[MIJB#19]

General Manager Notes: when the football gods summon cap hell...
Here we go again, another off-season! We're getting ready for the 80th amateur draft in IHOF history, and subsequently for us as well. Although technically, we kind of skipped the 2067 draft, as we traded away all our draft picks.

We're going into this off-season with a truck load of cap space. Negative cap space. We're $68.81M over the $463.8M salary cap, before the signing of rookies, which by league office number crunchers should account for $15.2M. It's faulty number, given that we've already got 49 players signed and only the two most expensive draft picks will count towards the salary cap, but such is the life with people who can't do math correctly.

It doesn't change the fact that we're in deep cap trouble. Even before the contract talks with the likes of Ellis McAlister, Kirk Hitchcock and three of our five starting offensive linemen, all asking for a better contract. Especially McAlister and Hitchcock won't come cheap. But after some of my own number crunching, I'm optimistic that we should be able to make some contract renegotiations, which fit within the players' request, combined with a couple of hard, but unavoidable cuts, to free up about $110M of cap space, which should put us about $40M under the cap, $25M if we take into account the horrible way the league's number crunchers apply rookie contracts to the cap figure projections.

Roster cuts? Yes. I've made up my mind and plan on releasing 5 players to open up about $50M of cap space. One of them has been informed about his release today. Four others aren't safe either, but I'm waiting for the other renegotiations to see how much room there is to keep those four guys around. In essence, releasing them still means we'll have to fill those roster spots with new players, of close to similar skills.

Our draft day trade from last season worked out in out favor, we ended up trading down from the 1.22 pick for the 2.1 pick in the 2084 draft, while in the previous draft trading up from the 2.23 pick to the 1.22 pick. Yes, we robbed the Bordeaux Vineyards there.

We didn't rob the Gothenburg Giants. Despite sweeping them last season, their total number of losses in other games was 2 in 17 games. They ended up winning IHOF Bowl LXXX, to claim the first league title for the franchise. Good for them. We plan no continuing that streak though, and this season, we'll plan on being the best in the division and hopefully live up to the hype that went around our team at the end of the previous pre-season...