Salary Cap Guidance
 

Being new to MP leagues and FoF in general, I seem to be having some trouble managing the salary cap. My league is currently discussing lowering the cap increase next season, yet I'm close to the top and looking to be 9 million over the cap next year already.

A helpful GM pointed out that I'm overpaying a number of my players. I also made some big trades this year that I may be paying for... but I'm not really sure how that affects things. Should I try to restructure contracts to give myself more cap room before next year rolls around? Should I wait till next year to deal with it? I have 5mil in cap room right now...

I looked through the 100 little things, and noticed that one of the pieces of advice listed in there is to offer big signing bonuses and set, lower, amounts per year. Would this strategy help me in the long run?

Any advice would be appreciated.

I don't play in any MP leagues... yet. However, I have been playing with a 20-50 cap increase every year. I keep it lower than what I've read to be the norm here as I believe it is one of my strengths... What I do to minimize the effects of contracts where a player wants a small amount the first year then triple in the next (which will kill your salary cap if you continually agree to these), is to offer a HUGE bonus and very small salaries. So if a guy wants a 4yr/$20M deal, I give him $12M bonus, and the other $8M in salary ($1.25M/$1.75M/$2.25M/$2.75M), with small raises each year. This keeps your team salary relatively consistent. As long as you are ahead of the curve, this type of salary offering will help keep you there, rather than dealing you big blows in years where a number of your players hit the big jump in salary at the same time.

Another thing to note is that the longer the deal you are trying to make, the more you are going to be paying per year. You'll often have to settle for shorter deals for less money per year.

Finally, get your starters in place and keep them around, while getting cheap backups with potential to take over. This really helps keep you from throwing a lot of money at free agents and, more importantly, helps keep you OUT of bidding wars for big time players.

I'm just a FOF n00b, so take this advice with that in mind :)

That can get dangerous when players get hurt/retire.

Ideally (and this is what I try to do), you give that guy a smaller bonus ($6m) and steady salaries. (IE 3.4M every year) for the same total amount. When you bring that 1st year up to a higher amount, you'll generally take a big hit this year, (Salary, plus % of bonus, plus % of last bonus) but it'll keep the contract from having a large impact in the future.

Thanks for the advice. Both of your approaches seem to advocate for the steady salary path, and that makes sense to me. Is there anything I can do at this point to prepare myself for all the trouble I'm going to be running into next year? I've played around a little with trying to renegotiate contracts but it doesn't seem to effect my next season's cap number that much...

Generally, if you've got money over for the year it can pay off to renegotiate with a player, and try to maximise his year one salary while reducing the bonus money. You can normally get a proportion of something like 7:10 in trade off from bonus to year one salary (so you can raise the salary by $1m and reduce the bonus by $700k (approximately, although it varies from player to player so it's worth trying a more advantageous deal to start off with)). The one thing here is that, if you're already into the season, you might as well offer the player's current salary for year one, but this combined with whatever bonus he's asking (after whatever reductions you've made) may push you over the salary cap for this year. To be honest this is more a long-term strategy and it's possible that it will get you into trouble next year so you might not want to do it at this stage anyway.

Other than that then there really isn't anything else you can do about the cap next year on such short notice. When you're in a tight spot like you've got coming the best thing you can do is wait until it happens. Unless your league is introducing renegotiation limits then the chances are that you'll be able to renegotiate your way under the cap fairly quickly next year anyway. If you can't then you'll have to trade some players/draft picks. If you trade any players you want to pick ones with little bonus left due to them, as most of their bonus will hit your cap the year after.