Salary Cap Calculator Tool for OOTP

[Young Drachma]

I'm releasing an experimental tool today for Excel called CAP'N SALARY CRUNCH. It's a pretty straightforward tool that's useful for solo leagues or online leagues and comes from a lot of studying I've done about player movement, salary disbursement and how arbitrary salary caps negatively affect gameplay.

I think that with the ascent of budget busting salaries in MLB, leagues try to do whatever they can to stem the tide of market inflation. Human owners though, will always spend no matter what and in a solo league, it's easy to create a depression where teams compete for the same small sector of top players, but hamper their payrolls so much that talent gets diluted across the league leaving you with a bunch of average teams rather than great ones, some good ones, average ones and ones that stink.

What this tool does, is take information from your league without factoring current team payrolls and comes up with a salary cap figure that takes into account how spending is done in your league, how much media revenue is available and how big team budgets are.

I've tested it using data from a variety of online leagues and it seems to do precisely what I hoped it would, which is produce a realistic and dynamic cap number that's reflective of active league spending.

How you use it is up to you, whether you adjust the cap number annually like the NFL, NBA and NHL do or whether you want to make it happen every few years. It's very easy to do and input though and shouldn't take you more than a few minutes, so it's not labor intensive.

The tool has room for five spaces built in, so you could use it for the same league over five years or five different ones and naturally can just copy the formulas in Excel if you want to create future ones or delete the figures once you've inputted them.

Some suggestions:

- If you want to control salary in your league, consider using a flat rate media contract for all teams (especially in a solo league) rather than having market sizes determine media money, since the game's methodology of this isn't realistic by any measure.

- Lowering player salary baselines in the league editor is always a surefire way to keep things in a place where you can tolerate it. If it's an online league though, this tool is essentially to ensuring your cap is fluid and reflective of how your league's owners are spending relative to the way your financial system works. It can handle any sort of variability and the calculations are based off studying the way real life teams spend and taking into account payroll percentages, average spending and the elements it takes to build a winning team in a competitive financial environment.

I do plan to add this tool to a newly update GMExcel 11 Suite, but I don't have an ETA on it right this second and I just thought this would be a nice way to whet the thistle.

This tool can be used in Microsoft Excel, Open Office or Google Docs too I believe. It's just an XLS file and is attached to this post.

As always, feel free to post questions or suggestions, comments and praise.