Oh Man!!!!

[Onyxgem]

Looking at my Dal - CFFL team i have several guys who are not recently drafted that have no salary in 2011 still on my team. Checked other leagues same issue, but that might be done on purpose in case we need to do franchise tags and what not.

[Goodell]

Looking at my Dal - CFFL team i have several guys who are not recently drafted that have no salary in 2011 still on my team. Checked other leagues same issue, but that might be done on purpose in case we need to do franchise tags and what not.

Yes, I haven't changed anyone to UFAs/RFAs/Tagged, etc. as that's still to be decided how free agency will work. They'd still be listed on the team roster for now as you have rights regarding those players without contracts in 2011 (even if its' just unlimited bidding for your own roster UFAs). We'll change the free agent statuses as we get closer to being ready for our own free agency, but for now they are all still just on the team roster as before. But if no salary figure for 2011, then they don't have a contract for 2011 with you and would either be unrestricted free agent, restricted free agent, or possibly franchise tag eligible depending on the individual player circumstances. We'll post more on that after we have finalized the rules regarding free agency and salary cap management for the new season.

[Goodell]

I think another thing we need to keep an eye on is the spending minimum that is part of the new CBA. It seems teams are required to spend more than 90% of the salary cap on current player costs. It is still unclear what that means, other than that we'll see more front-loaded contracts in the NFL. One way this could work is if signing bonuses are counted towards the cap in the year they are paid instead of prorated over the lifetime of the contract. But that brings up the question of what to do with signing bonuses that are currently being prorated, and dead money. Does it get wiped out altogether? I've read some Raiders blogs that suggest this possibility.

At the very least I think we need to employ some form of the spending minimum - that could be one of the ways we cut down on teams that are significantly below the cap while they rebuild.

As for restructuring, I think we could increase the number of contracts you are allowed to restructure. I don't see a reason for having a limit - or don't remember what the reason used to be.

I also think I may have thought of a way to fairly allow teams to re-sign players without letting them hit the market. What if we said you could sign a guy to a 1 year extension if you double the highest salary in his current contract for the extended year and give him a signing bonus of that amount? For example, on my AFFL Arizona team, I could sign Darnell Dockett to a 1 year extension if I pay him 8,000,000 salary in 2012 and give him an 8,000,000 signing bonus. Then next year if I wanted to add an extra year I'd have to give him 16,000,000 annually and 16,000,000 additional signing bonus. Clearly that would create a natural limit to how many times a guy can be re-signed while giving another option of a way to keep a player.

Yeah, a lot of details still need to emerge and questions answered for how everything will work and be accounted for in a new system. We'd try to replicate that where it makes sense. I do like the idea of also having the minimum like there will be in reality, but wonder a little about what teams will do regarding that or what enforcement to do if they don't. I can always reverse signings that put people over their cap, but not sure about signing players for teams under their salary floor if they don't. Could have some cap hit reflect the difference perhaps needed to bring them up to the floor. The ultimate enforcement would be removing ownership of the team I guess if not following new rules.

Resigning your own before the market is something that's come up before and we've kind of used the market matching franchise/transition tag rights. Maybe other options, but might be a bigger thing to talk about next off-season instead of this shortened one with other big changes. A lot of that might depend upon how the new NFL looks regarding tagging that might be more apparent in a normal off-season next year. One issue I'd see with the doubling salary suggestion would be cases of guys with minimum or rookie type contracts and doubling those not really anything close to what they'd make in reality in some cases (500K to 1M to 2M to 4M might be a huge underpayment for a top star over those years). If the NFL continues the tagging, and publishing their salaries by position for tags, that seemed like something that could maybe be useful for accepting a salary worthy of a player a team didn't want to part with and was willing to pay for it to avoid the market. But resigning your own has come up each off-season probably and we can keep looking at it. That's definitely a viable option to at least add to the other possibilities.

But definitely a lot of questions still needing to be answered about the new NFL cap and how things will work that we'll hopefully know more about soon.

[vikingfan]

Even after you re-adjust the salaries, I appear to still be off. I will have to look again at my spreadsheet to make sure calculations are correct. A little over 1M is what i appear to be off. Probably my error somewhere.

Just a quick question, did you advance the SBs or no?

Good catch. Nope, haven't done that yet. Should stay the same from year to year for most players still under contract with SB (just changes the cap hit if cut/traded with SB left), and shouldn't be counting them in the overall total if no 2011 salary but I'll adjust those soon in case that has an effect (plus needs to be done anyway). Thanks!

[tkienast]

Might be like mine. Guys that are FA's that had signing bonuses or roster bonuses still have the bonuses showing up.

[sportznut]

Funny Troy mentioned restructuring. After posting, and leaving my house, it was something I thought of as well.

Instead of artificially raising the cap, increasing the amount of restructures a team has (say from one to two) would be a good compromise that still makes that GM make a difficult decision with the SB money involved, but one that will clear up cap space for them in the 2011 season. I'm all for it, but I wouldn't like the idea of being able to restructure a LOT of contracts.

[sportznut]

I agree 100% nut. I wasn't cutting the Vick signing, you took and risk and it payed off. Noone thought he would come back better then before. That signing is completely fine by me. And I also do not believe that people will be signed cheap - people are to smart to let that happen.

We're pretty much on the same page.

Its not a big deal, nor was I upset at the example.

I just wanted people to realize that while its an awesome deal now, I also signed the guy, and waited on him to do something, anything for 3 lost seasons.

The majority of teams are going to have some really good signings, and some really bad ones, but having a Pro Bowl QB at the old league minimum is definitely a good thing for me. It still hasn't put me in the playoffs though.

[Goodell]

Just a quick question, did you advance the SBs or no?

I've advanced the SB left now and removed any bonuses for free agents no longer under contract now. So looks like those cap left figures did change for some teams (positively) and move the average under the cap to more space overall.