Someone tell me the downside of this. (MP Salary Cap Idea.)
 

PROBLEM: Too much cap room.
"SOLUTIONS" UP TO NOW: A bunch of house rules that aren't dealing with the issue across the board.

PROPOSED SOLUTION:

FA1:1-->every team must do renegs/cuts/trades to get down below some percentage of the cap. (Looking at IHOF after FA1:1 in the most recent FA period, I'm thinking 75% is the correct number here.)

If a team isn't there, the commish just starts releasing players, starting with the lowest future potential on the team, until he gets the team below that 75% number.

FA1:2-->every team signs one scrub to a one-year contract with a bonus equal to 25% of the cap.

FA1:3-->Proceed as normal with the rest of FA.

The upside is that it gets to the heart of the matter and eliminates the need for any sort of renegotiation restrictions (which are hard to police and sometimes hard to remember.) This would be a one-time act every season at the time of the season when typically you have the highest percentage of the league paying attentions, so I would think that the extra burden on the commish would be minimal to create exports for delinquents.

What's the downside? I'm not really coming up with one.

I dig this idea, Ben.

I can't think of any downsides either.

dola

Just speaking from a WOOF perspective, I would still like to keep the 3-year minimum signing in FA1, but agree that the last-year reneg rule could be dropped.

double dola..

I guess one other thing that the commish would probably have to do is assign the player to be signed so you don't have two teams going after the same guy.

Why don't you just sign guys to a 2-year deal each year where the second year is this amount? These guys can't be cut (and you can rename them to help remember: NoCut NewEngland or something). That way you can plan properly for the next season without jumping through hoops. Reneg each year where possible.

Have to think about whether or not the artificial cap restriction is a good idea though.

Doesn't that give you one less roster spot to work with? I rather do it every year and be able to have 53.

I think it's obvious that one of the biggest problems in FOF free agency is that players don't ask for nearly enough money. We've tried to do plenty of things to make it more realistic, but I think cutting the cap is going to be the easiest and best solution.

Extremely easy to do for the leagues that have any sort of database. Gimme a bit...

Now THAT is ironic.

How about just reducing the % the cap increases each year. One 6 yr TV deal going up at the minimum increase each year would solve a good portion of the problem. What I've seen with leagues that have too much cap is that the TV deals are so lucrative that they increase the cap so much that it's impossible to keep up with. It's not an overnight fix, but it's a long term one that's self regulating. Then at the end of that TV contract see how teams are doing with the cap and adjust accordingly, erring on the low side.

Well, one problem with this approach (aside the obvious phase-in) is that everything in FOF is pinned to the salary cap. Meaning that if you slow cap increases, you also slow the growth in free agent demands, rookie contracts, renegotiation requests, and so forth. That undermines a pretty good deal of what I think this idea is about.

That's like attacking a forest fire with a standard-sized garden hose. At the end of FA1:1, IHOF had 24 teams with $25M in cap room or more, and our cap is only rising at $3.9M per year. Even if we had it not rising at all, lowering the cap by only $3.9M is meaningless. Also keep in mind that players' reneg demands (the crux of the issue) are based on the current salary cap, so you'd just end up with players requesting the same amount (proportionally) anyway, so the cumulative effect isn't as big as you might think.

Heh. Quik beat me to it, and also mentioned rookie contracts as well.

Yeah, sportsdigs had the same basic thought about 6 months ago, and I agree it's a good one.

Downside? It's far from realistic, of course, realism is only used as a reason when it's conveient it seems...

The catch is that it's hard to counter a non-realistic problem (players asking for too little money) with a realistic solution.

A more realistic solution, say you must pay 50% more than the asking price for all renegotiations, is much more difficult to implement and monitor.

Correct on all counts. The core issue is that you can keep players in FOF far too cheaply.

Point taken, but you originally stated that there are too many house rules out there but you're simply trying to promote your house rule to replace them.

Is Jim no longer going to make a patch for the game that could potentially solve this so it's an in-game solution?

Source? I've seen this mentioned in these forums, but I could find no reference to this in the player guide.

If you sign a two year deal with double the bonus you cut him and you dead money is locked in and you only have to do this every other year. You can't get 25 exactly but close. Enough

Given that the most popular one (last-year only reneg) could be called "my" house rule, too (the early leagues that adopted it did so based on my testing), I have no idea what your point is, or if it's at all salient. *shurg*

But really, what does it matter? If there's a better way to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish that requires less monitoring and less to remember, why is that a bad thing???

By the time 6.2 was released, just about every MP league out there had a house rule trying to deal with making cap decisions tougher. Even prior to 6.1a (December 2007), it was well-documented. WOOF passed the last-year only reneg rule in February 2008. At least two patches and a year and a half have gone by without this beign addressed in-game. I see no reason to believe that this is something that's going to get modified in a future patch, if there is a future patch. It's pretty clear to me that if this ever gets addressed, it will be in FOF7 if there ever is one. And even so, Jim uses very small beta teams. There's no way that a small team can replicate in a short time what will happen to contracts when 32 humans are using the system over 8-10 seasons. If there's an FOF7 and the beta team is small again, I think a smart move by the community would be to set up a very fast-moving test league (something even faster than FOWL) to see if the system holds up. I suspect that what happened here is that because this is only a long-term MP issue, it just didn't show up in any bug or issue reports until it was something beyond the scope of a patch or small update.

My source would be 200 plus sp seasons. Its pretty obvious.

Wouldn't work due to owner restrictions. I have one of the more profitable teams in the FOFL and I can only offer 42.5% of the cap in bonus. Wade checked his IHOF team for me earlier today, because I was concerned that a downside might be that the poor-performing financial teams would to sign two players to get to 25%. His maxbonus is 31.3% of the cap. I guess you could sign two players, but that seems to be making it overly complex.

Yup. That's not in any documentation anywhere that I know of, but most definitely the case.

Oh yeah

Basically this is one rule to rule them all still. I think you could eliminate all the others.
And you can adjust on the fly if needed.

I'd much rather see a limit to renegotiations. Pick 3 guys each season to reneg, the rest go to FA where you can make your offers or not and compete with everyone else. Go after the source of the problem: too many guys renegotiate too easily, with not enough willing to test the FA waters no matter what.

Yes, I like it for sure. An active FA market sure would make things interesting and more realisitc. Especially in a league like the FOWL where the offseason will be the real focus of the season. And implementation really seems like a snap. With the season-in-one day format the roster spot lost to Mr. Pittsburgh McSteelersguy wouldn't hurt and then we'd all know who to sign in the offseason :)

You asked for discussion so I'm giving you some, sorry to ruffle your feathers.

Lolz. My feathers ain't ruffled.

Can the commish easily make contract offrers for each team? If so you could just find the crappiest RFA and sign and trade him 32 times and have him pocket 25 percent at each stop. Might take too long tho.

weak assed punters rejoice!

Thought of one (although you may like it). Doesn't this screw with franchise salaries?

Hmmmm....I *think* it's just salary based, not bonus-based, so it wouldn't do anything.

Oh wait. Come to think about it, it wouldn't matter. The franchise salary is calculated before FA1 starts, and these guys would just be signed in FA1:2 and then released immediately anyway.

That is also correct, for what it's worth. (He says boldly without even checking for documentation)

If there were a rule in place that forced all teams to pay their punter 25% of the cap space....it could be easy to police.