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*Building a Team Budget (S7) - SwagSloth - 04-18-2018 Lately, a lot of discussion has popped up again on raising contract minimums. This is something that I was a major advocate for before I became a GM. However, once I became a GM, I quickly started to realize how tight the budgets of many teams already were. As they say, there are two sides to every coin. So, with this topic becoming relevant again, I’ve decided to put together a look at what the average team budget would look like based on the league as it is today. To start, for players, I think we can agree that there are two main issues with contracts right now: (1) Contracts don’t always reflect the TPE of a player. Someone that signed for $1 mil at 395 TPE may now be playing at 700-800 TPE and still get paid $1 mil. (2) Teams with several loyal players open up cap room, so that teams can pay a larger amount to free agents compared to teams that already spread the money around to their actives. With this article, I’m going to take a look at what a realistic budget would look like if we followed current TPE. If you had to sign an entire team of free agents today, what would that look like? While teams benefit from old contracts signed at lower TPE levels, as budgets get tighter, those teams are going to have to cut corners to meet rising minimums when it comes time to re-sign. So, rather than follow existing budgets that may not be sustainable, I’d rather focus on a viable long-term budget model. [div align=\\\"center\\\"][/div] Based on the chart above, the average team needs to invest about $41,000,000 of its $75,000,000 budget just to meet its minimums. They will have to pay more than this as some players will obviously demand more than minimum, but that’s the floor. We’ll also assume that this team wants an offensive line comparable to the league average, which is 550 TPE and costs $4,500,000 per Bot. That adds $22,500,000 to your $41,000,000, raising the minimum investment to $63,500,000. This leaves $11,500,000 left in flexible money, which isn’t a lot (less than 20%). As a GM, I view two options here: (1) I can pay 11-12 actives $1,000,000 each over their minimum TPE. This rewards my most devoted players and creates a culture of equality, but will lock us out of certain free agents. Our best bet for recruiting here is promoting a balanced reward system and, hopefully, being competitive enough that a championship is still in reach. (2) Encourage my loyal players to take the minimum and use that $11,500,000 to pay 3-4 free agents well over the minimum. This rewards the least loyal players, but allows us to compete in bidding wars. Currently, many members of the league are loyal to their teams and happy to take the mimimum, allowing most owners to focus on option #2. However, that amount of flexible TPE used to be a lot larger and it’s been shrinking each season as players accumulate more TPE. Unless the cap gets raised (which may or may not happen at some point), the days of players getting $10,000,000 contracts are fading away. We’ve just been waiting for things to even out. Technically, we’re still waiting since many high TPE players are still on old contracts, but the trajectory is in place for much tighter budgets and we are moving in the right direction. The reason I offer this type of data up is to try to get more people to think about the bigger picture. Something does need to be done about contract minimums. Personally, I think the current minimums are fine, but contracts need to be more predictive of TPE growth. We can’t just have contracts auto-adjust because teams have to build budgets in advance. For example, YKW puts together conceptual budgets several seasons ahead and considers them when deciding what we can offer free agents and re-signing players. Forcing us to predict exact TPE growth would complicate that process drastically, but there are ways to build some sort of slope or auto-correction into contract minimums and still allow teams to plan accordingly. There are a lot of solutions being offered up about contracts and I’m not advocating for any specific solution here. I’m only trying to help provide more data, so that we can be better informed in discussing those solutions. If every team had to re-sign its players today, you’d find that most budgets are going to be very tight. I think it’s also useful to players to be aware of this for the purpose of their own negotiations. We’ve all seen the $10,000,000+ contracts that have been given out at times and be tempted to chase that. Many of us put a lot of time into this league and with that dedication comes a sense of pride. You’re likely loyal to your own team, but at the same time, you also question your player’s value. If every team got to bid on me today, what could I get? I’ve asked myself that at times. I don’t even need the money. It’s just a matter of curiosity. However, we do have to keep in mind some of the contracts negotiated in the past few seasons are products of the early days and aren’t sustainable for a competitive team. In theory, a rebuilding team might be able to afford that, but they’re probably better off funneling that money into younger players that put loyalty over money. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get paid, but the size of even the biggest contracts are starting to shrink as budgets get tighter. With regression just around the corner, we’re as close to a real picture of what the league will look like long-term as we’ve ever been. The TPE of older players will decrease, but the younger players are catching up and will draw more money than they did before. Everything is slowly evening out. And that’s a good thing for the league. For the purposes of full disclosure, I’m sharing two additional charts below, showcasing the TPE thresholds for all current starters. This is where the information in the data table above comes from. A few notes: - Players under 200 TPE are falsely displayed at $1,000,000 rather than $500,000. The actual table counts them as $500k, but rounds up before displaying the value. The correct un-rounded value is still correctly used in calculating the average. - Back-ups get paid $500k. The sole purpose of this is to swap in a player to refresh TPE and swap them out on the next play. A low-TPE inactive is best-suited for this role. - I tried to loosely figure out where players fit on their teams, so that we could use actual starters to determine these results. However, the sim itself is very flexible and there is a lot of wiggle room here. Several positions have been grouped together to account for this. Most teams will find a way to fit their best players in at needed positions when the opportunity is available. I do not have access to other team’s Depth Charts, but it doesn’t seem necessary for a baseline example. - For offense, “WR4” is more of an offensive flex. It’s the 11th man that floats around the field as needed. I tried to use the best remaining player. If it’s a RB2 or TE2, they might play FB or slot. If it’s a WR3/4, they might play slot or even switch to TE if the team needs its TE to play FB. (TEs need to be better blockers than WRs in general.) - For defense, the 11th man is typically either a defensive lineman, linebacker, or a strong safety playing linebacker. As with offense, I tried to use the best remaining player that wasn’t starting elsewhere. Some of these will be CBs/FSs that aren’t built for the linebacker position, but a team could easily move that player to SS and run their top SS at LB instead. It’s not necessarily ideal, but it’s possible and sometimes needs to be done if better options aren’t available. Creativity goes a long way in DC planning. 1,365 Words Ready for Grading [div align=\\\"center\\\"] [/div] *Building a Team Budget (S7) - 124715 - 04-19-2018 great, great read