5th Year Option for 2011 1st Round Picks

[Strategist]

I agree just because someone's team doesn't want to pay them 10 mil for one year doesn't meant the wouldn't want to be on that team. They might not even think they are worth that kind of money.

[charlie813brown]

I really think we need to consider the option to reject the 5th year option but retain FA advantage. This just makes sense for how the league is set up. Our advantage in FA is the same as having the rights to negotiate before other teams.

[RebelFan]

I second that.

[Ulrich82]

Regardless, I think we need to figure this out this offseason. In the NFL, teams have until May 3rd to decide on the option for 2011 draft picks.

We have no built in guarantee to lock us in this offseason, but I think that is ok. From what I read, in the NFL, the money is only guaranteed for injury at first. It becomes fully guaranteed only if the player is on the opening day active/inactive roster in the year of the option. This is how our system currently works (except for the guarantee against injury of course).

However, I don't know where the numbers we are using came from. I thought Troy put artificially large numbers into the system as placeholders. This is true for 2012 and 2013 draft picks, but not for 2011. For players taken in the top 10 spots, the amount should be set to the transition tag value for the player's position. For every other first round pick, the value should be the average of the top 25 paid players at the position excluding the top 3 highest paid. So it is actually the average of the 4th through 25th highest paid players at the position.

(see here: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/20 ... ore-may-3/, or here for 49er's Aldon Smith: http://www.ninersnation.com/2014/2/28/5 ... salary-cap or here: http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/1/13/5 ... cam-newton)

[Goodell]

When these new elements came into play and discussed for implementation in some way that was humanly manageable on a voluntary basis and didn't involve having to try to hire away the entire NFL's corporate office away with attorneys and accountants, we moved toward things that were doable in existing systems within the overall spirit of the change intentions.

Things like using existing publically available consistently published tag numbers that didn't have to involve hours and hours of individual player calculations and complexities were deemed consistent with the intent in a way that was humanly implementable given our purpose and limitations.

[Goodell]

I know some really want a change to this and it's something I'm still thinking on.

At the time, we setup rookie contracts under these new conditions in a certain way. Teams made decisions based upon how those contracts were setup for the past several years. To come in at the last minute and change that to suddenly shift how these existing players under existing contracts are going to be handled and change things around for teams that previously made personnel decisions perhaps in part at least based upon those contracts as they were setup isn't really how we've set out to do things.

Typically rule changes impact the future ahead, not re-write the past or change previous terms. Future draftee contracts. Future draft selections. Future signings. Not typically a vote to change the existing contract or team options of players who have been involved in transactions for years based upon those understandings of those contracts as entered upon the time of virtual signing.

If we change contract minimum amounts or allowable lengths of deals on free agency, those apply to future signings. We don't go back and re-write past deals that no longer meet those different standards and change things for teams that made decisions on that player under that existing contract. We don't say you may have thought you acquired a guy with a 7 year deal for a veteran minimum, but we're going to change his contract terms now to meet our different standards. Sorry you traded a lot for him based upon that contract you thought was his real contract, we're changing it.

It wasn't going to be an easy thing for us to try to implement. We could have just said, sorry guys I can't re-write everything this quick so you're going to be stuck with one year shorter deals and those guys would already be free agents as before. But we attempted to meet the spirit of the NFL change by allowing a team to keep a first rounder at a higher price if that player lived up to their potential and became elite, but also attempted to make it so players who hadn't lived up to that could be declined that final large salary year without salary cap implications and trying to approximate that situation within our existing setup. That's how all these deals have been written in the system for years having teams make decisions on them based upon that understanding.

I'm not sure how often this applies, but how fair would it be to a team that traded away a former first rounder because they didn't think they'd be worth a franchise/transition tag type salary and didn't want to just let them go, if suddenly after the fact that wasn't the case any more and had they held onto him they could have had more options for them than they thought. Maybe a team LTC'd a former first rounder already to avoid this situation but might not have if they'd have known his contract terms and available options were going to be different.

I'm not sure yet how big a deal that change is and how involved a change to make, and if issues of fairness raised in changing things up that way. Maybe not, and maybe no such cases, and maybe not so problematic to change. Just something to further consider and look at. I'll do much more on getting ready for 2014 finances this weekend and will be looking at some cases and potential issues and listening to other thoughts more as we focus on reaching some conclusions moving toward our off-season.

[RebelFan]

Whether it's something that we retrofit to all previous contracts is one thing, and you make a good point about GMs who may have already acted on a player's contract bc of the 5th year option.
Another discussion is what we should do moving forward on these contracts.

[Ulrich82]

I certainly understand that only so much time can be devoted for things to work smoothly around here. I appreciate this site and all the work that goes into making this an enjoyable experience, and I didn't mean to imply (or complain) that more needed to be done. Honestly, if the decision is that tracking these 5th year options becomes too complicated, I'm fully in favor of getting rid of them and just treating these players like normal free agents.

My understanding after the lockout ended was that placeholder contract amounts would be entered into the 5th year of the contract to be revisited later. However, it looks like I misremembered how things occurred. I just looked back in the forum and see we did agree to use previous tag numbers. However, for 2012 and 2013 draft picks, the contract numbers were never updated from the $99,999,999 and $88,888,888 placeholders, so if it is possible to switch to a new system, I don't know if people would feel it is fair to include the 2012 and 2013 picks or just 2014 and forward.

I'd like to see us switch to the NFL system, but I understand it may be too much work. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that since we had a tool for finding average contract values within certain specifications (the LTC option), a tool to calculate the average salary of the top 4 to 25th paid players at a position would not be too difficult to create. Of course, actually implementing these things without requiring Troy to manually update the contract of 32 players in each league every year might be impossible.

[Goodell]

Yeah, that was a bit of a complicated situation for us to try to implement as best we could at the time, not knowing what information will be publically available regarding those "options" consistently in the future. We were going to have the last year immediately be listed as the tag amount per position at the time of signing, but weren't quite quickly able to automate that with positional considerations determining different prices, so went with the placeholders for all that would allow us to find them easier in the data and replace with actual figures. I believe I put some time to swapping out those placeholders that first year but didn't seem as urgent and had complicated issues still to think about so didn't replace subsequent placeholders just yet so we could still find those easily if the picture of what we should/could do there became clearer as the NFL started to deal with it that in reality.

It's still a grey area that we need to figure out better long-term and a process that we know will always work and consistently have the information we need there without massive amounts of manual individual-by-individual checks across multiple leagues.

All the LTC stuff that looks at salaries to try to generate numbers for top 10, etc. all pulls data from our existing player roster tables. We'll always have current sim player salaries readily available and they don't ever need updating other than when transactions happen where they'll be automatically updated instantly. Trying to track every actual NFL players current salary through all sorts of real signings and restructurings is a much more intensive task. Maybe it's possible these days more than then that we can turn to other sites/services to quickly give us what we need there for more exact figures (to whatever extent we can count on those things existing always into the future).

It's a complicated thing that I'd like to attempt to find some better answers ahead, but in the meantime at least we approximated a team's ability to keep those elite first rounders an extra year at higher dollars if they've earned it. My interpretation is that those option years were for players who became elite enough to warrant a high salary among their peers. Our game players it turns out are probably more concerned (perhaps more than I initially expected) about the ones who didn't become elite and aren't worth the money. We see players cut all the time by teams who want to try to resign them for less if they aren't worth the money as a big part of our game play already. To me, seemed like we could essentially do much of what was happening with real first rounders without big changes and re-writes to the system. As we've gotten closer to having to deal with these now, though, more concern raised and more options wanted by teams for players not worthy of higher option amounts. To me there are still plenty of good options for such cases like LTCing them early ahead of that last big year, or strategically cutting at certain points in the off-season when number of bids aren't as critical or many teams already spent much of their available cap space otherwise.

It's something that'll take some time and research and ideas and discussion to try to figure out best ways ahead, and hopefully as the NFL goes through that with these players it provides some additional sights for us figuring out the best and most efficient ways we can try to incorporate.

[tino38]

Perhaps I have missed this? But if a team decides to pick up the option and then the player suffers a major injury, or something happens where the team no longer wants to pay the player that money and a team decides to cut the player feeling he isn't worth that price any longer, is any of that money on the option year guaranteed to the player or is it simply counted just as salary so if the player is cut he just loses all that money?