2013 RULES: Players without Grades

[Goodell]

We had some debates last year with NFL players who weren't on rosters at the time Madden put out their grades by team. Wanted to make sure we had something set in stone this year that all knew about ahead of time as it could impact free agent choices and roster decisions ahead.

We only use published information publically available as our grade data.

Right now the grades showing for players are from last season. Like always, grades are subject to change with player performance ahead and we update our grades on a weekly basis (if updates published) during the season. So don't necessarily pay for the listed grade only, because the grade can and will change. Do your research and pay for the individual, backed by your opinion about his play leading to either solid or improved grades ahead or not.

Before the regular season, we'll zero out the grades of all players in the system as they will be old grades by then not updated for 8 months.

We will then upload the new batch of published Madden grades for the new season (assuming that's still the way we measure player grades).

If a player on your roster doesn't get a grade then, he won't get one in our system either at that time. In recent years, grade updates from the company have been published on a weekly basis during the season in which case active players are likely to have their performance grades adjusted at times throughout the year.

Sometimes there are lists of new season free agent grades published by reliable sources (don't belive we found that last year, though, but have in others). We may incorporate that if it's reliable information on a group of free agent grades. But we can't do one-by-one individual research or take the word of someone trying to look up players on their game version. It's more labor than we can/want to put into fringe players not even on rosters in reality for the most part, unreliable as a method with manipulation possibile, unfair to just look up players for some teams and not others, and arguably at times an unfair represenatation of a players value if they had a high grade as a free agent but no NFL team has signed them as they sit unemployed.

As we've done in the past, at week 4 we'll do a roster check and unemployed players (who will no longer get grade updates that season since not active players) will have their grade knocked down 25% from what they were last graded before the season.

To avoid a lot of debate and grey areas with complication later this summer, wanted to make some straight-forward standards in regards to grades ahead of time. Open to further discussion this off-season on that, but unless announced otherwise that'll be the standard used for what grades are used at the start of next season and what we'll do in cases of players without grades (they just won't have one until published madden grade made publically available like the vast majority of active players with grades published).