32 Team Offline Franchise Players - Need Off Season Advice

[Midgeotto]

How do you manage your off season?

I am slowly working through mine, which is taking a century as I am trying to make it interesting, while maintaining a sim aspect to it as I utilize internet resources on FA speculations and such.

How do you go about Players resigning?

This is by far the most tedious, and frustrating aspect of the off season so far for me. Why they have no interest bar is beyond me. Sitting there staring at "please try again" a million times is driving me insane.

It's a shame the CPU is half ********, and lets players like Manning and Brady hit Free Agency when I've experimented with the auto-sim of player resignings.

One season I auto simmed it and I saw Brady go to the Raiders, while Manning went to the Redskins. Hilarious!

Anyways. Any tips, and advice is appreciate. Thanks.

[Phennixx]

Good question,

I look at key players like Manning and Brady and resign them to long term deals, most time those marquee players will resign at reasonable pay. If not and its a player who would never leave the team I franchise them.

As far as making free agency semi-real and fun, I go thru each teams season stats and look for player who are getting paid a lot but not performing and cut them so they are in free agency, example is Brenard Berrian WR Viking he getting paid like. Number #1 WR but is 4th on depth chart making 8 mill + a year is a joke. There are a few player like that who would in real life be on chopping block so cut them and have fun bidding on them

[mavfan21]

Quote: Originally Posted by Midgeotto

How do you manage your off season? I am slowly working through mine, which is taking a century as I am trying to make it interesting, while maintaining a sim aspect to it as I utilize internet resources on FA speculations and such. How do you go about Players resigning? This is by far the most tedious, and frustrating aspect of the off season so far for me. Why they have no interest bar is beyond me. Sitting there staring at "please try again" a million times is driving me insane. It's a shame the CPU is half ********, and lets players like Manning and Brady hit Free Agency when I've experimented with the auto-sim of player resignings. One season I auto simmed it and I saw Brady go to the Raiders, while Manning went to the Redskins. Hilarious! Anyways. Any tips, and advice is appreciate. Thanks.

Sounds like you're spending too much time.

Before the off-season I go through rosters and extend players with one year remaining that would logically stay with their team. I also cut a few of the non-playoff team players that would likely be cut or demand release (ex: Ochocinco might demand release if Bengals go 4-12). In the off-season I scroll through players in the re-sign players menu that have one year remaining and extend a few of them.

After the re-sign players section is over I go through and cut a few logical players from CPU rosters before FA. I hand pick a few FA's for the CPU and then do the first round of the draft and then sim to my picks for the other rounds.

In all it takes less than an hour. It's a lot more fun.

[dirtguru]

Go to franchise settings and change resign players from user control to c.p.u. Most of the time cpu seems to negotiate far better contracts than I can for some reason. You can change back to user control during regular season and resign players that you feel would/should remain with their respective teams longterm but be careful not to sign more than a couple per team or you could wind up with a team that can't afford to fill it's roster. Learned this on my 2nd season, Redskins and Seahawks couldn't afford to fill rosters no matter what I did, finally gave up and let cpu take over. Cpu wound up signing a bunch of undrafted rookie FA's and some really low rated FA's to one year 350k no bonus contracts. Both teams wound up 0-16 following year. Franchise been broken since M10, reasonable user control contract negotiations are impossible for key players. Look at salary breakdown and you will see, most contracts seem reasonable for first 2 or 3 years then jump up as much as 8 mil per year for last few years.
Let cpu handle this for you. Most times players resign reasonable contracts, sometimes they go to other teams but never for ridiculous back loaded contracts.