2017 Off-Season Update

[DuffMan]

can we turn off signing soon and those features now?

[Troy S]

The plan would be for signing soon to be off with several June 1st changes that get the league into more regular season mode. It's something to think about whether it should be on/off during this UDFA competition with cap limits, but I think we'll learn a lot about how this goes and possible changes to it from next year for the UDFA game within a game.

[soonertf]

Thanks Troy.. Looks good

[Ben C.]

That's different from what I've understood this change to be. I thought we were only capping the signing bonus. At least that's all the original vote mentioned.

Can we get some clarification here, Goodell?

The purpose of this is adding STRATEGY and REALISM. Not just who has the most cap to give 10 UDFAs each 2M contracts. The aim is no more ridiculous, unrealistic undrafted free agent contracts that are 10x higher than draft pick contracts. In the NFL teams have to use their budget there wisely. They do a little circumventing by guaranteeing some salary too sometimes (which we don't have that as an option), but we do give a little flexibility for increasing from rookie salary but not rising above realistic UDFA salary amounts. My original intent was all 450K salaries with no wiggle room, and only bidding by increasing limited SB cap. As examples done with counter-offers it seemed like I might need to make increasing salary an option, but salary weighs heavily on the bid score so tweaked that a little for UDFAs only and limited choices to realistic rookie deals only where strategy is most important not who spends the most fake money.

I get that, but it would've been helpful if you had marketed the change as a cap on signing bonus AND salary from the beginning. It was just a bit confusing to have it be called a signing bonus cap when it actually also is a cap on the salaries.

[Goodell]

In testing things and doing some examples to try to get it working best, leaving salary uncapped ended in ridiculous testing results. Really made capping anything meaningless if people could just add millions to salary where tiny tiny SBs didn't matter at all in the bidding. The opposite is the intention where SB matters most and you have a cap on how much of it you can apply to UDFAs. If people could give UDFAs 5M even after they spent their measly 100K SB, then we're really just where things were before. The intention is to make that more realistic with realistic UDFA salaries lower than higher round draft picks like reality and adding strategy where you have to prioritize who you go after with limited UDFA SB budget.

[Ulrich82]

Hrm.... I would not voted in favor of this if that were what was presented. We voted on capping signing bonuses. If that was not working well, we should have scrapped it for this year and reconsidered.

I think this is a step backward for the game. This is not something I ever viewed as a significant issue, and now we are giving priority to those who get their bids in first. Seems like the exact opposite of what we have always tried to do here.

[Ulrich82]

Also, what happens when I reach my limit? Can I not make any more bids? What if I am outbid on someone I had offered a 15k signing bonus to? I may have lost out on another signing and not have actually reached my cap because of a previous unsuccessful bid.

[Knighty Knight]

This is a step forward for the game. Capping signing bonus without capping salaries is useless.

I'm a GM that doesn't get in a bidding war for an UDFA. If an UDFA has an offer, I find the next guy on my list. I don't think this necessarily prioritizes first bids. It certainly does if you offer the max but then you won't be able to sign anyone else.It's about quantity, not quality at this point. A lot of GMs prioritize an NFL UDFA by selecting that player in the 7th round.

[Ulrich82]

This is broken. If someone has a SB offer at $30k, you can't beat it without offering $50k. I think that's smart for free agency, but when we have a small cap of $100k for UDFA, $20k is a HUGE increase. There should be a minimum increase required like $5k or maybe a 20% increase so:

$1k --> $1.2k
$5k --> $6k
$10k --> $12k
$20k --> $24k
$30k --> $36k

[Goodell]

Regarding what was proposed and voted upon, to clear it up this is what was exactly proposed:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1420

All UDFAs would get a standard rookie contract salaries, with a signing bonus amount based upon competitive bidding among teams that have an equal limit on the amount of signing bonuses they can give to UDFAs. After June 1st, any UDFAs that didn't get a bid in that new UDFA bidding process would turn into normal free agents on the market like usual for the rest of the season.

Initially the proposed plan voted upon as it states above was ALL UDFAs get the same standard rookie contract salary (450K) where bid competition is just SB raises where there's a cap. When implementing I started making it exactly like that, but decided in testing to allow that little bit of wigggle room to add some salary too to counter-bids so long as it remained within the stated and voted standard "rookie contract salaries".

I realize a lot of GMs who are used to just signing unlimited numbers of UDFAs and stocking their rosters without limit don't like having limits put on how many UDFAs they can competitively sign. I imagine free spending NFL teams might not like that rule either. I imagine some really think UDFAs signed to 3M or whatever obviously unrealistic contracts was fine too. The league does not and values realism and adding strategic elements.

There may be tweaks in the future after viewing results and there were some tricky things about regular bid score applying here that I had to work with (and will have to probably keep adjusting in the future), but overall the league views this addition as what we want within the vision of the league for competitive balance, strategic gamesmanship, and realism.