2014 RULES: Carry Over

[Goodell]

We currently have a limit of 5M that's allowed for unused cap space to be carried over into the next season. I read that the average carryover for NFL teams that do that was around 6M. Some teams carry over as much as 20M+. Here's a recent article:
http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/ ... er-numbers

Most of the teams are under 5M, though, in carry-over.

Another thing we don't factor in initially because of complexity is that NFL teams, as the article states, must consume 89 percent of the NFL's total cap allotment over a 4-year period. So they can be under some years, and carry that over to the next years, but eventually have to spend collectively around 89% of the cap over 4 years in total.

If we allowed 100% carry-over, things would likely get unrealistic fast as in our sim situations, it's much easier to tank and have almost no payroll without any repercussions of lost revenues that an NFL team wouldn't as likely do. Now NFL teams can't do that even outside of a down year or two because they have to ramp up the spending greatly in the others years to ensure compliance over the 4 year period.

So one option might be trying to do a multiple year tracking ourselves and let teams carry over much more from year to year (as some NFL teams do up to 24M+) but enforce that they must spend much more in the following years to balance that and reach the 89% requirement over multiple years. One challenge with us is that sim GMs can come and go, so hard to put in 4 year rules. Also what's our recourse if a team didn't meet that, other than taking their team away from them.

Another option would be to continue to artificially limit the amount of carry-over a team can do which keeps all teams always near that 89% overall requirement also. Right now that's 5M maximum carry over.

If you take the $133M salary cap x .89 that's $118.4M (so 14.6M under the cap reaches 89%).
Using last year's nearly $124M cap x .89 that's 110.4M (so 13.6M under the cap for 89%).

We could either say conservative and continue limiting just 5M, or move to something more realistic with unlimited carry over but 4 year tracking, or keep the limit to that 89% standard so all teams would stay within that multiyear requirement always. In some ways arguably that encourages more spending overall and perhaps more competition than if more was allowed to be carried over and more teams spent less. But maybe spending less isn't so bad to encourage either and maybe less salary over inflation due to competition if a better option to build long-term saving more.

Let me know if other thoughts. There are more cash/cap complications to the CBA requirement and greater detail that I'm trying to look into also. Here's some additional detail on that:
http://www.dawgsbynature.com/2014/2/28/ ... h-spending
http://www.cincyjungle.com/2013/2/13/39 ... er-the-cba

[tino38]

I wouldn't be opposed to testing out the 89% rule. Sounds kind of interesting. Perhaps a loss of a 1st round pick would force teams to stay within the rules of this?

[Goodell]

Maybe it makes it more exciting and better, maybe more problematic. I'm trying to think about what the league would look like teams having ballooned salary caps due to carrying over large sums of money (even if it's 15M extra or higher to more unlimited well up over 25M+).

Does that mess up free agency more than we want where some teams have to put out massive contracts to reach 89% standard over 4 years if way under? Or even if a just a handful of teams have 15M above the cap to dominate high level signings and each year it's just a different group of signing dominators who spent as low as possible the year before?

If a larger change, I'd probably be most okay with keeping the allowed amount at 89% of the current year cap each year, and we could then cap the amount of carry over to within keeping every team at 89% each year (not total spent but at least how we are allowing them to use unspent and keeping everyone within those 89% standards and not carrying over more than 11% annually).

That would triple the amount of carry-over we've conservatively allowed so far, though. I'm still thinking about if that would make things better or worse or not dramatically different since most of the good teams won't carry over much of anything and just the teams needing an influx of talent anyway will have large carry-over to try to improve next year. Maybe it helps bad teams jump up to better much sooner for the overall health of the leagues. Maybe it creates big fluctuations of spending from spending as little as possible one year to over spending a ton the next year. It may look similar to the NFL's carry over list with most under 5M anyway trying to field a good team with just a handful well under carrying over a large amount. If we kept it at 89% each year, we wouldn't have those few 20M+ carry overs but we may have more teams than the NFL carrying over around their max 15M each year for better or worse. Definitely interested in what most think.

[RebelFan]

I don't think we should be discussing moving the $5M limit up at all without a minimum spending limit over 4 years or however many years. This carryover system doesn't work without the salary cap floors in place. (As mentioned teams in real life must average out to 89% over 4 years) That's why it's written up that way in the real NFL. The unions don't want any kind of language in the cba that doesn't encourage teams to spend money.

[Ulrich82]

I am a little concerned about what this might do to free agency. I agree that if we do increase the limit, the carry over doesn't become any more than 11% a year. I think trying to average over each 4 year period is difficult both to keep track of and to deal with incoming GMs. Plus, since we don't have to worry about the fan relations side, it would be too easy for a rebuilding team to hold a fire sale for draft picks, spend a season or two with only drafted players and veteran minimums, and then go into the fourth year with twice as much cap space as standard with a requirement to spend over 89% of it.

Also, the actual CBA calls for an 89% CASH SPEND (not cap hit) over the 4 year period. In those terms, a signing bonus actually only counts toward the 89% in the year the contract was signed. I'm not sure if we want to try to simulate this element or not. It may help smooth out the issue of teams trying to catch up to the 89% floor because they could offer a large signing bonus, but we also know that large signing bonus is one easy way to end up with serious cap problems. I'm really not sure what the full implications of such a system would be.

Finally, the NFL had 2 4 year windows, 2013-2016, and 2017-2020, after which, the CBA is up for renegotiation. If we start using the 4 year method, we either have to retroactively include last season (usually not a good idea to enforce rules no one knew about at the time) or risk being left a year behind the future NFL cycle.

[Onyxgem]

I wouldn't be opposed to testing out the 89% rule. Sounds kind of interesting. Perhaps a loss of a 1st round pick would force teams to stay within the rules of this?

I agree, I like the idea of keeping the league with similar rules as the NFL has and think changing this rule to what the NFL's is would be a great idea.

[RebelFan]

Sounds like a lot more work for commish with very little to show for the league in the end. This league being fiction trying to mimic the real league, we have to draw the line somewhere.

[Goodell]

The 4-year tracking and administration perhaps at times between different GMs over time and having to pull in activity from past season where that wasn't part of the rules people were playing under at the time would add to complications. As would involving a different kind of calculation on cash instead of cap. It's possible they are doable but have some complexity to them.

The carry-over number itself changing isn't that complicated. It's 5M now. I'll create a record for each team that's under their cap to carry over that amount next year up to 5M (so if someone is 6M over they'd only have 5M carried over as max). It isn't too difficult for next off-season if that 5M is 10M or 15M or whatever instead. Not a lot of complicated scripting needs to be done for that.

Having that number always be based upon 89% (at least for the length of the current agreement in reality using that) so that we don't allow teams to carry over more than 11% of their cap gives that number some logical meaning instead of us arbitrarily deciding to use 5M or whatever determined. It would increase that number significantly, though, for better or worse and in line with some NFL teams carrying over much more than we have allowed previously.

[Goodell]

Most league support for keeping carry over maxed to 5M, so we'll continue with that this year. I kind of like the logic behind using the 89% figure to based that on something more real so we'll probably explore this issue again next off-season.

Keep that 5M figure in mind if you aren't planning on spending a lot of money this year. You may be 50M under your cap, but you'll only be able to carry over 5M of that next season.