2024 RULES: Free Agency Bids (High SB/Low Salary)
Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2024 6:56 pm
One of the frustrations that tends to come up in free agency over the years are some frustrated with low salary, high signing bonus bids, sometimes by rebuilding teams with cap space who may end up eventually trading the player and eating the big cap hit for the value since they have the cap space.
We've adjusted things over the years to keep things in line with reasonable reality to avoid fake situations here where we can, such as a one-year no-trade clause on highly graded or highly paid star players as no big free agent would sign with a team that had the intention of dealing them immediately and made things unrealistic. We also adjusted the bid score last year that made those kinds of bids easier to counter.
To me, we don't want a lot of fake limitations as we keep things real, but we also don't want our fantasy world without real money to be exploitable in ways to create extremely fake situations with these fake players. When we have non-NFL restrictions it's usually to help ensure more realistic outcomes. So we do have criteria for successful bidding that essentially serve as a player's agent rejecting weird or extreme offers that wouldn't make common sense for a player to agree to compared to the other more realistic bids on the market.
Lower salaries on high quality players has been an often expressed concern as we use salaries in our LTC estimates. It's a bit complicated, but we've looked at and could tweak LTC calculations and options further this off-season to factor in signing bonuses making it less of a worry for low salary offers. We could also apply more bid conditions to prevent too extreme offers that have those negative impacts.
For example, say we had a 10x max signing bonus difference so a team couldn't offer a 1M salary with 25M signing bonus but 10M max SB (10x) bid without upping the salary more. A 60M SB offer couldn't have salary lower than 6M with that 10x requirement. Or maybe that's still too much for most and want it more like 5x so if a team wanted to put in a big 60M SB then the salary has to be at least 12M for a 5x requirement. The biggest SB for a 5M salary would be 25M with that 5x limit.
There may be better ways to do the math on the bid limits there with percentages or whatever, but if implemented it helps to keep the programming simple.
On the other hand, there's an argument that SB are our only guaranteed money the way things are now and players should jump at the highest SB offers as they'd have the most guaranteed money, so they should be allowed and if they mess up LTCs or whatever then we should just adjust how those other impacts are calculated instead.
Revising LTC is a big project and some complications like SBs not being a cap factor any more for players once traded, but probably something we'll look at either way. But these kinds of bids do tend to raise LTC concerns more.
We've adjusted things over the years to keep things in line with reasonable reality to avoid fake situations here where we can, such as a one-year no-trade clause on highly graded or highly paid star players as no big free agent would sign with a team that had the intention of dealing them immediately and made things unrealistic. We also adjusted the bid score last year that made those kinds of bids easier to counter.
To me, we don't want a lot of fake limitations as we keep things real, but we also don't want our fantasy world without real money to be exploitable in ways to create extremely fake situations with these fake players. When we have non-NFL restrictions it's usually to help ensure more realistic outcomes. So we do have criteria for successful bidding that essentially serve as a player's agent rejecting weird or extreme offers that wouldn't make common sense for a player to agree to compared to the other more realistic bids on the market.
Lower salaries on high quality players has been an often expressed concern as we use salaries in our LTC estimates. It's a bit complicated, but we've looked at and could tweak LTC calculations and options further this off-season to factor in signing bonuses making it less of a worry for low salary offers. We could also apply more bid conditions to prevent too extreme offers that have those negative impacts.
For example, say we had a 10x max signing bonus difference so a team couldn't offer a 1M salary with 25M signing bonus but 10M max SB (10x) bid without upping the salary more. A 60M SB offer couldn't have salary lower than 6M with that 10x requirement. Or maybe that's still too much for most and want it more like 5x so if a team wanted to put in a big 60M SB then the salary has to be at least 12M for a 5x requirement. The biggest SB for a 5M salary would be 25M with that 5x limit.
There may be better ways to do the math on the bid limits there with percentages or whatever, but if implemented it helps to keep the programming simple.
On the other hand, there's an argument that SB are our only guaranteed money the way things are now and players should jump at the highest SB offers as they'd have the most guaranteed money, so they should be allowed and if they mess up LTCs or whatever then we should just adjust how those other impacts are calculated instead.
Revising LTC is a big project and some complications like SBs not being a cap factor any more for players once traded, but probably something we'll look at either way. But these kinds of bids do tend to raise LTC concerns more.