2017 Off-Season Update

[Fish]

Sadly I joined ISBL too late, took over a Red Sox roster that lost 130 games and was looking forward to rebuilding them when the league folded.

[Goodell]

As the drafts come to a close tonight, jot down some of your players of interest that weren't selected or print out your draft queue, because the next phase of league activity will begin tomorrow when we put all the undrafted players into free agency.

As voted this off-season, we're going to do it a little more realistically (assuming I can finish that today) where teams are capped at 100K for total budget to undrafted free agent signing bonuses. The actual NFL total is just below that, so we'll use 100K as a nice round number. I'll explain more about that with an update tonight. Tentatively, we'll plan for 9AM ET tomorrow morning putting all undrafted players onto the market. I'll update tonight if any changes.

[Goodell]

I've had to work tonight remotely with a bad wifi connection so just in case things aren't ready, we'll delay the start of undrafted free agents becoming available on the free agent market to:

Wednesday at 9:00 PM ET

... instead of 9am as planned.

[Goodell]

Here's more information about signing undrafted free agents to be put onto the market later today. Their bid page will say something to this effect:

UNDRAFTED FREE AGENT: This player was eligible for our recent sim league college draft, but went unselected. Prior to June 1st, our teams have a 100K signing bonus cap — similar to the NFL — for signing undrafted free agents. You can sign as many undrafted free agents (UDFA) as you want (up to 90 man roster limit during off-season) but can only spend up to 100K total for all signing bonuses for UDFAs total. Once you sign UDFAs totaling 100K in SB, you will be blocked from bidding on any other UDFAs until after June 1st. At that time all UDFAs become regular unrestricted free agents. Typical UDFA contracts might be 450K salary for 3 years with whatever signing bonus (typically 3-30K in reality). Bidded unguaranteed annual salary for UDFA cannot exceed veteran salary of 760K, so 760K salary with 100K SB is the highest any UDFA could receive.

You have 100,000 left of your $100K UDFA signing bonus cap.

[Knighty Knight]

Once you sign UDFAs totaling 100K in SB, you will be blocked from bidding on any other UDFAs until after June 1st. At that time all UDFAs become regular unrestricted free agents. Typical UDFA contracts might be 450K salary for 3 years with whatever signing bonus (typically 3-30K in reality).

Just wanted to confirm we can still offer UDFA's contracts with no SB even after using the $100k pool of bonus money.

[Goodell]

Just wanted to confirm we can still offer UDFA's contracts with no SB even after using the $100k pool of bonus money.

Yes.

[Goodell]

And actually I have to delay again. Sorry, but with this new feature I don't want to have new problems pop up while I'm not around to monitor and fix as needed. I had one issue pop up in testing I need to resolve tonight and I also have to pick up a friend that will leave me away from a computer at that time. So we'll delay UDFAs hitting the market until tomorrow morning...

THURSDAY MORNING at 9:00 AM ET

[robroach]

Back to my question way back. What do we do about ties? So if I'm understanding this correctly, the first person to offer 760k a year for 3 years and 100k in signing bonus will be guaranteed that player?

[JonC]

Back to my question way back. What do we do about ties? So if I'm understanding this correctly, the first person to offer 760k a year for 3 years and 100k in signing bonus will be guaranteed that player?

Yeah, just like FA bidding, highest bid wins, raises have to be at least 5%. So seems to me that if you offer 760k/yr for 3 years with a 100k signing bonus, you win. But then you are done with UDFA unless you offer 0 signing bonus money.

[robroach]

Not just like free agent bidding, because there is no max in free agency.