferred for him even if less cap/yr for team than Bid 3). Definitely room for discussion on what should be more valuable than the other or what variable should be emphasized more.

I tried a couple different variations looking for that mix of variables, and certainly would love to hear other variations on that or even different takes entirely as we look for a new way to do this that isn't overwhelmingly complex but gets better results. Tried to keep it straight forward, but maybe even something like this gets too involved and makes counter bidding too complicated (although we could try to add some tools to help come up with valid bids).

A requirement for a counter offer in this case might be having to have a higher bid score by x%.

Other ideas on a good calculation to use? Thanks for your thoughts.

[RebelFan]

The problem isn't the anonymity, its that the counter bid needs to be increased to make it a realistic counter.

Having private bidding worked fantastic last year, and eliminated the GMs out there who purposely bid against certain GMs, whether they're a rival, or whatever the motivation.

The idea of FA is for players to get fair market value, not to drive the price up to ridiculously high levels b/c of a rivalry or some vendetta.

I agree with Nut 100% on this.
I don't ever want to go back to a public bidding process. I don't want anybody to know if I'm bidding on a player & you shouldn't be worried about who I'm bidding on. I don't care who you are bidding on and if I do, I'll just ask you.
Going private with the bidding has taken all of the petty BS out of free agency and I would be sad to go back to the old way. Free agency is crazy enough without involving personal grudges and division rivalries.
And I also agree that we should raise the minimum bid requirements either greatly or slightly.
And finally, what in the world is the problem with last minute bids?
This is just downright unamerican is what this is.
The whole free agency system is set up on a 24 hour clock, with 5 bids per day... That's just the way it works. So I try to be selective about my bidding. Especially in the early stages of FA when I usually have a lot of targets. If there's a bidding war going on for a player I'm not gonna just jump into the fray and waste my bid there. I will wait until the interest has died down.
I think it's only smart, only good strategy at certain times to employ this tactic, and I don't freak out and have an ugly cry every time it happens to me. Maybe the guy just got his bid back? Maybe he was waiting to see if a 3rd team stepped in to bid. Maybe there were 2 players he was targeting, but only had 1 bid, so trying to wait and see if one of them gets rebid. Maybe he just logged on at the last moment & barely got it in on time. I understand that's the way this very ingenious game (that's so much fun) works, and I don't take it personally.

[Knighty Knight]

You've changed my opinion on the anonymous voting so I have removed my vote there.