FA bidding

[RyanM]

Just an idea for next year Troy, but I think you should try to create a formula that weights the salary offers towards signing bonuses. The way it works now you can't lower the annual salary while offering more in the form of a signing bonus. A player in real life is always going to pick the contract with a higher signing bonus if the total value of the offers is equal. A lot of times they'd go with the a larger signing bonus even if it had a smaller total value.

I noticed teams are offering large annual salaries with little or no bonuses in an effort to sign the players & then be able to cut or trade them easily with no cap penalties. It's something we need to address for the future to keep the league closer to reality, IMO.

[RyanM]

The other thing you might think about adding is an average annual value of contract. If a player gets offered an $18M signing bonus & $36M total contract ($6M avg) for a 6yr deal or the same bonus & $21M total contract ($7M avg) for a 3yr deal then they're more likely to take the shorter deal and get more years of FA.

[Jared A]

I personally like the simplicity of it. I understand what everyone's saying...

That said, some of these rediculas 7 year contracts will be biting people in the butt.

[Shagg]

Looking at some of these bids makes my 15 million a year for Wilson look pretty damn good

[Goodell]

Yeah, it's definitely something to at least look at. The simplicity was both a necessity initially technically as well as making it not too difficult for people to understand without needing a calculator or finance professor talking about the time value of money or something comparing vastly differently structured bids.

We could also just come up with some ratio where SB money was multiplied by an increased factor to make it more valuable than the salary, but adds a little more complexity.

I haven't found an easy way to implement a change there but definitely open to suggestions to put to a poll for next off-season in changing some of the bid evaluation methods. I'd like to not have to use a separate spreadsheet file, as well as making it easy to know what you need to do to counter a bid without having to do a ton of complex math, but we could also do those things if most want to. It's also possible that the system could have some kind of built-in tool that would tell you how to structure your bid of what adjustments you needed to make to your differently structured offer, but so far that's been more complicated to try to implement. But possibly down the road, and something we should bring up next off-season and look at a couple different alternatives.

[Ulrich82]

Personally, I like the idea of an average yearly value thing. It wouldn't be too hard to compute on your own : Salary + RB + SB/years. If your counter offer fails to raise the average yearly value, it would be rejected. Teams could weigh adding a player short term at a higher SB vs long term with higher yearly salary to reflect the kind of salary growth a young player might expect if he signs a lucrative long term deal.

[Joe]

Not to change the subject, but I think in oreder for teams to raise bids on any particular FA, they need to have the cap space available. In the NFL, you cannot sign a player if you dont have the funds, so you should not be able to do that here either. So, if youre already in the hole, you need to correct it before you go upping bids.

[Goodell]

Not to change the subject, but I think in oreder for teams to raise bids on any particular FA, they need to have the cap space available. In the NFL, you cannot sign a player if you dont have the funds, so you should not be able to do that here either. So, if youre already in the hole, you need to correct it before you go upping bids.

Currently you can't place a bid if you aren't under the cap.

Something like you mentioned has been raised before and discussed (and I think polls in previous off-seasons supporting how things are now), but difficult in some cases because you have no idea if you are going to get the player or not, as well as situations where you have no idea if an offer-sheet is going to be matched or not and placing a bid not treated as a signing.

Placing a bid to us is part of the negotiation process. Teams can talk about a price they'd pay to an agent and even write a number down and pass it across the table to an agent to put in their bids to them, but they don't have to be that much under the cap just while figuring out a price. Once signed, they have to have or make room for them but not currently during negotiations.

Let's say I have an over-priced LT and LJ from a previous big contract signed in their prime. I could clear a ton of cap space by cutting them. And I may do just that, but only if I can get a good RB signed to come in instead. Otherwise, I may just keep the old guys for another year if I can't sign somebody. It's difficult I think to make a team cut those higher priced veteran players way in advance when bidding could go on for days for that player's replacement and no way of knowing you'd even get the replacement or not. Or if a matching situation no way of knowing if a team would match 48 hours later after days of bidding. Contracts could go even more ridiculously high in some of those cases if a team was forced to cut a high priced older guy before even bidding on his replacement knowing that they could be all out of options and have all their eggs in only one basket of going as high as they can to get that replacement signee since they had to cut their other RBs days ago to even start bidding on a new one.

And it's not so noticable now with lots of teams under the cap, but in the weeks going into the season where most teams are somewhat set and not as much cap space it really limits the market to only a few teams or forces unneccessary cuts across any team that wants to bid with only one getting them.

For example, a sim team cuts a player in demand as training camp ends. Most teams are kind of set. But if 10 teams want to bid on the player who'll command a decent contract, you'd have to see many of those 10 teams cut all sorts of other veterans just for the right to negotiate/bid? Then you have another mass round of last minute free agency involving all those other veterans cut just so their teams could just put in a bid and then frantically trying to re-sign guys they cut to try to get a replacement but couldn't sign the replacement because only one team can get him.

It's something we can put into discussion and voting on again next off-season, and I get the logical angle for wanting it or maybe frustration in seeing teams close to their cap still bidding, but we treat that like negotiation not a signing until the time limit is up and then only the winning team has to be that much under. If they aren't or can't be quickly, it's voided.

[Joe]

Makes sense... I wasnt thinking like that.