Ideas for Self-implementation of a Salary cap and contracts for Online Franchise

[thekodinator]

Well, after much (too much actually) deliberation and fiddling around with different systems, my friend's and I have come together and finally decided what to do.

It's sad, but we're going to have to treat our online franchise more like an online dynasty. Because there's only 6 of us and we don't want to be spending hours and hours trying to figure out player contracts or free agent drafts for not only our teams, but for all the cpu teams as well, we've decided to not allow any trades, or free agent pick-ups (unless there's a season-ending injury).

The only way to gain new players will be through the draft and then we'll just keep our players until they retire or we cut them.

This is a VERY SAD development for me, but it's the easiest way to do it... so be it.

Ian and Co., PLEASE find a way to patch player contracts and salaries into online franchise.

[TDKing]

Quote: Originally Posted by thekodinator

Well, after much (too much actually) deliberation and fiddling around with different systems, my friend's and I have come together and finally decided what to do. It's sad, but we're going to have to treat our online franchise more like an online dynasty. Because there's only 6 of us and we don't want to be spending hours and hours trying to figure out player contracts or free agent drafts for not only our teams, but for all the cpu teams as well, we've decided to not allow any trades, or free agent pick-ups (unless there's a season-ending injury). The only way to gain new players will be through the draft and then we'll just keep our players until they retire or we cut them. This is a VERY SAD development for me, but it's the easiest way to do it... so be it. Ian and Co., PLEASE find a way to patch player contracts and salaries into online franchise.

Same here, I fiddle around with a bunch of ideas, spreadsheets etc.. but nothing really worked or was feasable time wise. We are doing the same thing that you are.

[bgdave39]

Quote: Originally Posted by TGCRequiem

PART1: How our league is dealing with no Online Salaries/Contracts/Free Agency When news first broke about no salaries/contracts etc I tried searching with not much luck for ideas for doing a simple free agency process. Originally I was going to do a 'Everyone drops so many players' thing and have a Free Agency draft each season. That really didn't do a good job of the intent of Free Agency...so the next two posts show what I developed, with some input from the guys in my league over the last month or two (We played NCAA last season). If you like it and want to use it for your league great, if not it doesn't bother me. I just thought with all the work I've put into this the last few weeks, maybe some others would find usefulness in it. ***PS***These posts were made specifically for our league forums, so if anything doesn't make sense that is likely the reason. Again my intent is only to offer others thoughts and to save others the work I have already done if they were trying it themselves. Also I would love if they updated to have contracts even with all the work I've done. WHAT IS IN A SALARY? - An editorial by TGCRequiem WHAT AND WHY? When we decided to go with a real salary cap system in Madden versus just being forced to 'draft' free agents I thought, wow how do I do this? and where do I start? Well as I thought about it, I found that the most important thing in being able to run a live salary system is knowing what a player would expect to make in the first place. From there contracts can be created, players can be overpaid etc, but until you know what a player expects to be paid...you don't have anything. HOW? So I started on the basic concept that better players, i.e. higher rated players need to be paid more. As I started to play around with the rosters provided by the Madden crew I just knew you couldn't say all 99 overall player's are created equal. So I started to tweak. I thought to myself, what makes the difference in the salary each player in the NFL makes? The first thing I thought of was that positions make a big difference as the usually the best Fullback in the league generally doesn't make as much as a marginal QB let alone a franchise QB. Within an individual position however, the better the player is within his position the more he is going to make, so yes his overall rating is important. A 99 overall TE 'should' be paid more then an 85 overall TE. Then I started to think about what makes two players of equal skill earn different amounts and the biggest thing I could think of is the players age. The concept here being that a 85 overall WR that is 24 is significantly more valuable then an 85 overall WR that is 36. The primary reason being that the younger player has time, and hopefully the potential, to develop into something better then he currently is while the older player is fighting to even maintain his current skill level. There are other things that come into play here such as the talent level available in free agency, or even on the team at that position...but for our system we needed to keep it as simple as possible. So finally I felt like I had a good concept of what we needed to take into consideration when considering an individual players salary, those considerations being; talent, age to talent, position played and talent comparable to others of the same position. So with this concept I went about working towards creating formulas that could be placed in an excel spreadsheet formula to create each players salary. These formulas are designed to automatically take into consideration any change made to a players position, age, and overall rating as these are the variables used when creating a players expected salary. MODIFICATIONS: 1) OVR/AGE MOD - Take the players overall rating and divide it by age giving each individual player in Madden an OVR/AGE Modifier, the higher the modifier, the better...for the player. 2) POS MOD - Next I looked up the average salary by position and came up with a Position Modifier to rate each player by position. Quarterbacks have the highest bonus modifier at 2.0 whereas a FB has the lowest modifier at 0.8. These were based on average QB salaries being $2 million dollars versus average FB salaries being $800,000 etc. 3) OVR MOD - Finally I setup a modifier based on the individual players Overall Rating in comparison to the rest of the players at the same position. Basically how this works is a 99 overall player gets a bonus of 2.3 because he is literally the best in the business versus a player who is a 59 overall who has a modifier of 0.6 because he is quite replaceable. So if you take all of these modifiers and multiply them by an individual players overall rating you get a relatively realistic salary structure where a top player at his position expects a fairly large salary in comparison to his competition at the position. SALARY TRACKER There should be a link here for our salary spreadsheet but it won't post it b/c I don't have 5 posts yet. Maybe I can trick it by adding spaces around the periods in the link. Nope, how about I replace the periods with the carrot symbol... www^thegrammatoncleric^com/MOF10_LEAGUE_SALARIES^xls SALARY COMPARISON: Top Salaries: TEAM------FIRST---LAST--------POS.----Age----Ovr-----Age/Ovr-----PosMod----OvrMod------Exp Salary Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------99------3.00-----------2----------2.3------------1366 Patriots----Tom-----Brady-------QB-----32--------97------3.03-----------2----------2.1------------1235 Saints------Drew-----Brees------QB------30-------96------3.20-----------2----------2---------------1229 Steelers----Ben------Roethlisbe-QB------27-------93------3.44-----------2----------1.9------------1217 Texans-----Mario----Williams---RE-----24--------95------3.96----------1.6---------2--------------1203 Vikings-----Jared-----Allen-------RE-----27--------98-----3.63-----------1.6--------2.1-------------1195 Browns---- Joe------Thomas-----LT-----24--------97------4.04----------1.4---------2.1------------1153 Giants-----Justin----Tuck--------LE-----26--------95------3.65----------1.6---------2--------------1111 Age and Skill Effect on Salaries: TEAM------FIRST---LAST--------POS.----Age----Ovr-----Age/Ovr-----PosMod----OvrMod------Exp Salary Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------99------3.00-----------2----------2.3------------1366 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------78------3.00-----------2----------1.2------------442 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------22-------99------3.55-----------2----------2.3------------2049 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------22-------78------3.55-----------2----------1.2------------664

Dude, at is freaking nice. Very similar to what i envisioned and was hoping to figure out. Absolutely perfect! Big props to you. Anyone with a little excel knowledge could manage that pretty easily. Just go through and add a +1 each year for age and a -1 for contract, then re-evaluate overalls in contract years. Freaking amazing man and very well done.

If the excel sheet you linked the finished product?

[thekodinator]

Quote: Originally Posted by TDKing

Same here, I fiddle around with a bunch of ideas, spreadsheets etc.. but nothing really worked or was feasable time wise. We are doing the same thing that you are.

Have you started yours yet? My friends and I won't be starting ours for another week and a half. If you've already got yours underway, I'd like to know how it's going.

[bgdave39]

Hook us up with Part 2 TGC! You are a salary cap genius!

Quote: Originally Posted by TGCRequiem

PART1: How our league is dealing with no Online Salaries/Contracts/Free Agency When news first broke about no salaries/contracts etc I tried searching with not much luck for ideas for doing a simple free agency process. Originally I was going to do a 'Everyone drops so many players' thing and have a Free Agency draft each season. That really didn't do a good job of the intent of Free Agency...so the next two posts show what I developed, with some input from the guys in my league over the last month or two (We played NCAA last season). If you like it and want to use it for your league great, if not it doesn't bother me. I just thought with all the work I've put into this the last few weeks, maybe some others would find usefulness in it. ***PS***These posts were made specifically for our league forums, so if anything doesn't make sense that is likely the reason. Again my intent is only to offer others thoughts and to save others the work I have already done if they were trying it themselves. Also I would love if they updated to have contracts even with all the work I've done. WHAT IS IN A SALARY? - An editorial by TGCRequiem WHAT AND WHY? When we decided to go with a real salary cap system in Madden versus just being forced to 'draft' free agents I thought, wow how do I do this? and where do I start? Well as I thought about it, I found that the most important thing in being able to run a live salary system is knowing what a player would expect to make in the first place. From there contracts can be created, players can be overpaid etc, but until you know what a player expects to be paid...you don't have anything. HOW? So I started on the basic concept that better players, i.e. higher rated players need to be paid more. As I started to play around with the rosters provided by the Madden crew I just knew you couldn't say all 99 overall player's are created equal. So I started to tweak. I thought to myself, what makes the difference in the salary each player in the NFL makes? The first thing I thought of was that positions make a big difference as the usually the best Fullback in the league generally doesn't make as much as a marginal QB let alone a franchise QB. Within an individual position however, the better the player is within his position the more he is going to make, so yes his overall rating is important. A 99 overall TE 'should' be paid more then an 85 overall TE. Then I started to think about what makes two players of equal skill earn different amounts and the biggest thing I could think of is the players age. The concept here being that a 85 overall WR that is 24 is significantly more valuable then an 85 overall WR that is 36. The primary reason being that the younger player has time, and hopefully the potential, to develop into something better then he currently is while the older player is fighting to even maintain his current skill level. There are other things that come into play here such as the talent level available in free agency, or even on the team at that position...but for our system we needed to keep it as simple as possible. So finally I felt like I had a good concept of what we needed to take into consideration when considering an individual players salary, those considerations being; talent, age to talent, position played and talent comparable to others of the same position. So with this concept I went about working towards creating formulas that could be placed in an excel spreadsheet formula to create each players salary. These formulas are designed to automatically take into consideration any change made to a players position, age, and overall rating as these are the variables used when creating a players expected salary. MODIFICATIONS: 1) OVR/AGE MOD - Take the players overall rating and divide it by age giving each individual player in Madden an OVR/AGE Modifier, the higher the modifier, the better...for the player. 2) POS MOD - Next I looked up the average salary by position and came up with a Position Modifier to rate each player by position. Quarterbacks have the highest bonus modifier at 2.0 whereas a FB has the lowest modifier at 0.8. These were based on average QB salaries being $2 million dollars versus average FB salaries being $800,000 etc. 3) OVR MOD - Finally I setup a modifier based on the individual players Overall Rating in comparison to the rest of the players at the same position. Basically how this works is a 99 overall player gets a bonus of 2.3 because he is literally the best in the business versus a player who is a 59 overall who has a modifier of 0.6 because he is quite replaceable. So if you take all of these modifiers and multiply them by an individual players overall rating you get a relatively realistic salary structure where a top player at his position expects a fairly large salary in comparison to his competition at the position. SALARY TRACKER There should be a link here for our salary spreadsheet but it won't post it b/c I don't have 5 posts yet. Maybe I can trick it by adding spaces around the periods in the link. Nope, how about I replace the periods with the carrot symbol... www^thegrammatoncleric^com/MOF10_LEAGUE_SALARIES^xls SALARY COMPARISON: Top Salaries: TEAM------FIRST---LAST--------POS.----Age----Ovr-----Age/Ovr-----PosMod----OvrMod------Exp Salary Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------99------3.00-----------2----------2.3------------1366 Patriots----Tom-----Brady-------QB-----32--------97------3.03-----------2----------2.1------------1235 Saints------Drew-----Brees------QB------30-------96------3.20-----------2----------2---------------1229 Steelers----Ben------Roethlisbe-QB------27-------93------3.44-----------2----------1.9------------1217 Texans-----Mario----Williams---RE-----24--------95------3.96----------1.6---------2--------------1203 Vikings-----Jared-----Allen-------RE-----27--------98-----3.63-----------1.6--------2.1-------------1195 Browns---- Joe------Thomas-----LT-----24--------97------4.04----------1.4---------2.1------------1153 Giants-----Justin----Tuck--------LE-----26--------95------3.65----------1.6---------2--------------1111 Age and Skill Effect on Salaries: TEAM------FIRST---LAST--------POS.----Age----Ovr-----Age/Ovr-----PosMod----OvrMod------Exp Salary Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------99------3.00-----------2----------2.3------------1366 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------33-------78------3.00-----------2----------1.2------------442 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------22-------99------3.55-----------2----------2.3------------2049 Colts-------Peyton--Manning----QB------22-------78------3.55-----------2----------1.2------------664

[thekodinator]

Yeah that thing is a lot of work, but it is a real beauty!

[burne]

Ok, sorry I haven't been here in a while, I'm just real busy cuz I'm moving across the country to San Francisco in a week... huge pain in the ***.

Also, until I move, my 360 isn't hooked up to internet so I can't even play around with starting an OF and checking out the interface.

Kodinator, for your concerns, I don't really have the desire to do a whole bunch of analysis on how realistic my system is. To be honest, it's like I said in the "goals" portion of my original post, it is in no way meant to be truly realistic... teams will lose some of their top players. Now, the whole protection system allows you to keep the players that you truly believe are your stars and core, but you will have to make decisions and big players will move.

Like I said before, IMO I'd rather do an OF where there's a lot of change and it's dynamic than have one or two big moves per season, but that's just me.

I'm a programmer, so honestly, at this point, I'm considering writing a program that will just read in whatever data I can get and then process it however the **** I want... the only problem with this is how easily can I get the data from the Online Franchise website.

The way I see it, manually doing this in Excel will cause issues where you have to do a TON of manual data entry. On the other hand, if I write my own program, I can keep track of contracts, do bulk calculations, write whatever formula I want for players' desired salary, etc. In fact, if I can get the rosters of the CPU teams in there, I can even write rudimentary logic for them to spit out their own free agency acquisitions.

What I REALLY want for that to work though, (and this goes out to the Madden dev team...) is for the Online Franchise website to be able to spit out files that I can download with up to date rosters, ratings, etc. from the franchise. A simple CSV (that's comma separated values, for those who don't know) file in a consistent format would be all I need... oh AND a file of the current UP-TO-DATE roster INCLUDING contract information as of right now.

From there, the sky would be the limit. If I could get initial contract data for all players, and then team rosters once the OF starts (I'm primarily interested in fantasy draft OF's, so the standard rosters won't do), then I could just write an app for whatever FA format I want. The commish simply runs it, it increments contract info every year, and then spits out CPU FA moves and allows the commish to enter the human players' moves...

Why would I take the time to write this? 1) I think I could do it relatively quickly, the only real hurdle is getting the DATA needed 2) It's an interesting project, and would be really rewarding to use in MY online franchises, and 3) I get the feeling that more than a couple people out here would appreciate having something like this.

[thekodinator]

Quote: Originally Posted by burne

Ok, sorry I haven't been here in a while, I'm just real busy cuz I'm moving across the country to San Francisco in a week... huge pain in the ***. Also, until I move, my 360 isn't hooked up to internet so I can't even play around with starting an OF and checking out the interface. Kodinator, for your concerns, I don't really have the desire to do a whole bunch of analysis on how realistic my system is. To be honest, it's like I said in the "goals" portion of my original post, it is in no way meant to be truly realistic... teams will lose some of their top players. Now, the whole protection system allows you to keep the players that you truly believe are your stars and core, but you will have to make decisions and big players will move. Like I said before, IMO I'd rather do an OF where there's a lot of change and it's dynamic than have one or two big moves per season, but that's just me. I'm a programmer, so honestly, at this point, I'm considering writing a program that will just read in whatever data I can get and then process it however the **** I want... the only problem with this is how easily can I get the data from the Online Franchise website. The way I see it, manually doing this in Excel will cause issues where you have to do a TON of manual data entry. On the other hand, if I write my own program, I can keep track of contracts, do bulk calculations, write whatever formula I want for players' desired salary, etc. In fact, if I can get the rosters of the CPU teams in there, I can even write rudimentary logic for them to spit out their own free agency acquisitions. What I REALLY want for that to work though, (and this goes out to the Madden dev team...) is for the Online Franchise website to be able to spit out files that I can download with up to date rosters, ratings, etc. from the franchise. A simple CSV (that's comma separated values, for those who don't know) file in a consistent format would be all I need... oh AND a file of the current UP-TO-DATE roster INCLUDING contract information as of right now. From there, the sky would be the limit. If I could get initial contract data for all players, and then team rosters once the OF starts (I'm primarily interested in fantasy draft OF's, so the standard rosters won't do), then I could just write an app for whatever FA format I want. The commish simply runs it, it increments contract info every year, and then spits out CPU FA moves and allows the commish to enter the human players' moves... Why would I take the time to write this? 1) I think I could do it relatively quickly, the only real hurdle is getting the DATA needed 2) It's an interesting project, and would be really rewarding to use in MY online franchises, and 3) I get the feeling that more than a couple people out here would appreciate having something like this.

And I...

Haha, good to have you back Burne! Did you see my final tweaked version of your FA draft system? Check it here. I also did a "mock" draft with it if you'd like to see the results.