2010 RULES: RFA/UFA

[Goodell]

As we near the start of NFL free agency, it seems that the league probably won't reach agreement on labor issues and over 200 would-be unrestricted free agents will be restricted free agents instead due to provisions in their agreement for an uncapped year.

If that's going to be the case in reality, should we follow that same rule this year making more of our UFAs also RFAs if they were under 6 years of experience? And giving their teams additional rights in retaining those players by offering tenders that would require the rights of first refusal and frequently draft pick compensation.

Technically, this wouldn't be difficult for us to implement because I manually look at the free agents across our leagues and manually assign a RFA tag to the younger ones with less experience than needed to be unrestricted. I'd just be assigning more free agents as restricted based upon a shift of that requirement. So it's not difficult for us to include that part of a new NFL reality this year, but just a case of how many GMs want to go along with temporary NFL shifts for this uncapped season in reality despite us not being uncapped ourselves.

http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d ... nfirm=true

In an uncapped year, a player would need at least six years in the NFL, up from the current minimum of four years in the league, to be an unrestricted free agent able to sign with any team...there are 212 players who would be considered restricted free agents -- instead of unrestricted -- if there is no salary cap in 2010...

The default position is that we'd likely go with the NFL shift in RFA/UFA requirements since it is not difficult to implement, unless there are strong feelings and strong votes in the other direction to not change here and stick with the old RFA standard where 3 year players (or less for us) would be restricted and 4 years or more would be unrestricted. If we change, 5 years or under would be RFAs and only players over 6 years experience would be UFAs.

Either way, we'll re-examine next year to see where the NFL rules are at that time if there is some future agreement in place.

[Alex S]

Man I could really go both ways with this....but I picked to keep it the same as the NFL because I have some players that I want to keep restricted under the new deal

But I guess that since we are still going to have a cap we should keep the old rules. It doesn't matter to me, I guess majority vote wins.

[Goodell]

Man I could really go both ways with this....but I picked to keep it the same as the NFL because I have some players that I want to keep restricted under the new deal

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how most GMs view this. Because we are somewhat on the side of ownership of these sim teams and GMs tend to want more control over their players and less freedom for players to leave, but for the teams who don't have as much to lose and want to buy up other team UFAs and want as many unrestricted players as possible could go the other way.

We tend to go in the direction most off-seasons of what most GMs want (especially in overwheming majority cases) but a lot also depends upon how I can best get things working technically as well as sometimes how I can best position the league to prospective new members and wanting to keep it within a certain vision. Part of that vision is to have a sim league that tries to be as realistic as possible, but in the case of these odd circumstances this year some of those alterations would be too much involved in too little payoff technically and for game play. But this is one of the elements of realism that wouldn't require any additional programming or anything.

After all is said and done, it may not be exactly a yes/no vote on each little item exactly that gets implemented, but hopefully will all point in one general strategic direction for the plan for next year. Whether it's ignoring most of the NFL temp changes entirely, or going along with that ride in keeping with realism but only to the degree that is feasible -- in which case the things that we do change hopefully all fit logically into a plan of the types of things we'd include.

That's one thing that I've really dreaded about this NFL situation happening and why I probably won't expand things this year is that it really gets this league further away from it's intended identity of trying to replicate the job of a real GM here.

[Goodell]

And if more people vote to move away from the league identy of being based in reality where it is technically possible, I would like to hear more for of a discussion than we've been getting in support of going in a different direction if we make a philosophical shift that way (at least temporarily).

Is it as simple as the new NFL rules are confusing or different environment than here and we should just stick with what we've done before and not add new changes at all?

Is it more in the interest in wanting more unrestricted free agents to sign (but also risking losing yours with less control over them than in reality now)?

This is one that I thought would probably be to the benefit of many GMs (as most owners/GMs love this in reality while players hate it) in being able to retain more control of their players -- as many often request wanting ways to keep/re-sign their players. And would be the easiest thing to do technically if we adopt any of the NFL shifting ways and try to replicate the GM job now.

So it is somewhat of a watershed issue, where if we don't do this which would be the easiest and the most beneficial to the GM/Owner side of things with the new NFL changes then we probably would go with the philosophy of not doing anything in recognition of the recent NFL changes and keep things as they were almost entirely.

[Royce R]

I guess I keep voting not to change things and I should mention why. We as GM's here plan for things that we know. We know 3 years or less is RFA, we know the cap rules we will be following.

GM's in the real nfl know what is coming at them and could prepare for these things. We did not and I'm sure people make roster moves planning in that direction. Maybe moving a player they didn't think they could keep because of free agency, now he would be a RFA if we change the rules.

I don't like changing things on the fly as it often hurts those who were trying to plan ahead. And just in case people are thinking this somehow benefits me it does not. If we change I could have Heath Miller as a RFA instead of UFA. I also don't have any money to spend in FA so I'm not trying to steal some player off the street.

It just seems to me all the discussion earlier when the possiblity of an uncapped year came up people were saying we would stay capped and keep our rules. Why change that now?

[Jared A]

I agree 100% with Royce. I have several players that I could benefit from being RFA's. But, I'm against it completley.


The reason the real NFL is doing it is strictly because of the lack of salary cap. This will keep salaries artificially low, and allow people to spend all their money on one player... when they should be spending it on several. So, instead of having 3 7mil per year players... it could be 2 -3mil per year players and a 21mil per year player... That's not realistic.

[Ben C.]

I for one have known since mid-season that the NFL was likely to be uncapped and these free agents would be restricted. It's been all over the media all season.

We aim to mimic reality as close as possible. The GMs didn't know with 100% certainty that things would turn out this way and neither did we. GMs had contingency plans in place for either situation.

We certainly can't go without a cap but I think it is perfectly within reason to adopt as many changes as we can do. Besides there is no proof that any of the changes in place for this year in the NFL will not be extended to future years. We know less of what the rules will be like in 2011 than what we knew about 2010. It's possible that in 2011 we will see restricted free agents with these rules.

[soonertf]

You can't just take bits and pieces of new rules. If you are going to change the RFAs then you have to take the rest of the package and go uncapped. There is really no way of doing an uncapped season here, so I think it only makes sense to ignore this year and see what the new agreement brings. If the RFA's remain under a new agreement, then I am all for adoptiing them into the leasgue. I have several key players such as Fitzgerald, Merriman, and others that I could keep under the new RFA, but I just don't think it's best for the league. If it's what majority wants then I will work within the rules, but I just think we need to think it over before making a lot of changes.

[Goodell]

I like the discussion. This is the kind of stuff we needed to get deep into, and isn't a quick resolution but important decisions to be made with long careful consideration. I get the points and agree with some above, but also wanted to add the other side of some of these...

"I don't like changing things on the fly as it often hurts those who were trying to plan ahead."

Technially, that is why we FREEZE roster activity during the annual rules discussions. Because rules are expected to be discussed and usually at least a couple changes made each year. I get the general long-term planning focus there, but the intention of freezing things during the annual and known rules discussion period is to not have things change on the fly. They change while the league grounds activity and has rules discussions just like the NFL owners have annual off-season rules discussions where new rules get discussed and put into play for the following season.

"when the possiblity of an uncapped year came up people were saying we would stay capped and keep our rules. Why change that now?"

What other GMs may say, though, in the middle of a season doesn't consistute the rules. All along I thought I said we'd have to have long off-season discussions about it and that there was still a lot to wait and see what happened in reality. And for timing, now is when we have league rule discussions each year.

"That's not realistic."

Arguably, things happening different here than reality would be more unrealisic. Us having very few RFAs while the real league has over 200 of them would be unrealistic by definition if we consciously shift away from reality. A high profile star player who is famously a RFA in reality this off-season but a different classification of free agent here could be unrealistic.

"You can't just take bits and pieces of new rules."

I tend to agree generally, but the facts are that we already do take bits and pieces of the real rules based upon our ability to either understand those complexities or implement technically. Whether a player ends up being a UFA or RFA may not really be a huge change to our rules, especially with teams having unlimited bids for their UFAs which is similar to a right of first refusal already for RFAs.

"The reason the real NFL is doing it is strictly because of the lack of salary cap. This will keep salaries artificially low"

But here, though, I don't know if it's the same market forces keeping RFAs cheap. If bidders know a team has set compensation high for a player, if they want him they have to really make a nice offer that the other team will have to think twice about financially since you know they want to keep them badly by their compensation.

While there won't be a cap in the NFL, like uncapped baseball I suspect most teams will have their own self-imposed cap budget. And outside of a couple of extremes on either side, many teams may end up in a similar financial position as they've been in spending roughly in the same neighborhood as they have for the past few years where us putting an artificial cap around there but having more RFAs as they do too may not be entirely outside of what happens with most teams in reality dealing with a similar sized budget and just more RFAs than UFAs.

.... hey, it's the easiest thing in the world for me to not change any of the rules or systems and just press start again under the same rules. It just kind of bums me out generally the further we get away from being based upon NFL play and more toward setting up artificial rules made up by us outside of the NFL reality and creating a different world and rules outside of the league intentions of mirroring the NFL GM job. But I guess there may be no way to have avoided that unless the darn rich people in the NFL could have gotten their stuff together. I really had my fingers crossed the NFL wouldn't have gone down this unfamiliar chaos road.

[Onyxgem]

I guess I keep voting not to change things and I should mention why. We as GM's here plan for things that we know. We know 3 years or less is RFA, we know the cap rules we will be following.

GM's in the real nfl know what is coming at them and could prepare for these things. We did not and I'm sure people make roster moves planning in that direction. Maybe moving a player they didn't think they could keep because of free agency, now he would be a RFA if we change the rules.

I don't like changing things on the fly as it often hurts those who were trying to plan ahead. And just in case people are thinking this somehow benefits me it does not. If we change I could have Heath Miller as a RFA instead of UFA. I also don't have any money to spend in FA so I'm not trying to steal some player off the street.

It just seems to me all the discussion earlier when the possiblity of an uncapped year came up people were saying we would stay capped and keep our rules. Why change that now?

I am going to agree with Royce also even though my team would benefit alot more with the new rule being in effect.