We talk a lot here about how free agency is kind of boring. This was arguably one of a most exciting off-seasons for it in quite some time, and how many fairly high TPE players actually changed teams? Four or five? If we ever want to see a free agent economy that encourages player movement and discourages dynasties, we need to make some changes. Here are a some things I think we could look at as possible fixes.
1. Inconsistent Minimum Contract Scaling
The current system:
The proposed system:
2. Standardized Rookie Contracts & DSFL Coverage Reform
The current system:
The flaws:
The fixes:
Disclaimer: I took advantage of a lot of these things as a GM. I probably didn’t think nearly enough about them in that role and I was certainly all too happy to turn a blind eye to them for my own benefit. I think there’s about a 0% chance any of these things find their way into the league for that reason - they benefit GMs who use them. At the same time, that's probably every GM now, so maybe nobody has anything to lose.
1. Inconsistent Minimum Contract Scaling
The current system:
- There is really simply one issue here, and it arises between the first two contract tiers. The pay increase from Tier 1 to Tier 2 is not consistent with the TPE increase. By adding $500,000 to each Tier’s minimum, we can align the increase in salary and TPE within each tier.
The proposed system:
- Also to this point, there’s something to be said for minimum scaling over the life of a contract rather than assuming a static minimum. You could effectively avoid a lot of the changes I’ll get into in point #2 by changing from static to dynamic minimums. Max earning players, even almost-max players basically go up a full contract tier per season. Allowing a 399 TPE max earner to sign a 3-season, $3m contract (under the current system) creates an absolutely nutty amount of surplus value over the life of that contract as that player will probably cross the $2m, $3m, and maybe even $4m thresholds over the life of that deal. Instead, that 3-season deal should probably be forced to factor in the cost of the next two contract tiers (this is what I mean by dynamic minimums). This was something I was against previously but the more I see how it works in PBE, the more necessary I think it is. Of course we’d need to safe guard against some of the ways PBE teams have abused this, but I digress. If you implement this then you fix some pretty big issues with the rookie contract system, but definitely not all of them.
2. Standardized Rookie Contracts & DSFL Coverage Reform
The current system:
- Maximum length of three seasons
- DSFL covers up to $4,000,000 of player salary if sent down, in perpetuity
- - DSFL also provides all rookies with a $5,000,000 contract
- No other restrictions
The flaws:
- DSFL contract coverage does not expire. This encourages teams to hoard talent and convince their draftees to be sent down, potentially against the draftee’s own best interests depending on their individual goals.
- - As part of this, the DSFL $5,000,000 deposit should really be for first generation creates only, similar to the first free training. Set them up, but don’t prop up recreates with a free season’s worth (technically like 60-70% of a season) of weekly trainings.
- Lack of restriction on contract structure. There are more than a few issues here. Allowing teams to place options on every season of a contract allows teams to manipulate the cap by opting out and signing timely extensions at their current minimum, among other potential issues, like making their players unattractive in expansion.
- This is not just something exploitable by teams, however. Allowing players to sign 1-year rookie deals provides them an undue amount of leverage, and encourages draft manipulation. There are two sides to this coin, more on that shortly.
The fixes:
- DSFL Contracts will not be covered beyond the first season a player is sent down. This feels almost too easy, and I’m not certain why we allow it to begin with. Not only does this allow teams to hoard talent, but it also lets them have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to negotiating send down contracts. Particularly with allowing clauses that provide for the contract value to increase to the maximum covered by the DSFL if a player is sent down.
- Standardize rookie contracts. This will probably be fairly unpopular, but I don’t see any good reason not to do it. The 4/1/1 structure that so many teams use is painfully broken. It basically allows teams to never face any real consequences of the cap. Meanwhile we often see bottom dwelling teams wind up just sitting on loads of cap space that they hand out as ridiculous bonuses rather than having the opportunity to use it on actual players who can improve their team. You could fairly easily do this by round, though I’m not going to propose too much in the way of actual logistics. Whatever those look like, I hesitate to say that teams should be allowed to structure that however they choose. Because I think that if we mandated 3-season, $9m total value contracts, we’d see a lot of 4/3/2 structuring and I actually think a 2/3/4 structure will force more difficult decisions down the road.
- Now, the boogeyman with standardized rookie deals is that you put players totally at the mercy of teams, which we want to avoid as a league that we all joined to have fun in. So, you’d probably also want to tweak a couple of existing rules related to this process. Primarily, allow players who are holdouts to earn TPE as normal. Maybe you could impose some minor restrictions, but we want both sides to have fair leverage here, and preventing holdouts from doing PTs would be rough. Additionally, there should be a cap hold on the pro team’s salary cap for the value of the player’s standardized deal. This would hopefully encourage the team to either negotiate or find a trade. Second, we would probably have to reevaluate what happens after a season of a holdout, though I wonder if we would ever get quite this far. Still, in that event would the player be a free agent, or would the drafting team still retain their rights for the hypothetical length of a standardized deal? I would actually have no clue how to approach this. My crackpot idea would honestly be an MLB-esque system where the holdout re-enters the draft (they remain a part of their original regression class) and the drafting team receives a compensatory pick based on the round of the player lost to holdout.
Disclaimer: I took advantage of a lot of these things as a GM. I probably didn’t think nearly enough about them in that role and I was certainly all too happy to turn a blind eye to them for my own benefit. I think there’s about a 0% chance any of these things find their way into the league for that reason - they benefit GMs who use them. At the same time, that's probably every GM now, so maybe nobody has anything to lose.