We did the full veteran draft last year. That's how most of the players made their way to your team.

This year we will have a free agency bidding period, where you bid on available free agents. It's not a draft, it's an open bidding system. That pool will have a few gems, but won't be incredibly deep this year. The next time we do free agency (January) it should get a little more interesting.

OP updated

There's something about the final pick that gets magnified in importance. I feel like it's my last chance to fill a hole or find a talented guy, so I worry about it.

Thanks for the Center offers fellas'.

I couldn't pass up my choice of 2 Pro Bowlers & the manager didn't insult my knowledge..or lack of...with whacked offers', lol
No siree, I'm quite good at that on my own.

That recent trade one team got killed

Corona shines some new Lights
 

22 Josh Gordon
46 Vick Ballard
70 Kirk Cousins
94 Travis Benjamin
118 Gino Gradkowski
142 Ladarius Green
166 Matt Johnson

After losing in the Semis, the Lights felt the sting of a weak receiving corps and general lack of depth at skill positions for a long, long, long time.
The GM moved quickly to put a legit threat across from Mike Williams full time. The addition of Gordon allows Brandon Gibson to concentrate on one position, while Plaxico Burress and Travis Benjamin are both solid 4th options.
Vick Ballard should do well taking some of the load from Matt Forte, and Kirk Cousins might provide future flexibility at the QB position should his real life starting QB not be able to answer the bell.
Gradkowski provides interior depth, as well as being a possible starting Center.
Green is a project, but could pay big dividends to a team uncertain about about Gronkowski's ability to contribute long term.
Johnson's eventual development would allow Glover Quin to move to Free Safety if Kenny Phillips can't stay healthy.
These moves should help keep The Lights on into the playoffs!

Why do you say it like that? Grow some balls if you're gonna call someone out. Here, let me help. Damn, Kansas City Fubar or Pompano Beach Pandas was raped with an aids tree for approving that last trade.

-----------------------------------------------

Imo, it depends how you look at it. A. Hernandez has the name, catches balls from Tom Brady so he's in the news a lot.


Hernandez hasn't played a full season yet, close in '11 & '10 with 14. 10 games last year. It goes to show he may have an injury bug.
Little stays healthy but no big numbers.

D. Alexander proved he's a better playmaker than Little but can't stay healthy.
Kalil completes my O line. A line I'm sure you wish you had for those big time RB's U have.

I'm not trying to win it all right away. I'm trying to get both lines built first.

First year or two its the D & controlling the clock with my running game. If I gave away an above average injury prone, less than full time starter TE & average WR & a 3rd rounder to establish a solid running game, so be it.

Sorry but your Center selection left a lot to be desired. I never thought twice. But having the pick of Chris Meyers & Ryan Kalil!! Wowser. There is no wrong choice. Now if we got to pick a zone blocking scheme I would have went with Meyers.

I dont understand, you should have commented on the trade I turned down yesterday? Now that was a team killer but you instead singled this one out?
I hope this isn't sour grapes. :doh!:

Was going to update the draft since it's over, but can't seem to get it to pull up....I keep getting a wall of error messages

Yeah, me too. I get the same error messages when trying to message the "administrator".
It works if I include a manager but not the admin. by itself.

Thanks, Old Dog.

It was an end of draft problem that is now fixed.

I feel like the Platypi have had a pretty solid draft. We had to say goodbye to Brandon Carr and Ben Obomanu, but picked up starters Dez Bryant, Bobby Wagner, Miles Burris, Bryan Anger, and Greg Zurlein as well as depth pieces Dexter McCluster, Kelechi Osemele, and Jarius Wright. We also picked up four additional future draft picks to build with in the coming draft, a 3rd, two 4th's, and a 5th.

In the future, we'll be using VB for all of our communications, so I probably won't spend a lot of time fixing the messaging system.

I figured it had something to do with that.

Updated now

It seems as though I'm always breaking stuff. Do you want me to continue to use Rain Man as the middle man or would you rather me PM you here directly...or message your team @ the Box site?

PM here works fine for now.

Okay, next up is free agency. To learn about our free agency system, read below. I've also added the rules to the opening post.

Note that we are still in beta testing, so things could change if we find problems in the system.

How Free Agency Works:

Free Agency will begin before the 2012 season after the rookie draft.

Our process is as follows for the 2012 season. In 2013 and beyond there will be minor changes as noted later.

1. We will unveil the list of available free agents so you can check out the talent pool.

2. If you look in "Standings", you will see that you have a salary account value of $1,300. You will use this to sign your veterans to contracts, sign your rookies to contracts, and (in a competitive bidding process) sign free agents to contracts.

The cost of a contract is as follows for players already on your roster (both veterans and rookies).

$0 - 1 season contract
$10 - 2 season contract
$22 - 3 season contract
$37 - 4 season contract
$55 - 5 season contract
$76 - 6 season contract
$100 - 7 season contract

You will sign your existing players to contracts using an interface that we will unveil shortly. If your 53-man roster is set you can spend your $1,300 on your current roster. However, it may be worthwhile to hold some money back so you can compete for free agents.

3. The free agency period begins.

Bidding for free agents will be open and competitive. As players come available, teams will be allowed to sign them if they are the high bidder. The contract length is automatically calculated by rounding down the bid to the chart below.

Contract Length (Seasons) Salary Points Bid
1 0 to 9
2 10 to 21
3 22 to 36
4 37 to 54
5 55 to 75
6 76 to 99
7 100 or more

For example, if you submit the winning bid for a player at a price of 25 salary points, that player becomes yours under a 3-year contract. If you submit a bid for 35 points and win, it’s also a 3-year contract. If you submit a bid for 38 points, it’s a 4-year contract. If you submit a bid for 120 points, it’s a 7-year contract.

For the 2012 free agency period, we will enforce the 53-man rule. You will need to cut down to 53 players before the free agency period starts, and if you sign a player to go above 53, you will need to cut a player to stay within the roster limit. NOTE: DON'T CUT YET UNLESS YOU WANT TO. WE'RE STILL FINALIZING THE SYSTEM AND WANT TO BE SURE THAT THIS RULE WORKS IN 2012.

4. Ending Bidding and Ending Free Agency.

Bids on an individual player will begin once the first player places a bid. For the 2012 season that bid must be $1 or more. Bidding ends when the existing high bid had not been raised for 72 hours. At that point, the high-bid team is awarded the player under the contract terms described in Step 3.

The free agency period in 2012 will end once there have been no bids on any players for 72 hours.

5. Unused Salary Points

If you do not use all of your salary points in a given year, they will roll over from year to year. This is experimental and we'll have to see how it works. If it doesn't work, they'll expire each year, or maybe a portion of the points can roll over. Right now, assume they all roll over.

6. Salary Points and Roster Management

In the Sandbox system, salary points and the salary cap are used only for acquiring players. You will never have to track the number of salary points “on your roster” and you will never have to cut a player for salary cap reasons.

Additionally, you are not obligated to keep a player for the full length of his contract. You can cut him or trade him at any time. However, recognize that it’s a waste of salary points to cut or trade a player before the end of his contract. But it doesn't hamstring you going forward - it's just past money that you wasted.

7. Free Agency and Contract Length - Retaining Your Current Players

When a player reaches the end of their contract, they go back into the free agency pool and teams will bid for their services. You are eligible to bid on them to get them back, just like you can bid on any free agents.

There is one exception to the rule of free agents going into the free agency pool, as follows:

• At the end of the bidding process, you have the opportunity to re-sign your own players by outbidding the high bidder. Your bid must be the minimum points to increase their contract period by a year over the high bid. (Example: your player goes to free agency, and another team bids 50 points for him, which equates to a 4-year contract. You can keep the player by paying 55 points for him, which is the minimum amount for a 5-year contract.) If the high bidder offered a contract of 100 points or more (7-years), you can keep the player by bidding 10% more points than the high bid.

8. Free Agency and Trades

If you trade for a player, their contract length is a consideration. Trading for a player with 6 years left on his contract will give you his services for that amount of time (unless you cut him or trade him, or he retires). Trading for a player with 1 year left on his contract means that he’ll go back into the free agency pool at the end of the season. (Of course, you can still retain him via Step 7.)

9. Future Years

In future years, the process will be identical to that shown above, with the following exceptions.

a. Because you will have a lot of veteran players under contract, you won't need $1,300. You'll get a new annual allotment of signing dollars. We're still working on the exact amount, but it looks like it'll be between $500 and $600.

b. In the 2012 season, we will introduce all free agents at once to catch up. In the 2013 season and beyond, the free agency period will occur during the actual NFL season. We will sprinkle the free agents in one division at a time over the course of the season. (The divisions may be randomly selected or we may release a calendar. It doesn't matter that much.) This system should be interesting because some free agents will come available early in the season when you don't know their performance for the year - greater risk, greater reward - while other free agents will come available later in the season when you know what their performance will be, but so does everyone else.

c. In the 2013 season and beyond, you will be able to retain more than 53 players through the rookie draft and the main free agency period. You will then have a cutdown period to get to 53 and we will have a final free agency period where you can sign any players who have been cut. In that final period you will have to enforce a 53-man roster, so if you sign a player you have to cut one.

10. When you think about the schedule in 2013 and beyond, it will go like this:

a. Sandbox season goes from February through April.
b. Rookie draft in May. No 53-man limit.
c. Free agency from (likely) September through December, with free agents sprinkled in throughout that period.
d. January. Roster cuts to 53.
e. Late January. Final free agency period to flesh out rosters and sign players cut in Step d.
f. New Sandbox season begins.

As an FYI, you’re our beta testers so you get the Cadillac version, but we will likely offer some leagues with a simple “draft ‘em and keep ‘em” setup for those who don’t get into the roster management.

I'm going to take down the site to load the free agent system up now. Shouldn't take too long.

I'm going to leave the bidding system inactive until <s>Thursday night</s> Sunday, June 9 to allow everyone to do the following:

1. Become familiar with the list of free agents.
2. Cut your rosters to 53. You won't get your bid buttons active unless you are below at or below the 53 man roster.
3. <s>Begin planning</s> Plan how you will invest your salary points between players now on your roster and in free agency.
4. Sign all the players that you are keeping to contracts.

From a mechanics point of view, there are two screens you will want to work with: manage roster (which you've seen before, but it now has new functionality) and the free-agent bid board, located under the draft tab.

In general, I've included all players that saw significant playing time in 2011 or 2012. If an older player missed 2012, I may have not included him on the assumption that he is retired. If you want anyone to be listed that I've missed, shoot me a PM. I need to add some punters and kickers.

Note: on the Manage Roster page you can juggle the various contracts up and down and watch the effect on your bankroll. They do not become final until you hit the button sign all contracts. That will finalize any contracts where it has a finite duration, rather than "no contract" indicated. So if you want, you can sign contracts in batches-- just make sure the players you aren't ready to sign say "no contract". To release a player, you must hit the release button for that player.

<s>You do NOT have to finalize all your contracts of the players on your roster by Thursday. You will need to before the beginning of the simulation season, or at a point that we believe will help game play during this beta test.</s>

In general it will behoove you to avoid signing players to contracts and then releasing them later to make room for a free agents.

And we're off!

Since contract length now affects trade value, I am going to turn off trades for a few days until I can can get the contract length to display in the traded window.

Trades are currently not allowed.

Messages are currently not allowed.

No drafts are happening now.

Help? There is no stinking help.

I get this when I try to view the free agents available

Oh, yeah. I need to turn trades back on to get access to the free agent list.

Also, my rookies I just drafted are not available to put into my lineup

Eric Berry isn't either

Lineups aren't active yet, all the data is from last year. Don't mess with those until we tell you to.

Ok will do, ill just start an excel sheet with my players on it.

Note changes. Beta and everything.

When do we need all players signed?

Sunday June 9.

is it down for anybody else?

Yeah, I' doing the work needed to get the correct list of free agents to show. I'll bring it up again for a while, but the list isn't quite correct yet. I'm going to have to take it down one more time for about 5 minutes.

Just so everyone knows:

1. You can't bid more points that you have even if they are spread over multiple players.
2. You can't rescind bids. If you change your mind you have to hope someone else will come along and take you off the hook.

So consider your bids carefully. You can't jerk around NFL players.

Is there going to be inflation in the price of players salaries?

I only ask because I can see very little utility in locking up guys long term if they're already on your team. What's the upshot? Why not just lock them all in on cheap 1-year deals as we clearly seem to have the ability to do? There's not even a great deal of benefit in using up cap space if you can roll over the unused space.

I just feel like there has to be something I'm missing here.

Why is Brandon Marshall both on my roster and listed as a free agent?

Oops...wrong thread. Whatever - same question though.

We probably should be sure it's the same one. I think there was a late-round linebacker in the draft last year by that name.

When a player's contract expires he goes out into the free agent pool. You have to either bid to get him back or you have to beat the bid by a margin sufficient to add a year to whatever offer he's already getting.

They both have WR as their position. That could be an error on the FA one, though.

Yes if you want to have those guys for only one year then you will have to pay insane amounts the next year for your good players. Think real life. Its easier to lock up your studs long term then to try to out pay every other team interested in him.

Okay...so how 'bout 2 years?

Can I extend him the year before he hits the market? At that point, why shouldn't I just give them all 2 year deals and next season, throw another 2 year deal the way of guys I really want to keep?

I feel like this can be gamed a little bit.

from what i understand once you hit accept all contracts they are stuck until they become free agents.

edit: So if you put everyone at 2 years, your entire team will be free agents in two seasons and have to piece together everything

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.

So if you draft a guy in the 3rd round that you think has great potential it should cost you the same to sign him for 5 years that it would cost to sign your first rounder?

There's literally no differentiation between your high end first rounders and the rest of the draft. If I think Jayron Hosely has long-term potential and want to keep him for 4 years, I have to pay him like the same amount that I'll be paying to an established badass C like John Sullivan.

That's bizarre. Especially if, like I said, there's no way to keep these guys out of FA later. In the NFL, it's RFA that allows teams to really reap the rewards of the late-round picks that pan out, but that doesn't really exist under this setup.

Ultimately I guess it's just a league decision to put greater emphasis on the free-agent market and I suppose that's defensible; it creates 2 thriving markets for players instead of 1. In the end, though, I'd like to see some mechanism whereby we can extend guys we think are about to bust out and actually extend them below market or the possibility of having a more graduate salary scale for later round picks.

Yeah, I'm not liking the idea that it costs as much to lock up my punter long term costs as much as it does to lock up a QB for the same amount of time....that seems odd

Ya, QB for 7 years should be like 200, P for 7 years should be like 50

If your punter isn't valuable enough to lock up, you don't have to lock him up. Just let him go and get another one.

It's great when a simulation game can mimic reality as closely as possible, but there's a tradeoff between that level of complexity and both playability and unintended consequences that has to be considered.

Eagle Rob....check your smokes

Another thing I'm wondering is if the market for elite players will be more expensive anyway. There's no limit on the amount you can pay for an elite quarterback, so will they blow by the 100 point mark on the free agent market? If that's the case, then rookies could become pretty cheap.

Nonetheless, thanks for the critiques. We're looking into everything people bring up. As patteeu said, we're trying to find a good balance between playability and complexity.

That's where I keep ending up.

I don't see a chance in hell that Cruz and Sherman don't go for well over $100 pts - I'd just be shocked. There are a few really bad teams that will have the money to spend, so they'll spend it and they'll drive that bidding through the roof.

My team has quite a bit of young talent on it so I think I'm going to end up using nearly all my FA money on my own roster.

But where I think it gets more dicey is not the high end guys, but rather the middle-tier players. I think Brandon Browner ends up with a 5 year deal at least. Some like Ramon Foster could even end up in the 4-5 year range and really, there's not a crapload of wiggle room in between the tiers.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes and it will only get stranger over the next 2-3 years. I think we're going to have an active FA market, but I worry a little that it might stifle the trade market that way. We shall see.

What if the player is unavailable for a portion of the contract through retirement, injury, etc? Say I sign Titus Young to a 7 year deal and he is unexpectedly unavailable from year 4 on, do I receive a portion of my money back or am I just SOL?

SOL, but over the long run it will affect everyone the same, as long as you are making sound decisions with your contracts. If you continually give 7 year contracts to 32 year old RBs, it won't work out for you. However with good investments, over the long run the bad luck is just part of the game.

We want to save people the tedium of balancing a salary cap while at the same time introducing some of the resource constraints faced by real GMs.With some tweaking, I think the system we have can do that.

do you have a different pool then me, Cruz isnt in my free agents

If this has been covered in an earlier post, I apologize. Does the contract follow the player in a trade? Obviously a top player with five years remaining on a seven year contract would have more value than one year remaining.

On the flip side, will owners have an opportunity to lockup newly acquired players after a trade or free agency? For instance, if I bid $25 on Andy Studebaker and win the auction, will I have an opportunity to immediately sign him to a seven year deal, or am I forced to bid based on the contract length I would like?

For bids exceeding $400 (28 year contract) are player's children immediately considered under contract when they reach adulthood?

In league 2, Cruz is already a happy member of the Los Angeles Knights. He was picked up in the initial veteran draft before the 2011 season, so he's not part of the free agent pool in that league. DJLN is in league 1.

Yes, contracts follow the players in a trade.

There is no extension of contracts without going through free agency. If you want a longer deal for Andy Studebaker, you need to bid more for him in free agency.

Maximum contract length for any player is 7 years.

I'll echo cdcox's answers.

One way to think about the contract lengths is that they're a ceiling, not a requirement. In general, teams will want to sign the better players to longer contracts, so this system is an easy way to do that. And if you want a high-priced player for only a year, who cares if you get the rights to him for seven years? It's all front-loaded and you paid the same for him, so you can drop him if you don't need him any more.

And on the other end, in the Studebaker example, if you want to sign him to a seven-year deal it's probably because you think he's ascending. If that's the case then at some point he's going to hold out and demand a renegotiation. This system avoids that problem.

Thanks for the answers. This all sounds great, I'm just trying to game out my four year plan.

One more question for this evening...As I understand the system, if a player's contract has ended, they come up on the FA market. Highest bid wins, then the previous contract holder has the option on beat that bid. Is that a one-and-done, or does the auction winner have an opportunity to come back and 're-raise', and go back and forth between the auction winner and previous owner?

One-and-done.

1. Active bidding phase
2. Bidding phase ends
3. Previous owner has a one time opportunity to retain player by upping contract by one year or adding 10% to bid. If the previous owner opts in, the player is his. If the previous owner opts out, the player goes to the high bidder.
4. Of course, the previous owner does have the option to enter into the bidding phase. If that owner wins the bidding phase, the player obviously goes immediately to the winning owner.

If we made some changes to the system now based on feedback (no guarantees, just saying), would it screw up everyone's contracts? We're just figuring out if we should make any changes now or wait until the 2013 season.

I've done extensive planning, but I've built in contingencies for any possible rule changes so it won't screw me up. Change away.

I'm willing to live with that. Is there any way to roll back the system so I can get my cheap rookie contracts?

My suspicion is that cdcox could clear your system out if you wanted, but probably not selectively for individual players. With 48 teams it'd have to be an all or nothing. But I'll let him respond if that's even feasible.

I've cut guys but haven't signed anyone to contracts yet. I say change away.

Screw up contracts? Heck I'm still trying to figure out how to have points left to go shopping.

If we decide to implement changes now, I'd want to clean out everyone's contracts so that the huts against salary points would be correct based on the revised scheme. We would give a couple days notice for people to copy down their contracts if they wanted to replicate them or use those contracts as a guide moving forward.

I'd be completely ok with that. I know in general where I want guys, and if I mess that up after a redo, that's on me--not on you.

Ya, I agree change it we can figure it back out. It should change anyways with the changes.