09-17-2024, 06:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-27-2024, 02:53 PM by lemonoppy. Edited 2 times in total.)
I Have Too Much Time
It's been a while since I've had any substantive thoughts about sim leagues, and the heart of this was a stream of consciousness response to someone else’s media, so take everything I am about to say and/or propose with a grain of salt – I may be just a little bit out of touch. The media I responded to was laying out some ideas / suggestions / proposals regarding contracts, player movement, etc. in this league. The same things we’ve probably been arguing about here for 45-plus seasons and however many real-life years. Or maybe those are just the things I’ve been arguing about. It did inspire me to write a response that wound up somewhere around 1,200 words, and I’ll be damned if I don’t use it to get paid. I think there are probably things or variations of things we could have been doing in this league for a long time, so I’m going to blab about some of the changes that I think could be beneficial.
I think you can basically split my own ideas along two schools of thought:
Players Have Too Much Money
TLDR – Not really. A few users have more money than they know what to do with, but you’ll never really drain those users’ accounts. Even if you could, there’s nothing stopping users who want to earn money from non-contract sources from doing so.
I think that we’re all mostly well aware of just how much money some users have. At a certain point it stops meaning anything, and contract payouts become nothing more than a drop in the bucket. So, is it possible to generate player movement or higher contract demands by taking away, taxing, or withholding money? I’m not sure I would say that it is. In general, these users comprise a tiny fraction of the overall user base, and any rule to this effect would probably disproportionately affect them. I would say, though, that we kind of lack voluntary ways to spend money, so one way to try to kill two birds with one stone could be splitting bank accounts into user money and player money.
User vs. Player Bank Accounts
I feel like this has probably been talked about by someone before, but in case it’s unintuitive:
So, what solution could there be to drain bank accounts over time while still giving those users who’ve earned tons of money in this league the advantage that their effort should reward them with? The best I can come up with is allowing users to purchase money. A practice as fiscally sound as it is timeless. Since we are talking about this in the context of split bank accounts, this basically means transferring money from the user account to the player account at some kind of exchange rate. As a practical example, let’s say you create a new player with a bank balance of $0. You want to purchase weekly training for the next three weeks, and equipment once the off-season rolls around, so you need another $15m in addition to your $5m from the DSFL. Your user balance is sitting at $100m, and the User:Player exchange rate is 1.2:1. So to make $15m available from your user account, you need to pay $3m (15 * 1.2 = 18, but 15 of that 18 stays with you while 3 vanishes into the ether). Your user balance now sits at $102m ($5m from new money, minus $3m in exchange fees) and your player balance is $20m.
If none of that math makes any sense to you, that is perfectly fair and probably a great reason why this exact implementation wouldn’t be useful. Not to mention it would require some development work to get the bank on the site to even work this way. The only reason I’m pitching this is because it would help drain overall bank balances while still rewarding users for earning tons of money, and it might incentivize them to earn more as those exchange fees pile up.
What does this actually solve, though? Obviously you could jack up the exchange rate to accelerate this process, but the above example illustrates that this would be more of a slow burn than a bonfire. I’m also not certain it would really make a difference, because users who earn that much in the first place are either going to have a league job or media writing addiction that earns that money right back. Or they might prefer writing the occasional media to having to hit free agency to ask for more money. In short, any attempt to drain user bank accounts as a way to incentivize free agency and drive up contract values would be futile, to say nothing of how incredibly unpopular it would be.
Teams Have Too Many Resources
TLDR – If you’re asking me, then this is 100% true. That being said, you might disagree with my reasons for believing this is an issue, and if you do, then you disagree with this whole premise.
Unlike the previous section of this article, I have some conviction behind the things I’m going to be proposing, so get ready to read, I guess. I think the basic thing I’m trying to solve for in suggesting any of this is a relatively stagnant user experience. For my money, I’ve only ever been drafted by teams GM’d by a user that I have some history with. Without knowing for certain, I would say ISFL has relatively minimal player movement not just within career but within user when compared to other leagues. People find a fit, they like it, they want to stick with it. I certainly get it, but it’s also something that contributes to the second thing I have complaints about; it is not really challenging enough for teams to remain consistently competitive once they get there, and relatively difficult for teams to drag themselves out of the basement. How do you solve for that without implementing policies that might be seen as anti-user? You probably can’t, but that won’t stop me from trying.
Draft Pick Luxury Tax
Let’s start with the thing that I’m certain people in this league have been arguing about forever – the salary cap. Right now, it’s not really restrictive at all. If anything, it feels designed for teams to just be able to retain all of their players every year, as long as they get enough of them on minimum contracts, and we have nothing if not a deluge of players willing to take minimum contracts.
What do we do then? Lower the cap? Raise it? Neither accomplishes much, so we have to Goldilocks this thing and do both. I pointed to PBE in my original post as an example of how this has been implemented in another league, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t work here. Basically, there is a tax threshold under which you just pay your players and go on your merry way. If you cross the tax line, though, you start to pay in draft picks rather than cap fines. If you cross the next line? Another (or possibly a higher) draft pick bites the dust. I honestly fail to see many downsides in this – you give teams the freedom to go all in, but they have to actually pay the price. No more building for the present and future at the same time.
I’m not going to pretend I know enough to give you a real example, but to lay it out in a hypothetical world where most teams in the league are sitting around $75m in salary:
How does it solve for the stagnation I described? There is an obvious tradeoff to competing, for one. Two, while this doesn’t directly squeeze players out of teams, there will come a point where teams have to make decisions on which players they can retain. Those players hit the market, and that – to me – is just how it should work.
Compensatory Picks (without RFA)
I will reiterate, if the subtitle didn’t make it clear enough, that I am not proposing restricted free agency. It’s been attempted here in the past, it didn’t work, it probably won’t ever work, that’s it and that’s all. That does not mean that we can’t implement comp picks. In the NFL, I believe that in order to receive comp picks, you have to lose more qualifying players than you sign. I’m not 100% sure what determines which players count toward that calculation and which don’t, but this doesn’t need to be a one-to-one replica. But wait spec, didn’t you just propose something that might force good teams to lose a disproportionate number of good players at the risk of losing draft picks? Wouldn’t this undermine that? No! Let’s say that comp picks are handed out based on net TPE loss. If you are forced to let a 1,000 TPE player walk in free agency for fear of losing your 2nd round pick, you will probably net a draft pick in a comp pick world. That comp pick will be in the form of some rookie who probably has 150-200 TPE and might not be relevant on your roster for another two or three seasons. In other words, it mitigates the loss, but it certainly doesn’t offset it. TPE now is more valuable to a competitive team than TPE tomorrow.
There’s another wrinkle that could be added here that mimics MLB a little bit – the qualifying offer. In the real world, MLB teams can receive compensatory picks (usually very valuable ones) if a player that receives a qualifying offer from them is signed by another team (in the past, the signing team also lost a pick, but MLB had to change that rule because it had the same downsides as RFA – teams tended to avoid signing those players). Making a qualifying offer, though, is not a decision these teams take lightly. I’m not sure the exact value year-to-year, but it’s essentially a 1-year, $17-18m offer. In a lot of cases, the player would not make that money in free agency and so they would likely opt to take the QO instead. In our case, teams that want to receive comp picks could be forced to offer a player an above minimum deal before that player hits free agency if they want to receive a pick for that player going elsewhere.
The logistics here could be messy. If you’re an uncompetitive team, you might implore your best players to take 1-year deals in free agency after offering them QO’s so that you can get comp picks for them, and then re-sign them the following off-season at no cost. So there would probably need to be some minimum contract duration to qualify for a comp pick. Or does that punish teams who lose players who only want to sign a short-term deal? Maybe you have to restrict them from returning? That certainly gets ugly. All of this to say, this is not a clean proposal. I also don’t have to be the one to refine it, since I’m getting paid just to say whatever I want right now.
Minimum Rookie Contract Lengths
I almost didn’t even add this one, because I think the scenario is so rare that it doesn’t really warrant a rule, and because even if there was a rule it would probably be messy to enforce. That being said, this is another thing that PBE does to prevent players from forcing their way back to the same teams they just left at a potentially discounted draft pick cost. I really only added this to suggest that I think doing this would benefit teams who might otherwise be able to take those players. It’s been a long time since I GM’d, so I don’t know this for sure (or I forget how toxic GMs can be), but nobody was so malicious as to actually hold another user’s player hostage.
As an example, if we have a player Top Prospect who wants to force their way to Team A, who picks 10th, the only goal of this is to prevent Team A from getting away with picking Top Prospect at 10 because they know nobody is going to gamble their first-round pick under the current rules. If there is some minimum contract length, though, then maybe Team B who is picking 4th and would otherwise draft Top Prospect now has the leverage to force Team A to move up. Team A gets their player, Team B gets appropriate value for their pick.
I’m not sure that would work in practice, and so I don’t really want to keep going on this topic. I’ll only add that under the current rules, teams have a lot of leverage to get certain players way below market value in terms of draft capital, and it’s just another way for them to remain competitive without sacrificing anything. Also, PBE has had this in place for some time and it seems generally to just be a part of life now.
It's been a while since I've had any substantive thoughts about sim leagues, and the heart of this was a stream of consciousness response to someone else’s media, so take everything I am about to say and/or propose with a grain of salt – I may be just a little bit out of touch. The media I responded to was laying out some ideas / suggestions / proposals regarding contracts, player movement, etc. in this league. The same things we’ve probably been arguing about here for 45-plus seasons and however many real-life years. Or maybe those are just the things I’ve been arguing about. It did inspire me to write a response that wound up somewhere around 1,200 words, and I’ll be damned if I don’t use it to get paid. I think there are probably things or variations of things we could have been doing in this league for a long time, so I’m going to blab about some of the changes that I think could be beneficial.
I think you can basically split my own ideas along two schools of thought:
- Players have too much money, so there is no incentive for them to ask for bigger contracts, and consequently no reason for them to test free agency.
- Teams are not restricted enough by the existing salary cap structure, making it easy to retain players and build juggernauts without having to sacrifice any draft capital.
Players Have Too Much Money
TLDR – Not really. A few users have more money than they know what to do with, but you’ll never really drain those users’ accounts. Even if you could, there’s nothing stopping users who want to earn money from non-contract sources from doing so.
I think that we’re all mostly well aware of just how much money some users have. At a certain point it stops meaning anything, and contract payouts become nothing more than a drop in the bucket. So, is it possible to generate player movement or higher contract demands by taking away, taxing, or withholding money? I’m not sure I would say that it is. In general, these users comprise a tiny fraction of the overall user base, and any rule to this effect would probably disproportionately affect them. I would say, though, that we kind of lack voluntary ways to spend money, so one way to try to kill two birds with one stone could be splitting bank accounts into user money and player money.
User vs. Player Bank Accounts
I feel like this has probably been talked about by someone before, but in case it’s unintuitive:
- User Bank Account: total earnings throughout their time in ISFL
- Player Bank Account: total earnings since creating this player
So, what solution could there be to drain bank accounts over time while still giving those users who’ve earned tons of money in this league the advantage that their effort should reward them with? The best I can come up with is allowing users to purchase money. A practice as fiscally sound as it is timeless. Since we are talking about this in the context of split bank accounts, this basically means transferring money from the user account to the player account at some kind of exchange rate. As a practical example, let’s say you create a new player with a bank balance of $0. You want to purchase weekly training for the next three weeks, and equipment once the off-season rolls around, so you need another $15m in addition to your $5m from the DSFL. Your user balance is sitting at $100m, and the User:Player exchange rate is 1.2:1. So to make $15m available from your user account, you need to pay $3m (15 * 1.2 = 18, but 15 of that 18 stays with you while 3 vanishes into the ether). Your user balance now sits at $102m ($5m from new money, minus $3m in exchange fees) and your player balance is $20m.
If none of that math makes any sense to you, that is perfectly fair and probably a great reason why this exact implementation wouldn’t be useful. Not to mention it would require some development work to get the bank on the site to even work this way. The only reason I’m pitching this is because it would help drain overall bank balances while still rewarding users for earning tons of money, and it might incentivize them to earn more as those exchange fees pile up.
What does this actually solve, though? Obviously you could jack up the exchange rate to accelerate this process, but the above example illustrates that this would be more of a slow burn than a bonfire. I’m also not certain it would really make a difference, because users who earn that much in the first place are either going to have a league job or media writing addiction that earns that money right back. Or they might prefer writing the occasional media to having to hit free agency to ask for more money. In short, any attempt to drain user bank accounts as a way to incentivize free agency and drive up contract values would be futile, to say nothing of how incredibly unpopular it would be.
Teams Have Too Many Resources
TLDR – If you’re asking me, then this is 100% true. That being said, you might disagree with my reasons for believing this is an issue, and if you do, then you disagree with this whole premise.
Unlike the previous section of this article, I have some conviction behind the things I’m going to be proposing, so get ready to read, I guess. I think the basic thing I’m trying to solve for in suggesting any of this is a relatively stagnant user experience. For my money, I’ve only ever been drafted by teams GM’d by a user that I have some history with. Without knowing for certain, I would say ISFL has relatively minimal player movement not just within career but within user when compared to other leagues. People find a fit, they like it, they want to stick with it. I certainly get it, but it’s also something that contributes to the second thing I have complaints about; it is not really challenging enough for teams to remain consistently competitive once they get there, and relatively difficult for teams to drag themselves out of the basement. How do you solve for that without implementing policies that might be seen as anti-user? You probably can’t, but that won’t stop me from trying.
Draft Pick Luxury Tax
Let’s start with the thing that I’m certain people in this league have been arguing about forever – the salary cap. Right now, it’s not really restrictive at all. If anything, it feels designed for teams to just be able to retain all of their players every year, as long as they get enough of them on minimum contracts, and we have nothing if not a deluge of players willing to take minimum contracts.
What do we do then? Lower the cap? Raise it? Neither accomplishes much, so we have to Goldilocks this thing and do both. I pointed to PBE in my original post as an example of how this has been implemented in another league, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t work here. Basically, there is a tax threshold under which you just pay your players and go on your merry way. If you cross the tax line, though, you start to pay in draft picks rather than cap fines. If you cross the next line? Another (or possibly a higher) draft pick bites the dust. I honestly fail to see many downsides in this – you give teams the freedom to go all in, but they have to actually pay the price. No more building for the present and future at the same time.
I’m not going to pretend I know enough to give you a real example, but to lay it out in a hypothetical world where most teams in the league are sitting around $75m in salary:
- Tax Line: $60m
- 4th Round Fine: $61m - $70m
- 3rd Round Fine: $71m - $75m
- 2nd Round Fine: $76m - $80m
- 2nd + 4th Round Fine: $81m - $85m
- 2nd + 3rd Round Fine: $86m - $90m
- 1st + 2nd + 3rd Round Fine: $91m and above
How does it solve for the stagnation I described? There is an obvious tradeoff to competing, for one. Two, while this doesn’t directly squeeze players out of teams, there will come a point where teams have to make decisions on which players they can retain. Those players hit the market, and that – to me – is just how it should work.
Compensatory Picks (without RFA)
I will reiterate, if the subtitle didn’t make it clear enough, that I am not proposing restricted free agency. It’s been attempted here in the past, it didn’t work, it probably won’t ever work, that’s it and that’s all. That does not mean that we can’t implement comp picks. In the NFL, I believe that in order to receive comp picks, you have to lose more qualifying players than you sign. I’m not 100% sure what determines which players count toward that calculation and which don’t, but this doesn’t need to be a one-to-one replica. But wait spec, didn’t you just propose something that might force good teams to lose a disproportionate number of good players at the risk of losing draft picks? Wouldn’t this undermine that? No! Let’s say that comp picks are handed out based on net TPE loss. If you are forced to let a 1,000 TPE player walk in free agency for fear of losing your 2nd round pick, you will probably net a draft pick in a comp pick world. That comp pick will be in the form of some rookie who probably has 150-200 TPE and might not be relevant on your roster for another two or three seasons. In other words, it mitigates the loss, but it certainly doesn’t offset it. TPE now is more valuable to a competitive team than TPE tomorrow.
There’s another wrinkle that could be added here that mimics MLB a little bit – the qualifying offer. In the real world, MLB teams can receive compensatory picks (usually very valuable ones) if a player that receives a qualifying offer from them is signed by another team (in the past, the signing team also lost a pick, but MLB had to change that rule because it had the same downsides as RFA – teams tended to avoid signing those players). Making a qualifying offer, though, is not a decision these teams take lightly. I’m not sure the exact value year-to-year, but it’s essentially a 1-year, $17-18m offer. In a lot of cases, the player would not make that money in free agency and so they would likely opt to take the QO instead. In our case, teams that want to receive comp picks could be forced to offer a player an above minimum deal before that player hits free agency if they want to receive a pick for that player going elsewhere.
The logistics here could be messy. If you’re an uncompetitive team, you might implore your best players to take 1-year deals in free agency after offering them QO’s so that you can get comp picks for them, and then re-sign them the following off-season at no cost. So there would probably need to be some minimum contract duration to qualify for a comp pick. Or does that punish teams who lose players who only want to sign a short-term deal? Maybe you have to restrict them from returning? That certainly gets ugly. All of this to say, this is not a clean proposal. I also don’t have to be the one to refine it, since I’m getting paid just to say whatever I want right now.
Minimum Rookie Contract Lengths
I almost didn’t even add this one, because I think the scenario is so rare that it doesn’t really warrant a rule, and because even if there was a rule it would probably be messy to enforce. That being said, this is another thing that PBE does to prevent players from forcing their way back to the same teams they just left at a potentially discounted draft pick cost. I really only added this to suggest that I think doing this would benefit teams who might otherwise be able to take those players. It’s been a long time since I GM’d, so I don’t know this for sure (or I forget how toxic GMs can be), but nobody was so malicious as to actually hold another user’s player hostage.
As an example, if we have a player Top Prospect who wants to force their way to Team A, who picks 10th, the only goal of this is to prevent Team A from getting away with picking Top Prospect at 10 because they know nobody is going to gamble their first-round pick under the current rules. If there is some minimum contract length, though, then maybe Team B who is picking 4th and would otherwise draft Top Prospect now has the leverage to force Team A to move up. Team A gets their player, Team B gets appropriate value for their pick.
I’m not sure that would work in practice, and so I don’t really want to keep going on this topic. I’ll only add that under the current rules, teams have a lot of leverage to get certain players way below market value in terms of draft capital, and it’s just another way for them to remain competitive without sacrificing anything. Also, PBE has had this in place for some time and it seems generally to just be a part of life now.
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![[Image: 05mahaI.png]](https://i.imgur.com/05mahaI.png)
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