2014 RULES: Bid Scores

[Goodell]

We had some discussion this off-season about possibly allowing bids formatted differently to be fairly compared. To where you didn't just have to raise the amounts of initial bids keeping to their structure somewhat, but could offer and entirely differently structured bid as a counter also if you wanted to put a lot more into signing bonus than salary, etc.

Here's a page you can test various bids and see how they would be judged by a potential new system:

http://www.fangm.com/football/freeagency-bid-test.php

Try it out on various types of bids and let me know if you see any problems or if you think it's judging certain types of bids unfairly. I imagine we'll tweak it a little as we go based upon feedback, but if most are supportive of something like that and doesn't seem like many issues there we may switch to this type of evaluation of bids for the upcoming free agency period.

[Goodell]

Here's the formula it's using to start. Definitely open to feedback on potential improvement on the formula tweaks, or your own formula suggestions.

Percent of contract guaranteed becomes a multiplier for the overall score, so if you're guaranteeing a large percentage that's to your benefit as end scores multiplied by that factor. The score totals include the total contract value + guaranteed money (gets counted twice as we want to emphasize that) + cap hit per year (I've multipled it by 5 to make that more significant and separate similar offers further by cap hit per year differences).

Guaranteed percent multiplier (1+ percent of contract guaranteed -- SB/total value)
x [ Total contract value in millions (salary+RB*years + SB)
+ Guaranteed $ (Signing Bonus so that gets counted twice as also in total above)
+ 5 x Cap hit per year (salary+RB + sb/yr) ]

- If no SB guaranteed money, salary+RB 5% increase required as previously and only requirement for successful counter no matter the bid score for 0 guaranteed bids.

[Goodell]

This tool or something like it would be available from the free agency bid page for you to check and test bids before entering a counter offer.

[charlie813brown]

First year salary is also guaranteed, no? Shouldn't that be in the calculation

[Goodell]

First year salary is also guaranteed, no? Shouldn't that be in the calculation

No. If you sign a guy in April to a 750K deal or whatever and cut him in training camp, that's not guaranteed money. Salary only gets guaranteed any year for veterans who make the roster week 1 they get their paychecks for the full year any year of their deal.

Signing bonus is guaranteed. You'll pay that money no matter what, no way around that (either prorated per year or in large cap hits if player leaves roster but one way or another you're responsible for all signing bonus). Agreed salary for a season goes away if a player never starts receiving game checks from your team during regular season.

[Royce R]

how much do you need to increase the bid score for a successful bid?

[Goodell]

how much do you need to increase the bid score for a successful bid?

In the example currently, 5%.

[tino38]

I've been playing with this a little bit. My original offer scored a 44.28 with 3 year contract at $16,605,000 and no guaranteed money. My counter scored a 39.71 with $13,200,000 and $1,200,000 guaranteed. It said my counter offer was successful even though the score was lower. Does that mean if the bidding war would end there, then the counter offer would win?

[Goodell]

I've been playing with this a little bit. My original offer scored a 44.28 with 3 year contract at $16,605,000 and no guaranteed money. My counter scored a 39.71 with $13,200,000 and $1,200,000 guaranteed. It said my counter offer was successful even though the score was lower. Does that mean if the bidding war would end there, then the counter offer would win?

I was entering those figures and not getting the same thing. Might be that it hadn't loaded a new answer yet from a previous bid comparison or maybe I was entering your described info in wrong.

The only times a lower score would be successful should be cases where there is no signing bonus on either offer, where it just goes by straight 5% raise in unguaranteed salary+RB required as previously for a successful counter-offer. I did that so people could just raise a minimum contract bid with no SB by just adding years to totally unguaranteed contract.

The bid/counter process wouldn't change with this. In previous free agency periods here, someone puts in a first bid. Teams can put in a counter so long as it involved a 5% raise in salary, etc. and some other requirements we had. Then that's the highest bid and will be signed if nobody puts in a higher bid for 24 hours. This won't change any of that related to still needing to be top bid for 24 hours, this just allows teams to put in a wider variety of bids to try to counter using a bid score calculation to determine if the counter is valid or not.

[tino38]

Im traveling and have been on my phone so I wonder if that is what caused that. I put those numbers in again and this time it told me it was too low. Maybe it didn't load all the way. Sorry for the confusion. But after playing around with this quite a it over the last hour or so I'm a big fan of this.