2014 RULES: Minimum Salaries

[Goodell]

When we utilize minimum salaries in the game currently (such as empty roster spot fillers for lowest level salaries or minimum free agency bids) we started with minimums at a particular time but haven't always kept up with the inflation. I believe NFL minimum salaries for next year are:

420K - Rookies
495K - 1st year
570K - 2nd year
645K - 3rd year
730k - 4th-6th year
855K - 7th-9th year
955K - 10th year+

Making sure that we're 100% on data accuracy on 100% of thousands of players can be a challenge and a lot of work, so we've kept our minimums less strict normally to give us that flexibility and not having to rely upon perfect data always.

There are either some small changes we can make to keep up with the times, or we could try to go even future into realistic approaches on newly signed veteran contract requirements.

Small changes would be increasing our minimum free agent bid for inexperienced players to be $420K instead of 310. Same with empty roster spots if a team under their 53 man limit (as all teams must fairly pay 53 players). Veteran minimum free agency bids could go up from 535K to $730K for what all guys 4+ years at least make or higher.

A bigger change would be taking efforts to ensure experience fields in the database are always 100% accurate and really enforce those to where if you were bidding on a 10 year player you'd have to bid at least 955K for veteran minimum for his experience level.

[Ben C.]

Would an easy solution to the "larger" change be to just log a season of experience to each player that is on an active roster at the end of the year? It wouldn't be fool-proof, but it might be an easy way to move towards more accurate minimums.

[Goodell]

Would an easy solution to the "larger" change be to just log a season of experience to each player that is on an active roster at the end of the year? It wouldn't be fool-proof, but it might be an easy way to move towards more accurate minimums.

Yeah, depending upon the year and how much time I have to gather all the NFL rosters and do updates, that's quicker to just add +1 to all and I've done that at times. With injuries and other rules, as you mention certainly cases where that's not going to be right. Without spending a lot more time on what experience figures are in the system now, no assurances they are 100% right to start with now, which is why we don't rely on them as critical other than with restricted free agents and 0-3 year young player bids where I try to pay more attention to getting those guys right and not as much currently whether a guy is 8 or 9th year in database since that doesn't matter to us now. If we just add 1 to everybody now and really rely a lot more on the experience variable, it'll be based upon probably incomplete data and just adding +1 to wrong info that maybe was just +1'd several years in a row and way off for some. If we care a lot more about that real experience figure, we'd have to put more time toward making sure it was right at the start and then could maybe do less formal +1's from there at times when didn't have as much time to do a complete data accuracy refresh.

[Strategist]

I think it is good that we update the numbers. I voted for just 2 numbers just because that seems like less work.

[Knighty Knight]

I voted for larger change but would be happy with smaller since it's easier. Maybe we could start smaller and begin a transition by adding a year of experience for last years rookies and continue to add on from that class on, instead of tracking current veterans for exact years of experience we can use just the base veteran minimum. So that the small implementation will eventually phase into the larger change with less work.

[RyanM]

Just curious as to why we'd use the NFL's salary cap number, but not the league's minimum salary requirements for rookies/veterans.

[Goodell]

Just curious as to why we'd use the NFL's salary cap number, but not the league's minimum salary requirements for rookies/veterans.

We do in theory... at least a simplified version of it based upon the amount of workload we can do that doesn't get overly complicated to implement. We've always had minimums.

Laziness perhaps or not enough hours to do everything or just not seen as a huge deal at the time perhaps that we didn't up it a little bit every year to keep in pace. But after not updating for a while that difference now isn't so small so catching up this year. We'll try to keep pace ahead also with support for that.

As for if it's hugely important that 6th year guys must have a minimum of X and 7th year guys must have a minimum of Y, did the poll to see just how big of a deal that is to everyone as it is more work on both always keeping up with every individual in the NFL's accurate data as well as adjusting the automated tools beyond their simplified versions of minimum requirements to get into something more dynamic on an individual by individual basis more.

[RyanM]

Would we go back and change existing deals, or would this just be for contracts going forward?

[Onyxgem]

Would we go back and change existing deals, or would this just be for contracts going forward?

I would think that it would have to be just going forward.

[RyanM]

I would think that it would have to be just going forward.

That's what I was thinking, but obviously an important strategy issue in trading/FA planning right now.