09 Rules: Free Agency Counter-Offer Minimums

[Goodell]

Our counter-offer requirements were enhanced last year coming off some issues that first off-season, but perhaps will be tweaked again before FA starts.

We do probably want strong counter-bid requirements to:
- Not waste teams bids (only 5 per day) when someone offers just a tiny bit more.
- Give some benefit to the initial bidders (especially later in the year) who may have done research to find that player instead of reacting to someone else's bid.

Current counter-bid requirements is minimum of $10,000 for either annual salary or roster/signing bonus.

Raising it too much may not matter too much during initial FA phase in March but really would impact later season free agent signings for marginal players if you have to raise it $100K to counter offer, but that really gives strong incentive to first bidders and really cuts bidding wars short.

Some FA complaints come from the 24 hour window on bids and some players getting new bids at the last moments just before signing with a team. I'm not totally sure what could be (if anything should) be done there other than perhaps increasing number of bids possibly, but that takes away from prioritizing on targetted players a bit and not sure that would effect that last minute bidding anyway.

Another quick note or two on free agency as that approaches real soon related to minimum bids:

- We may have a lower minimum salary for marked younger players than the 435K veteran minimum to where teams could pay younger players similar to draftee annual salaries versus the veteran minimum. However those probably would have a restriction on back-loading the deal so as not to reduce that first year salary to be so low with new reduced minimum for youngsters. That might not get instituted until later in the year around training camp time instead of bigger name free agency coming up.

- It was talked about before but too complex with time running short so I'm not going to be able to come up with some time value calculations for bid contracts with different salaries in different years. As such I am going to try to build in pro-rated contracts for that first year if a player signed to a multi-year deal at mid-season. So in November a team would bid 435K/year for 3 years on a player and pay $435 for year 2 and 3 but half that in year one, instead of how done before with minimum bid reduced as the season went along.

We'll probably do both of those things as default positions unless opposition otherwise, time and resources permitting -- as well as raising the minimums on counter-offers slightly depending upon poll results.

[Ben C.]

Is there a way to have the counter-bid be a percentage higher - say a 10% increase, rather than a flat figure?

For example, team A bids 435k. Team B then must bid 479k or higher. Team A then responds by pushing the offer to 1,000,000, to which Team B must bid by 1,100,000 to beat it.

[Jared A]

I think Ben's idea makes more sense.

There's a pretty big jump from 435k to 535k... but doing the same on an eight million dollar salary isn't nearly the impact.

[Goodell]

Yeah, that has come up before and I was intending to add but slipped my mind yesterday. Will be some adjustment to the bid checking scripts but not too bad I don't think. Especially as more leaning toward higher jump in the minimums a percentage would make more sense instead as mentioned the larger that minimum goes up. It does make it a little more complicated on the bidding part, trying to do the math and each bid would have a different minimum to raise in terms of money, but if we kept it straight forward shouldn't be too bad.

[Jared A]

Most GM's can type 1.05 X current bid and figure it out! Now... there's a couple in here that multipication isn't exactly a strong suit!

[Royce R]

Most GM's can type 1.05 X current bid and figure it out! Now... there's a couple in here that multipication isn't exactly a strong suit!

Jared you can just send me a PM and I can figure out the increase for you

[Goodell]

We will raise the minimum bid raises this off-season to 5%.

$500,000 bid -> $25,000 raise required to counter
$1,000,000 bid -> $50,000 raise required to counter
$5,000,000 bid -> $250,000 raise required to counter

We may go to 10% next year (or some hybrid of 10% for small bids and 5% for bids over $1M), but 5% already represents a big jump from the $10K requirement previously at all levels even doubling the raise amount on small bids and doesn't make the counter offer requirements too insane for top player bids on the other end of the scale.

We will also go to a more realistic minimum bid so that you don't have to pay undrafted rookies starting at $435K as before (although with back-loaded could pay less).

Here is the real league minimums:
Year 2009
0 $310,000
1 $385,000
2 $460,000
3 $535,000
4-6 $620,000
7-9 $745,000
10+ $845,000

I have experience levels (from NFL roster pages) for most players but can't be sure to always be up-to-date with those so we'll be more general this first year. Also I don't want to get in a situation arguing whether a guy is a 4 or 5 year player based upon partial seasons, etc. especially if different sites list experience differently (as they certainly could if published at different times of the year and it's not usually labeled).

League Minimum: $310,000
If experience listed in database greater than 2 years then minimum for those players: $535,000

Minimum deals cannot be setup as back-loaded for half of the first year salary (double in last year) unless the back-loaded amount is greater than the minimums.

We may try to get more in line with minimums by experience in the future, but for now allowing younger players to be signed for less and raising the minimum for veterans from last year.

This doesn't effect contracts already in place, just new ones bidded on for free agency starting next week.

We also will not reduce the minimum bid throughout the season, but prorate the salary so that if a player signed at mid-season to a 2-year $535K deal it would end up counting 268K this year and 535 next year.