This Guy Has a GREAT Agent (reneg woes)

[cuervo72]

This is an interesting case of a player in FOFL:

theFOFL.com : Player >> Jerome Coffey (http://www.thefofl.com/players/player.php?player=29867)

<table class="playerstats" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr class="playerheaders"><th>Salary</th><th>Bonus</th></tr> <tr class="playeryear" align="right"><td>$1,420,000</td><td>$86,820,000</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear" align="right"><td>$1,560,000</td><td>$57,800,000</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear" align="right"><td>$27,410,000</td><td>$57,800,000</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear" align="right"><td>$30,770,000</td><td>$57,800,000</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table class="playerstats" cellspacing="1"><tbody id="transactions"><tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Breizh</td><td>QB</td><td>Offer withdrawn due to lack of cap room</td><td>164,700,000/3</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Chesapeake</td><td>QB</td><td>Offer withdrawn due to lack of cap room</td><td>105,000,000/3</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Dodge City</td><td>QB</td><td>Signed as an unrestricted free agent from Hell Creek </td><td>240,010,000/3</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Bar Harbor</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>98,950,000/5</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>French</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>140,000,000/5</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Cloud City</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>155,240,000/5</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Alabama</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>75,000,000/3</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Tampa Bay</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>195,000,000/3</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2041</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Smugglers Cove</td><td>QB</td><td>Turned down a contract offer</td><td>108,950,000/5</td></tr> <tr class="playeryear"><td>2043</td><td>Free Agency (I)</td><td>Dodge City</td><td>QB</td><td>Renegotiated contract</td><td>292,390,000/4</td></tr></tbody></table>

Ok, some backstory on what transpired here. FOFL doesn't apply any dead cap space, so it's generally easier to keep key (and non-key) free agents. This also leads to some teams having a little more cap space than others, as there just aren't always enough good players in FA to soak up all that money.

Coffey is an interesting exception in that he wasn't in the FA pool out of owner neglect - his owner consciously made the decision to let him walk (normally you'd think this is crazy, but this is an owner who has had pretty good success (http://www.thefofl.com/teampages/history.php?t=4) in the past).

Understandably, teams with cap space lined up at the opportunity to throw cash at him. Dodge City - Ben, who had just taken over a new team to try to revive his interest in the league - won the bidding with an offer that paid about 51M salary and 29M bonus per.

Fast forward a season, and Ben has tired with the league again (steps down before 2042, then later returns to his previous team in 2043). The team is on auto-pilot for 2042 as no new owner is found, and remains on AI heading into 2043, the last year of the initial contract. What does the AI do? It re-ups with the player with an insane deal that gives 57M bonus per.

I'm guessing here that the AI, possibly based off of player demands, was looking only at the existing contract, and not at the other QB salaries in the league (http://www.thefofl.com/league/positionsalaries.php?p=QB). Which probably wasn't the best thing for the team (fortunately they WERE able to sign all of their picks, though that wasn't the case last year as their 1st rounder went unsigned); while the player demands may be a nice safeguard against a human owner trying to renegotiate cheap deals, this can seemingly put the AI at more of a disadvantage. Subsequent owners as well, though in this case if we do get a new owner I think the league would give them the option of voiding the contract.

[Ben E Lou]

Once one offers enough outside-the-box contracts, one learns pretty quickly that player demands are constrained by the existing deal. And the AI plays by different rules when it comes to renegs--rules that typically do *not* benefit the AI team when it is renegotiating a contract that the AI never would have offered, and therefore isn't programmed to handle at all. I suspect the logic at work here is something along the lines of:

1. This makes too much money.
2. Should he be cut? No. He is too good to be cut.
Therefore...
3. His contract must be renegotiated.

And then the "AI Team Reneg" logic was faced with a deal that it had no idea how to restructure, so it completely botched it.

My plan was that I'd simply do a final-year reneg with him. The AI would have asked a human player for a bonus of around $50M (assuming he hadn't had a monster season yet,) which would have been fine for the 4 or 5 year deal it would have surely requested.

[lastcat3]

One other problem I see with how AI teams renegotiate is that they get into really intense bidding wars against other AI teams for star players. They always have a few players whose contracts are outlandish because of those bidding wars and it often catches up to them when other players contracts on their team come due again.

They fail to see that even though the player is really good it doesn't bold well for the future of the team because you won't be able to play your other good players.

To be honestt though it is probably good for the sales of the games that computer AI isn't smarter than the human player. As soon as the computer AI starts becoming more intelligent than the human player and starts beating him all the time he will stop playing the game real quick.

[QuikSand]

Hmmm, I'd say that the AI doesn't get intense enough in bidding wars. I tend to see a big cluster of similar bids from multiple teams all surrounding some consensus value, and then the best one tends to just win out. And too many quality players that go completely uncontested.

I confess I don't tend to get too deep into the weeds of the background when playing solo, though.

[lastcat3]

Hmmm, I'd say that the AI doesn't get intense enough in bidding wars. I tend to see a big cluster of similar bids from multiple teams all surrounding some consensus value, and then the best one tends to just win out. And too many quality players that go completely uncontested.

I confess I don't tend to get too deep into the weeds of the background when playing solo, though.

I will say that if you go look at AI teams rosters in sp(which is all I play) many of them will have about three or four players that are way overpaid (making about 25 million a year) and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for them to sign many of their other players when their contracts come due so they end having to let a lot of players go to stay below the salary cap. I assume that the computer is paying those particular players that much to win a price war over other teams.

Some AI teams do seem to manage their rosters better than others do though as most of the time when I see that it is coming from teams that consistently have losing records year after year.