2024 RULES: Free Agency Bids (High SB/Low Salary)

[Goodell]

One of the frustrations that tends to come up in free agency over the years are some frustrated with low salary, high signing bonus bids, sometimes by rebuilding teams with cap space who may end up eventually trading the player and eating the big cap hit for the value since they have the cap space.

We've adjusted things over the years to keep things in line with reasonable reality to avoid fake situations here where we can, such as a one-year no-trade clause on highly graded or highly paid star players as no big free agent would sign with a team that had the intention of dealing them immediately and made things unrealistic. We also adjusted the bid score last year that made those kinds of bids easier to counter.

To me, we don't want a lot of fake limitations as we keep things real, but we also don't want our fantasy world without real money to be exploitable in ways to create extremely fake situations with these fake players. When we have non-NFL restrictions it's usually to help ensure more realistic outcomes. So we do have criteria for successful bidding that essentially serve as a player's agent rejecting weird or extreme offers that wouldn't make common sense for a player to agree to compared to the other more realistic bids on the market.

Lower salaries on high quality players has been an often expressed concern as we use salaries in our LTC estimates. It's a bit complicated, but we've looked at and could tweak LTC calculations and options further this off-season to factor in signing bonuses making it less of a worry for low salary offers. We could also apply more bid conditions to prevent too extreme offers that have those negative impacts.

For example, say we had a 10x max signing bonus difference so a team couldn't offer a 1M salary with 25M signing bonus but 10M max SB (10x) bid without upping the salary more. A 60M SB offer couldn't have salary lower than 6M with that 10x requirement. Or maybe that's still too much for most and want it more like 5x so if a team wanted to put in a big 60M SB then the salary has to be at least 12M for a 5x requirement. The biggest SB for a 5M salary would be 25M with that 5x limit.

There may be better ways to do the math on the bid limits there with percentages or whatever, but if implemented it helps to keep the programming simple.

On the other hand, there's an argument that SB are our only guaranteed money the way things are now and players should jump at the highest SB offers as they'd have the most guaranteed money, so they should be allowed and if they mess up LTCs or whatever then we should just adjust how those other impacts are calculated instead.

Revising LTC is a big project and some complications like SBs not being a cap factor any more for players once traded, but probably something we'll look at either way. But these kinds of bids do tend to raise LTC concerns more.

[JonC]

I would rather see LTC floors for all players as it relates to franchise tags than basing them on SB, but that would really eliminate variety and searching for bargains on the LTC market.

[larry linke]

I didnt vote yet but place a NTC for more than 1 year depending on the dollar amount. Ex : For every $10 M SB an additional year of NTC is figured. $30 M = 3 years

Larry

[RWCordell]

I ran into what I felt to be extreme complications with the LTC situation in back to back seasons. In both seasons there were multiple players that were grossly overpaid as my top end peers whereas the low end guys were far and few between (expected!!!). These high end peers were all cut due to their salaries and re-signed for pennies on the dollar yet their original salaries were used throughout the season. As discussed with Troy changing these numbers during the season makes for an unfair playing field as depending on when you LTC could change the contract by millions so I propose that when we do a LTC the top 2 and bottom 2 contracts be removed instead of the 1 used currently. We all have to deal with this yearly but some times guys get lucky with the position being LTC'd....simply believe dropping 2 contracts from top and bottom may make things a tad more realistic!

[sportznut]

Not trying to make it more complicated here, but just spitballing. Perhaps you insure the signing bonus doesn't exceed 200% of the annual base salary. So, the base is 5M, but the SB PER YEAR is 10M. If it doesn't meet minimum requirements, you have to increase both to make the bid valid.

Also, we're seeing more and more contracts that are mostly, or fully guaranteed. You could add an option to guarantee more of the overall contract, yet its still broken down to a base and signing bonus combo, so any team trading said player doesn't have a vet minimum salary, while the team eats 50M in SB.

[Goodell]

CONCLUSION: Mixed results on high SB limits, but we'll keep things the same this year and monitor for future season adjustments.