03-31-2023, 04:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-01-2023, 08:32 PM by Caleb_H. Edited 2 times in total.)
Why do leagues have a salary cap? The primary reason is to prevent any one team from dominating.
Major leagues use a salary cap as a proxy for how good a team is. That works because players are human and therefore want as much money as possible. And the better a player is, the higher teams are willing to pay them.
The difference in the ISFL is that the majority of users don't care what they're paid as 1) there is no use for excess money once you've hit a level that most users are able to hit and 2) comparable money can be earned via a number of other sources.
So how do we currently get around that lack of desire for contract money? By forcing teams to pay players more the better they are! The vast majority of contract money currently given out is forced by a tier system that ties TPE to a minimum salary.
So we've got a system where a player's TPE determines what they get paid in order to make a team's total salary a rough proxy for how good they are, allowing the salary cap to act as a way to prevent a dominant team from emerging, but allowing next to no fun or flexibility in contracts.
But we have something that the major leagues don't have. We have a metric that objectively tells us how good a player is: TPE. So why aren't we making teams adhere to a TPE cap rather than a budget cap?
It would be a far more reliable way to do what the cap is intended for, and we wouldn't need to fudge the inputs by deciding what a player should get paid, with the team having practically no say in how they want to pay their players, and players having practically no say in what they want to paid.
If we had a TPE cap, teams would still have a fixed pot of money each season to use for contracts, but we wouldn't need to set rules around how to pay people. This allows for a lot more creativity and player agency!
- Are you a GM who wants to play for $0 to have more money to pay other players?
- Do you want to pay your max earners a token sum but pay your rookies enough to make sure they can all buy T6?
- Do you want to earn $69,420 per season?
- Are you a free agent who wants to demand the ISFL's first ever $50M contract?
All of this could be possible if we relied on a TPE cap to keep things balanced and unlocked the rulebook on contracts.
The main three reasons I think this would be a good thing for the league:
A few specific caveats that I think would need to be part of a new system:
I'm keen to hear people's reasons for why this wouldn't work and there are likely some complications to work out before this could go anywhere, so if anyone else has any thoughts, comments or ideas, please feel free to post below.
Major leagues use a salary cap as a proxy for how good a team is. That works because players are human and therefore want as much money as possible. And the better a player is, the higher teams are willing to pay them.
The difference in the ISFL is that the majority of users don't care what they're paid as 1) there is no use for excess money once you've hit a level that most users are able to hit and 2) comparable money can be earned via a number of other sources.
So how do we currently get around that lack of desire for contract money? By forcing teams to pay players more the better they are! The vast majority of contract money currently given out is forced by a tier system that ties TPE to a minimum salary.
So we've got a system where a player's TPE determines what they get paid in order to make a team's total salary a rough proxy for how good they are, allowing the salary cap to act as a way to prevent a dominant team from emerging, but allowing next to no fun or flexibility in contracts.
But we have something that the major leagues don't have. We have a metric that objectively tells us how good a player is: TPE. So why aren't we making teams adhere to a TPE cap rather than a budget cap?
It would be a far more reliable way to do what the cap is intended for, and we wouldn't need to fudge the inputs by deciding what a player should get paid, with the team having practically no say in how they want to pay their players, and players having practically no say in what they want to paid.
If we had a TPE cap, teams would still have a fixed pot of money each season to use for contracts, but we wouldn't need to set rules around how to pay people. This allows for a lot more creativity and player agency!
- Are you a GM who wants to play for $0 to have more money to pay other players?
- Do you want to pay your max earners a token sum but pay your rookies enough to make sure they can all buy T6?
- Do you want to earn $69,420 per season?
- Are you a free agent who wants to demand the ISFL's first ever $50M contract?
All of this could be possible if we relied on a TPE cap to keep things balanced and unlocked the rulebook on contracts.
The main three reasons I think this would be a good thing for the league:
- Make contracts more fun and flexible, unlocking a whole host of possibilities
- Reduce the workload for GMs to tactically manage contracts
- Make it easier to prevent imbalanced teams forming
A few specific caveats that I think would need to be part of a new system:
- A player's TPE cap hit for an upcoming season is determined by their tracker TPE after the final update of last season. That way, a GM knows after the final update what their existing roster will 'cost'. A player's individual cap hit is fixed throughout the season and only recalculates after the final update of the season.
- The maximum TPE cap hit a player can cost is 1000 TPE. This is to prevent users being disincentivised to apply TPE all the way to the max and for maxed 1500 TPE players hurting a team.
- Cap allowances could be considered for certain positions, like OL or K (say a 50% discount)
I'm keen to hear people's reasons for why this wouldn't work and there are likely some complications to work out before this could go anywhere, so if anyone else has any thoughts, comments or ideas, please feel free to post below.