2010 RULES: Player Contract Extensions

[Royce R]

There is 3 options.

I don't believe you should be able to match a real NFL contract extension because that has a lot of chances of messing things up.

You could sign a player that has 1 or 2 years left in the real NFL to a huge contract here, hoping that they would soon extend him to cheaper than you have already signed him.

But as I have been saying, if you put a fair market price on a player based on their grade/play then why not?

[Goodell]

There are probably too many complications to implement something like extensions this year (so glad keeping it the same ahead) unless there are lots of good easy to implement suggestions.

The way I'd see using real NFL contracts, though, wouldn't be quite as described previously. We do alter contracts a bit with restructures already where we adjust the annual salary in two seasons and add signing bonus. We'd probably have to similarly come up with some way of comparing the deals and restructuring things that made common sense.

Say a AFFL contract for 3 years and 6M per year and 3M SB that has one year left. But in reality the guy signs a 5M per year deal for 4 years. We wouldn't lower the last year of the AFFL contract but keep it 6M, then three more years after at the real 5M. Then SB added to the contract overall similar to restructuring based upon real SB.

If the real contract was more per year (on average) than the AFFL one and someone wanted to take the real extension, raising the salary wouldn't be so out of the question as lowering it, so we'd probably go with the higher salary for the rest of the years.

Another real complication comes with interpreting the real contract for how it applies here. Often with new signings all the details aren't known until some time later when added to a salary website, but if we have to implement almost immediately might not know much about the details. We could rely heavily upon averages per year and all years of the real deal the same but then you have extreme cases of back or front loaded deals in reality, or cases where it's a long-term deal but really structured so only the first two years really matter or are guaranteed so using an average per year would be misrepresenting it dramatically.

Maybe it's something someday workable, but lots of details to work out and would probably also involve having to strip away some home team advantages in free agency and enhanced tagging if that's not the way anymore, so really gets to be a bigger restructuring of multiple rules. But maybe we get a start on ideas for how to implement and all the things that maybe would be impacted and can deal with implementing it the next off-season since it would be more involved. If more people liked the extension revision to the rules versus the existing way when asked next off-season. But probably is a bigger issue that takes some time to work out the kinks and all the other things that could be impacted.

[Joe]

I agree with Royce... Dont match the real deal, but if we can come up with a fair market price on their grade, Id like to give it a shot!

[vikingfan]

I think option 3 here is a great idea, otherwise it seems like we will continuously be having years where a team has 20 free agents. You dont have enough bids to sign enough players. One twist I would add to choice 3 is he has to have signed on your team. For instance, Cedric Griffin signed an extension with the Vikings. I have him on my team, so I would have the option of accepting that extension. Its a bonus for having the players on your sim team that are on your real team. If Jordy Nelson signs one, I wouldnt have the option. Otherwise this is going to turn into a 53 man fantasy league. I would to see it model the NFL more and have teams keep some of the guys on there team. Not all, otherwise the bad teams would have no chance to get better.

[Ben C.]

You dont have enough bids to sign enough players. One twist I would add to choice 3 is he has to have signed on your team.

But you have unlimited bids to sign your own players.

[vikingfan]

You dont have enough bids to sign enough players. One twist I would add to choice 3 is he has to have signed on your team.

But you have unlimited bids to sign your own players.

Thanks for correction Ben. But I know for sure I dont have unlimited time.

[Goodell]

The league is probably 50/50 on just keeping the market setting all prices and giving home team big advantages versus coming up with some way of doing LTCs otherwise. We'll just keep things as they are now heading into free agency soon but if people are passionate about some kind of contract extension and want to work out all the details for a proposal on that just let me know and we can address again next year with more specific options.