2015 Off-Season Update

[Goodell]

Right. That's not an option to actually do just yet. I have to update those scripts in terms of a new year and new year finances. Deactivated it to avoid confusion with someone seeing one set of numbers today and another set of numbers tomorrow. It's not available yet, but hope to be in the next few days. Right now teams can only check-in and look at their 2015 roster. More options will be coming available soon.

[Goodell]

Updated the restricted free agents (RFA) last night and did a little more updating otherwise, so I think team roster finances are pretty close to finished. Let me know if you see something on your roster that you're not sure about. Send it in PM to me so I'll have a check list of items and can mark them off when done (and not having to search through various threads). Thanks!

[Knighty Knight]

Can we get an explanation on the $3M Workout, Reporting, Misc Bonuses and Practice Squad under cap hits?

I'm assuming this will be some kind of pool money for undrafted free agents but it is currently counting against our cap room so not sure how it all will work.

[tino38]

Can we get an explanation on the $3M Workout, Reporting, Misc Bonuses and Practice Squad under cap hits?

I'm assuming this will be some kind of pool money for undrafted free agents but it is currently counting against our cap room so not sure how it all will work.

We used to have it. Not pool money, it's a legit cap hit. I don't remember it last year but I believe it is supposed to be there since NFL has such things counting against their cap.

[Knighty Knight]

Ok, we haven't had it in the two years I've been around. How did we come up with $3M as the number? Is this the average in NFL contracts for most teams?

[Goodell]

That's the number from discussions in that regard several years ago. It might have been in a different league thread but asked about that earlier, and if it was left off last year it was a mistake on my part. It's always been part of things from the beginning because NFL teams have to account for those kinds of things also. We came up with a fairly conservative figure for that a long while back and used it universally for all.

It's not something I want to have a big debate about, but if someone had some research or calculations into it should be something else, that's fine, and we could look at changing that, but it's part of things as intended from the start. Practice squad salaries alone are over $1M at the very least and teams usually have to account for a lot of other salary cap related matters such as workout bonuses, etc. that all go against the cap. Here's a link about workout bonuses from a few years ago: http://overthecap.com/workout-bonuses/ with some teams over $6M in those bonuses alone with a wide variety there (and that was a couple years ago). So with psquads about a million and various other bonuses, we came up with that figure back then to use for all.

[Knighty Knight]

Fair enough, I just wasn't aware of it and it caught me off guard since I haven't seen it before or a discussion about it.

I did find some old numbers for workout bonuses. However, that doesn't incorporate reporting bonus or incentives. So $3M seems to be a fair estimate given the lack of information available on the subject.

http://overthecap.com/workout-bonuses/

[Goodell]

Understandable, especially for newer GMs not here in previous years when that was part of it.

Alright, looking at past off-season rules discussions a bit and trying to refresh my memory. It was part of things early on here, but I think we may have dropped it starting from the uncapped and then new CBA year with some new odd rules like teams being able to borrow against a future cap just for that year and some other odd things.

In looking at the database getting things ready for the new year noticed that line item but that it wasn't coming up and assumed it should be (as it was originally intended).

I do believe it was probably a mistake on my part to not include that in recent seasons, as everything I'm finding now indicates both practice squad and workout/other bonuses should count. Practice squads alone are 1M+. Read an article about workout bonuses and minimums NFL uses for that for cap purposes (listed as around 600K with some teams paying much more well into the millions). Based upon some of that, I'll probably adjust all down to $2M across the board for now as kind of the minimum there (also helps with transition to lower that impact if we weren't including in recent seasons but perhaps should have been as always previously), but believe those things should be against the cap and that's how the league was setup. With the salary cap going up quite a bit (and more than expected) also seems like good timing to integrate that back in if it should be in as intended.

Focusing this off-season on getting some lingering trouble areas finally all worked out and things setup automatically for how they need to be going forward.

[Goodell]

Another update... I've activated the franchise/transition/RFA options on your team roster pages. You can't hit submit just yet, but at least can look at those figures and think about the options there with more detail. I'll turn the submit option for decisions probably tomorrow. Want to first make sure no problems there before people start submitting, so let me know if you see anything.

Also, you can now click on the LTC link on your team roster page. That'll show you LTC contract values you'll be able to select soon. That's also not submittable at the moment, just shows you the information for me to give it a little time to ensure it's as it should be, then we'll turn that fully on also probably later tomorrow.

So decisions can start to be finalized in those regards this weekend.

[chiefbrody]

Will full roster moves be activated at the same time?