Ok, the site is back up. The free agency list should be much more complete now. Still could be some players missing, expecially keekers and punters, so let me know if you see any.

I also want to update bad pfr links.

You can't extend contracts. Once you assign a contract to someone, it ticks to zero. At that point they hit the open market. You can still keep them, but you have to beat their best offer. You have to want to keep a player more than the rest of the market, which means you'll be paying a premium on all your player. My feeling is that it will be okay to do that once in a while, but if you end up doing that on every player you won't have enough money to retain them all and you'll end up with a lot of second contracts that are too long for the expected life of the player.

Yeah, that's probably one that needs correcting, then. The free agent should be this guy: http://www.pro-football-reference.co...M/MarsBr01.htm

Okay, that makes more sense then. Additionally, if I spend 100 FA points on Aaron Rodgers, its simply 100 spent this year that doesn't carry over; I don't have to 're-spend' it in the future, correct?

Exactly. You can't extend their deals. They will always hit the free agent market when their contract ends, and the only way you can retain them is to beat the highest bidder once the bidding closes. Or I guess you could be the highest bidder during the bidding, too.

But you can't extend their deal without them hitting the market, which means you're going to pay at or above market rate.

Exactly. In fact, I was meaning to change the language from "salary points" to "signing points". Once a guy is on your team you don't have to worry about him any more until his contract hits zero or he retires or you decide to cut him or trade him. The only time the points come into play is signing people.

Okay, well here's a fairly significant problem then - IMO: The draft means largely dick.

There's no rookie salary scale. I'm paying the same for 5 years of a first round pick that I'd be paying for an established free agent. That seems kinda shitty, especially when there's no pre-FA extension mechanism that allows us to protect ourselves from under-performing draft picks.

It seems like it should be incredibly easy to put in a salary scale for draft picks, especially since the 'money' is largely irrelevant and the only real concern is the length of service time. It could easily just be as simple as having no true 'contract' at all on drafted players, rather giving a team 5 years of that players rights if he's a first rounder, 4 as a second rounder, 3 for anything after that.

The NFL has taken great pains to iron this out and it certainly seems that we should endeavor to do the same. Otherwise there's not much benefit to drafting well.

Yeah, once you've spend the $100 it is gone from your bank roll but you now have the player for the remainder of his contract without spending additional salary points.

I don't understand your concern.

When you draft, you pay for a contract length for each player, and you can pick that contract length. It comes out of the same pool as free agent money.

We did ponder just having a scale along the lines of 1st round pick - 7 years, 2nd round pick - 6 years, etc., but decided that it would be better to give people the extra salary points so they can either do that themselves or go shorter or longer depending on their specific needs. If we make the rookie contracts standard, we would lower the number of signing points, which limits flexibility. Teams with low first-round picks might prefer to use fewer points on their draft, for example.

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ok, nevermind. refreshed and all is well.

when will we be able to begin bidding for free agents?

Sunday, June 9th.

It's not really drafting well if you don't have enough confidence to sign your draftees to long contracts. At that point it's just lucky drafting if your draft picks pan out.

Some of the FAs are guys playing on the other side of the ball. For instance, there's a Patrick Peterson (off) listed as an HB. It doesn't seem like they should be separate, right?

Correct. I'll have to look at the data base to see why that is happening.