10-29-2023, 11:34 AM
(This post was last modified: 11-01-2023, 08:44 AM by lemonoppy. Edited 2 times in total.)
This article is brought to you with inspiration from our former commissioner @Swanty who sometime back during my Inaugural Rookie Season in the DSFL pitched a replacement for the ISFL Cap with an implementation that instead measures player’s hit against the Cap using TPE levels instead of contracts. The original pitch found at the following link was a well thought out concept that, while in need of some refinement, generated a very stimulating conversation on the topic.
Replacing the Salary Cap with a TPE Cap
The thesis for the pitch was as follows:
“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.”
- 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?
While there exists a measure in place to set the floor on Contract Salary relative to a player’s TPE level, the current system, for the most part, encourages players to sign the absolute minimum at $4m on lifetime contracts to help their team compete. Acting as a soft barrier against creating super teams the current system is by no means flawed and certainly has allowed for a mostly stable era of league parity. In fact I don’t exactly think the current system is in need of any change, but nevertheless it’s a fun topic to discuss and theorize about.
While the current implementation is working well it doesn’t quite simulate the environment we see in leagues such as the NFL. Now there is certainly a positive that a simple team Salary Cap makes the league much easier to navigate for GMs, I won’t refute that at all. However as someone who has always carried a deep interest in how NFL teams are able to manage their cap space I thought looking at an alternative would be a fun thought experiment.
MATH
Alright onto the actual mathematics of a new Cap Space system. This is by no means perfect or what I’d actually like to see implemented because it’d be an absolute nightmare for GMs trying to estimate cap season to season, but hopefully it can generate some discussion. Current system is as follows:
Simple, straight forward, and proven to work, nothing wrong at all with the application. Clearly we have a linear TPE to Salary Cap hit model here, as well as an eventual floor a $4m minimum for keeping a max earning player on the team long term. So what if we made the linear trend of TPE to Salary granular in nature. With 1000 TPE equating to a $5m contract that’s $5000 per 1 TPE, i.e. in a finite scale a player with 765 TPE would equate to a $3.825m contract. So what if players could sign a contract for any duration they desired rather than being limited to 3 years while their TPE total sums to less than 800 TPE? But as an additional clause ALL contracts now have a Salary Adjustment clause.
So a player entering their first contract from the DSFL at 250 TPE could sign a 13 year contract starting at $1.25m that gradually adjusts year to year as they gain TPE. So if by their second season they sit at a clean 400 TPE the contract would automatically adjust up to $2m. Now of course similar to how we handle regression season to season there’d need to be a set date for when the adjustment occurs. Well look at that we already have a system in place for when Salary Adjustments occur don’t we! Additionally because the scale is finite there’s really no benefit in a player holding off on TPE tasks to sit right below the next contract threshold as at most you’d be saving your team a few hundred thousand against the Cap.
One last final adjustment we’ll make to the formula is to set a ceiling where the Salary Adjustment stops when a player hits 1000 TPE effectively setting the highest Cap hit at a cool $5m. Alright then I’ve snap shotted the S44 budget sheet just after each team has gone through regression and the last update of the offseason to use as reference for this new approach to cap space.
I’ve also made a second adjustment taking account for how many Human Offensive Lineman each team is rostering and a 2nd cap that includes the cost of paying for Tier 4 OL Bots to fill out the depth chart. I.e. in the "Including OL Bots Tab if a team has 4 Human Oline then I've added $7m to the value that was in the "Adjusted Cap" tab to account for the purchase of a Bot.
WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN MASON?
So what can we deduce from this new system? Well for starters we see that team's that were either very close to the $80m cap or over it tend to be in the range of $105m with the new Adjusted TPE Salary Cap. Typically we see that teams looking to push for the ultimus during their window are the one's that are riding this Salary cap edge such as New York, Honolulu, Cape Town.
The other teams close to that $105m mark such as Sarasota and Colorado is more a result of having to pay for multiple Oline bots due to only rostering 1 Human Oline, and less of a correlation to their average TPE per player. We can also see the benefit of Human Oline providing Cap relief with teams like Baltimore, Arizona, Austin, and Berlin.
Okay but we already knew teams with higher TPE players would correlate with requiring more Salary Cap space, so what does a truly linear system really do for us? Well referencing back to Swanty's proposal of a TPE Cap, the current system already functions as a roundabout way to enforce a TPE Cap for teams. Team's currently just sign players for $4m lifetime deals because it's the optimal way to build a competitive team within the current Cap restrictions. The Adjusted Cap is consistently around $90m for teams that have the highest TPE per Player essentially creating a very strict system when it comes to a competitive balance. And as I mentioned previously there's no glaring issue with the current Cap rules aside from making player contracts very generic aside from player clauses.
In conclusion my goal here was to expand on Swanty's idea of implementing a TPE Cap system wherein we adjust each team's actual cap usage linearly with that team's TPE per Player, and provide more leniency to player's being able to negotiate contract payment! Now there are some common concerns that this just leads to team players signing $0 contracts so they can funnel money to less active players. And I'm not saying we should allot an entire $80m per season for teams to payout to a single player. Rather my goal is to hopefully this can provide grounds and further numbers for discussion on such a system. Anyways thanks for reading!
Replacing the Salary Cap with a TPE Cap
The thesis for the pitch was as follows:
“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.”
- 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?
While there exists a measure in place to set the floor on Contract Salary relative to a player’s TPE level, the current system, for the most part, encourages players to sign the absolute minimum at $4m on lifetime contracts to help their team compete. Acting as a soft barrier against creating super teams the current system is by no means flawed and certainly has allowed for a mostly stable era of league parity. In fact I don’t exactly think the current system is in need of any change, but nevertheless it’s a fun topic to discuss and theorize about.
While the current implementation is working well it doesn’t quite simulate the environment we see in leagues such as the NFL. Now there is certainly a positive that a simple team Salary Cap makes the league much easier to navigate for GMs, I won’t refute that at all. However as someone who has always carried a deep interest in how NFL teams are able to manage their cap space I thought looking at an alternative would be a fun thought experiment.
MATH
Alright onto the actual mathematics of a new Cap Space system. This is by no means perfect or what I’d actually like to see implemented because it’d be an absolute nightmare for GMs trying to estimate cap season to season, but hopefully it can generate some discussion. Current system is as follows:
Simple, straight forward, and proven to work, nothing wrong at all with the application. Clearly we have a linear TPE to Salary Cap hit model here, as well as an eventual floor a $4m minimum for keeping a max earning player on the team long term. So what if we made the linear trend of TPE to Salary granular in nature. With 1000 TPE equating to a $5m contract that’s $5000 per 1 TPE, i.e. in a finite scale a player with 765 TPE would equate to a $3.825m contract. So what if players could sign a contract for any duration they desired rather than being limited to 3 years while their TPE total sums to less than 800 TPE? But as an additional clause ALL contracts now have a Salary Adjustment clause.
So a player entering their first contract from the DSFL at 250 TPE could sign a 13 year contract starting at $1.25m that gradually adjusts year to year as they gain TPE. So if by their second season they sit at a clean 400 TPE the contract would automatically adjust up to $2m. Now of course similar to how we handle regression season to season there’d need to be a set date for when the adjustment occurs. Well look at that we already have a system in place for when Salary Adjustments occur don’t we! Additionally because the scale is finite there’s really no benefit in a player holding off on TPE tasks to sit right below the next contract threshold as at most you’d be saving your team a few hundred thousand against the Cap.
One last final adjustment we’ll make to the formula is to set a ceiling where the Salary Adjustment stops when a player hits 1000 TPE effectively setting the highest Cap hit at a cool $5m. Alright then I’ve snap shotted the S44 budget sheet just after each team has gone through regression and the last update of the offseason to use as reference for this new approach to cap space.
I’ve also made a second adjustment taking account for how many Human Offensive Lineman each team is rostering and a 2nd cap that includes the cost of paying for Tier 4 OL Bots to fill out the depth chart. I.e. in the "Including OL Bots Tab if a team has 4 Human Oline then I've added $7m to the value that was in the "Adjusted Cap" tab to account for the purchase of a Bot.
WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN MASON?
So what can we deduce from this new system? Well for starters we see that team's that were either very close to the $80m cap or over it tend to be in the range of $105m with the new Adjusted TPE Salary Cap. Typically we see that teams looking to push for the ultimus during their window are the one's that are riding this Salary cap edge such as New York, Honolulu, Cape Town.
The other teams close to that $105m mark such as Sarasota and Colorado is more a result of having to pay for multiple Oline bots due to only rostering 1 Human Oline, and less of a correlation to their average TPE per player. We can also see the benefit of Human Oline providing Cap relief with teams like Baltimore, Arizona, Austin, and Berlin.
Okay but we already knew teams with higher TPE players would correlate with requiring more Salary Cap space, so what does a truly linear system really do for us? Well referencing back to Swanty's proposal of a TPE Cap, the current system already functions as a roundabout way to enforce a TPE Cap for teams. Team's currently just sign players for $4m lifetime deals because it's the optimal way to build a competitive team within the current Cap restrictions. The Adjusted Cap is consistently around $90m for teams that have the highest TPE per Player essentially creating a very strict system when it comes to a competitive balance. And as I mentioned previously there's no glaring issue with the current Cap rules aside from making player contracts very generic aside from player clauses.
In conclusion my goal here was to expand on Swanty's idea of implementing a TPE Cap system wherein we adjust each team's actual cap usage linearly with that team's TPE per Player, and provide more leniency to player's being able to negotiate contract payment! Now there are some common concerns that this just leads to team players signing $0 contracts so they can funnel money to less active players. And I'm not saying we should allot an entire $80m per season for teams to payout to a single player. Rather my goal is to hopefully this can provide grounds and further numbers for discussion on such a system. Anyways thanks for reading!