I don’t really know why I’m writing this article other than I have the perception that I have a lot of free time, and that I’m really quite interested in this topic. If you couldn’t already tell from the title, this article is essentially going to be going into a deep dive and analysis of the current state of the ISFL cap.
Now, I’m not writing this article for monetary incentive, as I’m set money wise to max earn for almost 3 more full seasons. After talking to some people in the rookie discord, and expansion and the cap space and budgets, and seeing Troen’s article recently, I got curious about the figures and numbers and just exactly how strapped each team is for cash, and whether the ISFL needs a change-up in the economy. Just kidding, I'm definitely writing this for money, because my GMs don't pay me enough. This is unironically a plea for help.
Introduction, sort of.
Let’s start off with the introductory statistics, and by the way, I’m terrible at formatting these articles, so it’s probably going to be all out of place and such, but I’ll try and condense everything in a digestible manner.
First off, we have the official cap space number.
85 million.
This number has stayed the same for a while now, despite the amount of active players trending upwards. No team has more than 5 million in cap space left. 3 teams have $0 in cap space left.
Pictures speak a thousand words though. Credit this to the budget sheet.
Moving on, as of the most recent update, there is a total of 256862 TPE in the league (according to the tracker). That’s a lot of activity checks. Too bad there’s no historical data surrounding TPE, like even if it was a screenshot of the team stats page of the tracker during every season, so we could compare how fast the league has grown in recent seasons.
Each team has 23-25 players, except for Baltimore and Chicago, which have 21 and 29 players, respectively, because they are both special. The average TPE player in the entire ISFL is 763 TPE. That’s crazy when you think about it. You’d have to max earn for around 3 seasons to even get to that point. So, how does that leave any space for us rookies, you might be saying, well, it’s very scarce. There are 34 members of the S27 class that have updated within the past 2 update cycles, and yet only 4 of them have been called up this season. For the S26 class the numbers look a lot better, but some of these players are already 600 TPE, so I’d expect them to be in the ISFL.
Now, at this point I think I’m just rambling about interesting tidbits, without any direction, so I’ll try and focus my thoughts on a topic.
Contracts
Contracts. We love them, they get us paid!
Here’s a simple graphic from the rulebook depicting the TPE tiers. With an $85 Million cap space, you can technically roster 17 1000+ TPE guys, which sounds like a lot, but that assumes all of these players are on minimum.
There are only 6 players earning over 5 million per year. 2 of which are retiring this year. 3 out of the remaining 4 are getting paid 6 million, except Darrel Williams, who is the highest paid player at 8.5 million per year. That’s about 10% of a team’s total cap space. If we put this in NFL terms, that means the highest paid player on an NFL team would be about 20 million in real life money. Anyone who keeps up with football knows that usually the highest paid players salary is around 10-15%, depending on the team and the QB. Now, that position, the quarterback position, is quite an interesting position. The highest paid QB in the league is getting paid below their minimum, at $4 Million per year, up until S31. The best QB in the league, in theory, getting paid 5% of a team’s cap space? Unheard of. The ISFL minimum budget rules need a serious reworking, based on position and team cap space. I’d be happy to work with head office to provide a tool that calculates this.
I guess that brings me into my next talking point. Minimum contracts. Why are so many people taking minimum. I, myself, am taking minimum for my entire contract, because I don’t need the money to provide for my player. That saves Baltimore some cap space where they can go and attract a free agent. I’m sure many of my fellow players wholeheartedly share that sentiment. But is this necessarily a good thing? Not at all. Good players should be getting paid more.
But how do we do that, how do we break people out of their minimum wage shell and ask them to ask for more? Well, let’s look at the main factors.
They don’t need money. A lot of people just do not need contract money. There are a lot of rich users who can ride their current nest egg for over 7 seasons, and if you add any contract money that number grows. So then, why would someone like infinite ask for 4 million a season? The answer is he just wouldn’t. There’s the elite top 3% that would probably not ask for anything above minimum, but there’s still a boatload of users who are not rich at all but still ask for their minimum wage.
With each team rostering an average of 24 players, that leaves an average of just 3.5 million, per player. That’s honestly kinda sad. In my opinion, that number deserves to go up to 4-5 million. The fact that the top league players are only taking up 6-7% of their cap space because teams don’t have enough money to support their gigantic roster of actives is unfortunate. Top QBs are barely earning anything.
There are 82 players above 1000 TPE. 82! That’s almost 6 players per team over 1000 TPE. If they all took minimum wage, they would only take up around 34% of the league’s cap space, despite making up over 40% of the league’s TPE total. Now, that data in itself is skewered, because it shouldn’t be a strict 1:1 ratio. These statistics are tough to compare with the NFL because you have no way of accurately measuring a players talent and comparing it to their contract value.
What needs to change?
For starters, there are multiple options head office can choose to pursue. I believe the current league cap structure is poor and unsustainable for the health of the overall league. This isn’t an in-depth article at ALL, with little statistical analysis performed, but, I just wanted to start a discussion, in all honesty.
Increase the cap. - People are worried about inflation, which is a just cause, but it costs a lot to max earn, $21.5 million, according to Troen’s recent article. That’s still a ton of money to cover, even with contracts, and unless you are over $50 million in net worth, you probably want a sizeable contract, but I don’t think inflation is necessarily a problem for now.
Restructure minimum contracts. - This option would probably not be effective unless option 1 was integrated successfully. I do think a plain old, flat, value of money, attached to each TPE tier, is very insufficient, and doesn’t regard for a lot of factors like, the cap space, the position, the amount of TPE earnt, and the amount of TPE they’ll earn in the future, and draft position. The fact that players go up a tier every single season but you can still sign a 3 year contract, meaning you can have a 1000 TPE player for 3 million on your ISFL team, thanks to the current league rules. QBs cost the same as kickers. First rounders can be paid the same as the last overall pick.
Change the league perception towards minimum contracts - This one is definitely more intangible and would follow easily in the footsteps of options 1&2, but if we can convince rookies to start asking for more, and before you come at my head, I had around $60 million when I signed my minimum wage contract, so I wasn’t exactly cash-strapped. Hey first round rookies, it’s okay to ask your teams for $4 million a year.
I’m really onboard with option 2, and I’m eager to see some change in that department, even if it requires a restructure of the cap to, to let’s say 90 or even 100 million. With all the active players peaking or soon to be peaking, I don’t think there’s a more appropriate time to change the cap space with the new sim. Restructuring minimum contracts would probably mean that there would be a necessary cap space adjustment, and I think, in all honesty, the cap space should be going up every year. I don’t understand why it remains stagnant, it should be fluid, just like the NFL. Even if that’s a 500k-1 million dollar increase, Head office should deem what they seem fit to increase the cap dependent on the past few classes and how well the retention rate turned out.
Half-assed conclusion
The current state of the ISFL budget needs a toss-up. With more actives in the league than ever, something needs to happen, and it needs to happen quick. By S30 the league will be saturated beyond belief with TPE. There either needs to be an expansion or some major change in the way contracts and cap space work.
A half-assed conclusion for a rushed, half-assed article. Initially I had a big dream to conduct some big statistical analysis on the topic, but after reviewing it, I realized I’m much too lazy, and all I really want to do is start a discussion on the topic and hear your thoughts. Do you think the cap space is fine as it is? Do you think we need to restructure it, or maybe minimum contracts need to change?
Remember to comment, like, and smash subcribe.
P.S. Is this eligible for the double media?
Now, I’m not writing this article for monetary incentive, as I’m set money wise to max earn for almost 3 more full seasons. After talking to some people in the rookie discord, and expansion and the cap space and budgets, and seeing Troen’s article recently, I got curious about the figures and numbers and just exactly how strapped each team is for cash, and whether the ISFL needs a change-up in the economy. Just kidding, I'm definitely writing this for money, because my GMs don't pay me enough. This is unironically a plea for help.
Introduction, sort of.
Let’s start off with the introductory statistics, and by the way, I’m terrible at formatting these articles, so it’s probably going to be all out of place and such, but I’ll try and condense everything in a digestible manner.
First off, we have the official cap space number.
85 million.
This number has stayed the same for a while now, despite the amount of active players trending upwards. No team has more than 5 million in cap space left. 3 teams have $0 in cap space left.
Pictures speak a thousand words though. Credit this to the budget sheet.
Moving on, as of the most recent update, there is a total of 256862 TPE in the league (according to the tracker). That’s a lot of activity checks. Too bad there’s no historical data surrounding TPE, like even if it was a screenshot of the team stats page of the tracker during every season, so we could compare how fast the league has grown in recent seasons.
Each team has 23-25 players, except for Baltimore and Chicago, which have 21 and 29 players, respectively, because they are both special. The average TPE player in the entire ISFL is 763 TPE. That’s crazy when you think about it. You’d have to max earn for around 3 seasons to even get to that point. So, how does that leave any space for us rookies, you might be saying, well, it’s very scarce. There are 34 members of the S27 class that have updated within the past 2 update cycles, and yet only 4 of them have been called up this season. For the S26 class the numbers look a lot better, but some of these players are already 600 TPE, so I’d expect them to be in the ISFL.
Now, at this point I think I’m just rambling about interesting tidbits, without any direction, so I’ll try and focus my thoughts on a topic.
Contracts
Contracts. We love them, they get us paid!
Here’s a simple graphic from the rulebook depicting the TPE tiers. With an $85 Million cap space, you can technically roster 17 1000+ TPE guys, which sounds like a lot, but that assumes all of these players are on minimum.
There are only 6 players earning over 5 million per year. 2 of which are retiring this year. 3 out of the remaining 4 are getting paid 6 million, except Darrel Williams, who is the highest paid player at 8.5 million per year. That’s about 10% of a team’s total cap space. If we put this in NFL terms, that means the highest paid player on an NFL team would be about 20 million in real life money. Anyone who keeps up with football knows that usually the highest paid players salary is around 10-15%, depending on the team and the QB. Now, that position, the quarterback position, is quite an interesting position. The highest paid QB in the league is getting paid below their minimum, at $4 Million per year, up until S31. The best QB in the league, in theory, getting paid 5% of a team’s cap space? Unheard of. The ISFL minimum budget rules need a serious reworking, based on position and team cap space. I’d be happy to work with head office to provide a tool that calculates this.
I guess that brings me into my next talking point. Minimum contracts. Why are so many people taking minimum. I, myself, am taking minimum for my entire contract, because I don’t need the money to provide for my player. That saves Baltimore some cap space where they can go and attract a free agent. I’m sure many of my fellow players wholeheartedly share that sentiment. But is this necessarily a good thing? Not at all. Good players should be getting paid more.
But how do we do that, how do we break people out of their minimum wage shell and ask them to ask for more? Well, let’s look at the main factors.
They don’t need money. A lot of people just do not need contract money. There are a lot of rich users who can ride their current nest egg for over 7 seasons, and if you add any contract money that number grows. So then, why would someone like infinite ask for 4 million a season? The answer is he just wouldn’t. There’s the elite top 3% that would probably not ask for anything above minimum, but there’s still a boatload of users who are not rich at all but still ask for their minimum wage.
With each team rostering an average of 24 players, that leaves an average of just 3.5 million, per player. That’s honestly kinda sad. In my opinion, that number deserves to go up to 4-5 million. The fact that the top league players are only taking up 6-7% of their cap space because teams don’t have enough money to support their gigantic roster of actives is unfortunate. Top QBs are barely earning anything.
There are 82 players above 1000 TPE. 82! That’s almost 6 players per team over 1000 TPE. If they all took minimum wage, they would only take up around 34% of the league’s cap space, despite making up over 40% of the league’s TPE total. Now, that data in itself is skewered, because it shouldn’t be a strict 1:1 ratio. These statistics are tough to compare with the NFL because you have no way of accurately measuring a players talent and comparing it to their contract value.
What needs to change?
For starters, there are multiple options head office can choose to pursue. I believe the current league cap structure is poor and unsustainable for the health of the overall league. This isn’t an in-depth article at ALL, with little statistical analysis performed, but, I just wanted to start a discussion, in all honesty.
Increase the cap. - People are worried about inflation, which is a just cause, but it costs a lot to max earn, $21.5 million, according to Troen’s recent article. That’s still a ton of money to cover, even with contracts, and unless you are over $50 million in net worth, you probably want a sizeable contract, but I don’t think inflation is necessarily a problem for now.
Restructure minimum contracts. - This option would probably not be effective unless option 1 was integrated successfully. I do think a plain old, flat, value of money, attached to each TPE tier, is very insufficient, and doesn’t regard for a lot of factors like, the cap space, the position, the amount of TPE earnt, and the amount of TPE they’ll earn in the future, and draft position. The fact that players go up a tier every single season but you can still sign a 3 year contract, meaning you can have a 1000 TPE player for 3 million on your ISFL team, thanks to the current league rules. QBs cost the same as kickers. First rounders can be paid the same as the last overall pick.
Change the league perception towards minimum contracts - This one is definitely more intangible and would follow easily in the footsteps of options 1&2, but if we can convince rookies to start asking for more, and before you come at my head, I had around $60 million when I signed my minimum wage contract, so I wasn’t exactly cash-strapped. Hey first round rookies, it’s okay to ask your teams for $4 million a year.
I’m really onboard with option 2, and I’m eager to see some change in that department, even if it requires a restructure of the cap to, to let’s say 90 or even 100 million. With all the active players peaking or soon to be peaking, I don’t think there’s a more appropriate time to change the cap space with the new sim. Restructuring minimum contracts would probably mean that there would be a necessary cap space adjustment, and I think, in all honesty, the cap space should be going up every year. I don’t understand why it remains stagnant, it should be fluid, just like the NFL. Even if that’s a 500k-1 million dollar increase, Head office should deem what they seem fit to increase the cap dependent on the past few classes and how well the retention rate turned out.
Half-assed conclusion
The current state of the ISFL budget needs a toss-up. With more actives in the league than ever, something needs to happen, and it needs to happen quick. By S30 the league will be saturated beyond belief with TPE. There either needs to be an expansion or some major change in the way contracts and cap space work.
A half-assed conclusion for a rushed, half-assed article. Initially I had a big dream to conduct some big statistical analysis on the topic, but after reviewing it, I realized I’m much too lazy, and all I really want to do is start a discussion on the topic and hear your thoughts. Do you think the cap space is fine as it is? Do you think we need to restructure it, or maybe minimum contracts need to change?
Remember to comment, like, and smash subcribe.
P.S. Is this eligible for the double media?