10-30-2023, 02:29 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-01-2023, 08:36 AM by lemonoppy. Edited 1 time in total.)
No. I | No. II
ON CONTRACTS.
Baron1898, Lecturer in Economics
Quote:A player’s minimum contract amount is determined by their TPE total upon signing, as follows:
Tier 6 (1000+ TPE) - $5,000,000
Tier 5 (800+ TPE) - $4,000,000
Tier 4 (600+ TPE) - $3,000,000
Tier 3 (400+TPE) - $2,000,000
Tier 2 (200+ TPE) - $1,000,000
Tier 1 (<200 TPE) - $500,000
Why do people always seem to take the minimum? The broad issue of the minimum contract has inspired minds throughout the ages to take a crack at a delicate economic conundrum. Unfortunately, this is far from a simple solution. To quote @Crunk in his analysis of earnings across different sim leagues:
Quote:…taking the minimum is pretty much the norm in sim leagues. You pretty much only chase the money if you're trying a career as an experiment or to make a point about the realism of sim league economies. Or you're too lazy to write media and don't care if your team wins…
From the perspective of an uninformed observer, or of a real-life sports league, this downwards pressure on contracts makes little sense. It costs $21.5 million annually to max earn in the ISFL, yet the average annual salary of a minimum-taking max earner over their career amounts to only $3.3 million – 15.3% of the required sum. NFL players never gleefully settle for the minimum because NFL players rely on their income as their one and only resource. The ISFL player, by contrast, earns most of their money elsewhere, from league jobs to media, graphics, community engagement, and everything in between.
This is a structural foundation of sim leagues that will never and can never change. It is a game where the majority of users will never need to pay a dime in money to play, and so it falls upon a sprawling bureaucracy of unpaid volunteers to commit serious time and even real money to administer teams, run the bank, punish S44 users, and keep the league afloat. Similarly, attrition forces the league to constantly recruit in order to keep numbers steady, and so it must incentivize users to spend their free time making content and creating a thriving community. All of these contributors must be paid, lest the league die, and so in the absence of real money they are compensated in sim money.
Most crucially, all of these systems can scale in pay to reward users who go the extra mile, who take multiple jobs or draw gobs of graphics. This is intentional. The league benefits massively whenever users go above and beyond to keep it running, and users benefit massively from the truckloads of money they can receive and reinvest into equipment or save for a later time. This has created wealth inequality to a degree even real sports leagues cannot emulate, because none of the ISFL's plutocracy needed to take $500 million contracts to get over a billion dollars in stored wealth. These users are the exception, but a significant number of users can maintain close to max earning and keep their accounts in the black with only a few media posts and maybe a backup auditing job.
So why would anyone with a bit of free time take more than a minimum contract? If you can pay for everything you'd ever need with other streams of revenue, pushing for a bigger paycheck only takes away salary cap from your team that they could use elsewhere. Team loyalty is the strongest force in the league (for better and for worse) and it's awfully hard to entertain the idea of pushing your way into free agency instead of taking the standard deal. And pretty much everyone finds their material desire to win a ring stronger than some abstract desire for more realistic contracts. Ergo, the minimums are the norm, free agency is rare, and the stagnancy of movement creates an unhealthy malaise where many users return to the same team player after player.
It sure is a mystery, in a league where contracts are cookie-cutter and people can always afford to prioritize winning over money, why so many rings have been won by the same couple of dynasties.
The challenge, then, is finding a place for contracts to matter. The pay scale above has been in place since the beginning of the league, and though there are always exceptions, most users – especially the rich and the ultra-rich – take minimums whenever they can. Most of them take even less than the minimum, because contracts do not automatically scale to a player's TPE unless they possess a Salary Adjustment (SA) clause. It is very common for max earners to sign a three-year rookie contract at the $1 million rate, cross the 800 TPE threshold needed for longer deals, and then re-sign with the same team for $4 million over the rest of their career. Nothing about that experience matches the fantasy of playing in a sports league.
So if the basic premise that something needs to change in this status quo is accepted, as it has by so many, then plenty of possible options for reform open up. The remainder of this essay will be a historical survey of many such proposals and the potential benefits and downsides around each avenue. Some of these suggestions have gone as far as rules summits; scant few have gone any further. On a methodological note, every idea detailed below was found on the forum, so if someone published a treatise of league economics on a Discord server I am not motivated enough to go looking for it.
Adjusting the Minimums
This is the most straightforward line of thought. From this perspective, the core problem with the contract system as it stands is that it is too easy to squeeze many high-TPE superstars onto a roster and keep them there for extended periods of time. This hypothesis finds some ground in a 2021 analysis by Ephenssta showing a strong relationship between total team TPE and the amount of added value gained through underpaid talent. This makes intuitive sense; the league's top talent will generally sign long contracts at or below minimum value to minimize their negative impact on a team's cap.
Real teams in leagues with a hard salary cap, like the NFL, cannot afford to buy all the best talent available if they have any hope of fielding a well-rounded team before running out of cash. This is the situation many advocates hope to emulate. Changing the minimum tiers would ideally make the best players in the league appropriately expensive and even force them to perhaps walk away as a free agent if their team cannot afford to keep them on the roster.
The simplest form of change would be simply changing the static TPE brackets and their associated payouts to new values. Interestingly, only two formalized proposals ever went down this route. A suggestion by @124715 (2017) went with doubling the existing values for every tier (for example, making Tier 6 minimums worth $10,000,000) while @speculadora (2020) went the route of adding a half million to every tier above Tier 1, making Tier 6 worth $5,500,000. Speculadora's solution is more mathematically sound because it fixes the disparity between salary increase and TPE increase between Tiers 1 and 2 that exists nowhere else on the system. Kckolbe (2018) also gestured at creating more tiers for minimums in smaller increments, although he avoided specific numbers.
However, calling these the extent of the proposals is disingenuous. In truth, a component suggested by speculadora's work and explicitly included in Numbers' and kolbe's falls under the umbrella of what I will label the "dynamic contract". Essentially, this popular idea aims to eliminate long-running deals that skirt under high-TPE minimums. This could come through raising contracts to the new floor after reaching the next minimum tier (tlk 2017, @JBLAZE_THE_BOSS 2017, kolbe 2018, speculadora 2020), moving only halfway towards the new minimum upon switching tiers (Numbers 2017), or automatically paying players as if they were some amount of TPE or percent of money higher in each successive contract year (bovo 2018, @Pat 2020).
Something of a merger of these ideas was proposed by @wizard_literal (2023, an article published YESTERDAY) in which the current minimums were replaced by a sliding scale based on TPE. Wiz's idea would pay players $5,000 for every point of TPE at the start of the year, up to a maximum of a $5,000,000 salary for 1000 TPE players and above. This scale would also automatically adjust every year to the player's new TPE total.
Discussions along this path continually found support among a wide slice of the league community. Implementing them, however, proved a challenge. The tlk-style proposal of automatic contract adjustments after each season based on the new minimum tier was considered and rejected in a late 2017 rules summit, receiving five of thirteen votes and four short of the necessary threshold. Concerns ranged from the added work of keeping track of these changes to disliking the notion of altering an existing contract. But the much more realistic explanation for its dismissal boils down to not wanting the existing system to change. Reform would be less GM-friendly by allowing less naked salary manipulation, and the GMs just so happen to hold power over passing any rules changes.
A second attempt at reform went forth at the Season 8 summit, and again it was shot down. This proposal was based on the bovo model of automatic increases in pay by 100 TPE each year, which was itself stolen from the PBE. Again, the likely culprit of GM disagreement was the automatic scaling, which even in this watered-down form would hinder long contract exploitation. It is unsurprising that the dynamic contract reform which did emerge, the Salary Adjustment clause, is not universal like any of the above proposals. Though it functions like the tlk method when applied, the ability to pick and choose years means that the SA is in all likelihood used more for regressing players to stick to the minimum and save their team some cash – the exact opposite intent of the above systems of dynamic contracts.
Quote:Digression: The Salary Adjustment Clause
While forum restrictions prevent easily searching through all historical contracts for the SA clause without manually documenting every single transaction, I wanted to see if the above hypothesis bore out in the contracts of today's players. This is especially relevant because of the changes to the SA clause in the S41 rules summit, adding variants of Upward Adjustment and Downward Adjustment that would only adjust to minimums in the specified direction. Does empirical data support the idea that SA clauses are more a tool for GMs than for addressing minimum contract abuse?
In short, yes.
Of the 157 players on ISFL rosters with an SA clause, a staggering 150 of them used the language exclusively to drive down their cap hit to the minimum. This was accomplished either through the SA- tag, which unsurprisingly proved over sixteen times more popular than its SA+ counterpart, or by attaching the regular SA only on years where it wouldn't move up, usually deep into regression. Only seven players had any contract seasons where the SA clause would increase their salary, and only five of them didn't also have seasons pressuring their earnings back down. These exceptions are worth a quick mention:
Just for fun, the table below shows the usage of SAs by team. There are interesting stories on both ends. New York has nearly the entire active roster on clauses that depress their contract value, while New Orleans is the only team where more players than not are using SAs to gain money. Good job, New Orleans.
- The two players with both upward and downward incentives are Jamdrian LeBayers (@kenvald) and Tank McGibbons (@MikeWhiskey). Both employed odd combinations of different SA flavors to achieve this. LeBayers went for one year of a regular SA in the middle of an eight-year deal of only SA- clauses, effectively meaning they will get a slight pay increase right as regression begins until they move back down. McGibbons' deal, split between SA+ and SA- after his ninth season, effectively mimics the type of dynamic contract many advocates wanted the entire league to have by default.
- Four players used the SA+ designation to boost their pay – Demarius Cook (@Cook), Kyle Crane (@Ultimatedestroye), Sonny Johnson (@Sonny), and Ryan Lawrence (@ThreeToeSloth) – while Thomas Passarelli (@Tmoney6996) carries the distinction of being the only player in the league to use the regular SA to boost their salary.
If this didn't drive home my earlier point, I am not sure what will. Are Salary Adjustment clauses a net good? Yes, obviously. Pretty much every player here was doing the same thing in the olden days with more steps by using options to re-sign for friendlier deals, and this is less work for everyone. Are they an engine for promoting league parity or driving higher contracts? To claim so would be laughable. There's a reason this is one of the only contract-related reforms to ever be implemented.
Dynamic contracts haven't been the only method floated to make minimums more… dynamic. For example, why does TPE have to be the sole arbiter of the floor? This has been a tantalizing school of thought for a while and another way to make contracts more realistic. But no one in the league to date has detailed a thorough proposal for implementing secondary variables; @
Every adjustment to minimum contracts discussed above has made the same assumption: to fix the problem of people defaulting to the minimum, minimums should be made higher, more complex, more fluid. The less cookie-cutter contracts become, the less a team can stock up identical high-TPE deals like candy. But adjustments can go both ways. What if the real problem is that minimums are too high?
Former commissioner @Swanty wrote up a radical solution in 2021 – predated by a similar idea from Beaver (2018) – that hinged on the complete elimination of minimums. Instead of delicately tiptoeing around the issue of money's worthlessness as a contract incentive, Swanty's system would make money entirely voluntary (still under a salary cap) but prevent super teams by limiting total TPE instead. Max earners and GMs could take nothing to their heart's content and free up big bucks for rookies and free agents. The idea is sound, and the proposal goes into a number of specifics on mechanics to show exactly how exploitation could be prevented. But it is simply too ambitious to succeed. Established systems are rarely revolutionized to the extent this requires, and the complexity it would demand on a management level makes it a simply untenable solution for those with the power to bring it to life.
On the other side of the spectrum, and representing a thoroughly conservative viewpoint in the subject, is @Molarpistols. Molar took the position early in the lifespan of minimum increase suggestions that all they would accomplish was inflation, leading to a situation where top players make so much money that they run out of things to spend it on and stop making articles and graphics. He elaborated on this front in a 2018 analysis, using survey data from 32 respondents to calculate the supply and demand curve for league labor.
According to Molar's research, the average league salary at the time was already operating above the equilibrium price – the price at which all players looking for work could find a job. Any average above that is an economically inefficient mark, because teams can no longer afford to roster everyone they could have at the lower price and some players are left unemployed. This cost from inefficiency is known as a deadweight loss, and Molar argues that proposing to raise minimums further would only exacerbate the problem. The only way to raise equilibrium salary is to shift the labor demand curve rightwards, either through raising the salary cap or expanding the number of teams.
I must preface that Molar holds a bachelor's degree in economics and I have taken all of one introductory macroeconomics course by comparison. With that said, I think that some of the basic economic assumptions made in this analysis simply cannot be translated to a sim league. Users do not act like real-life workers. For example, this is how Molar partially addressed the issue when discussing his methodology.
Quote:I operated under the assumption that if you'd be willing to take $500,000 that you'd also be willing to take $1,000,000 and so on and so forth… I realize this isn't 100% true for everybody because they want to help their team by opening salary cap room. I didn't take this into account because I honestly don't know how I'd fit that into the labor supply model.
My honest opinion is that you cannot fit that into the labor supply model because the model assumes upward ambition on behalf of workers that so many users do not follow. I do not believe someone willing to take $500,000 would necessarily also be willing to take more, because their rationale for taking that low comes down to simply not needing the money and wanting to help their team as much as possible. These factors are downward pressures. Molar sees the specter of inflation as a reason not to raise minimums, yet the league has seen an incredible ballooning in wealth even without any changes whatsoever to the salary structure since he penned his article. Media, graphics, and jobs are not potential victims of a higher minimum salary, they are its killers.
To be frank, while I believe the labor supply curve is ill-fitting for the situation and the one in the article is heavily misleading, basic economic realities do make it obvious that there is some equilibrium out there. There are only ever so many roster spots, after all, and regardless of the system you embrace as a silver bullet solution there will only ever be so much money or TPE people can sacrifice. Ultimately, though, the league has shown in the time since 2018 that fears of a runaway deadweight loss are overblown. If there are not enough spots to go around, all that needs be done is shift the curve by adding teams or raising the cap, and management have been very willing to use both as economic stabilizers in the past when necessary.
Speaking of which…
Adjusting the Salary Cap
The logic here is of a similar level of complexity to the minimums argument. While those advocates took a heavy-handed approach, trying to seal holes in the current system by forcing teams and players to comply, the argument around raising the salary cap centers more on the carrot than on the stick. Even with near-strict adherence to the cult of the minimum, most teams are right up against the cap or within a few million. Therefore, by deliberating giving teams more wiggle room to spend, players will in turn feel less pressured to accept the bare minimum and push for higher salaries themselves. This is essentially the trickle-down economics approach to league contract reform.
Historically, changes in the salary cap have usually come about whenever Head Office wants to adjust to shifting league conditions. Here is the condensed timeline:
- June 2, 2017. $50 million –> $60 million. Adjusted right after the conclusion of the league's inaugural draft.
- July 20, 2017. $60 million –> $65 million. In the middle of Season 2 preseason. Head Office explicitly stated that the cap could be moved up or down when deemed necessary, attempting to make the lives of future researchers more difficult.
- October 23, 2017. $65 million –> $75 million. Part and parcel of the OL robot revolution. The extra room was necessary to accommodate paying the prices of bots.
- April 19, 2019. $75 million –> $85 million. Raised in response to the monumental S15 class. Because expansion was already in the works, this change was explicitly noted to be a temporary increase only.
- June 14, 2019. $85 million –> $75 million. As planned, a reversal to the norm.
- August 7, 2019. $75 million –> $80 million. Raised in response to the S17 and especially S18 draft classes on the horizon.
- April 5, 2020. $75 million –> $85 million. In the S21 offseason. Unlike with the S15 increase, which could be absorbed through expansion, the league needed both expansion and a salary cap raise to deal with the historic S22 crop.
- July 22, 2022. $85 million –> $80 million. The result of some upper management numbers-crunching. It was determined that the cap was simply too high in proportion to the average team cost.
Quote:It's important to understand and remember that the salary cap exists in part to be a competitive balance tool and encourage teams to make smart team-building decisions.
It is unsurprising that many calls for an increased salary cap do so as a package deal with reworked minimum contracts. This was the approach of Numbers (2017), Rusfan (2021), and excelsior (2021). But even for these ideas, and the members of the community commenting on them, raising the salary cap and encouraging a level of player greediness really comes second to fixing minimums abuse and preventing the stockpiling of talent among the top teams. As one user astutely noted way back in 2017:
Quote:Quote:The problem is the low amount of the minimum contract.
This is what this conversation boils down to every time it's brought up again
Adjusting the System
Time for some wackier ideas! It's difficult to fix a complicated economic system by only adjusting the numbers input into the machine. All of these ideas embrace the addition of new structures and mechanisms into the system, all designed in theory to boost the incentives on players to chase a big free agency bag and patch up the most obvious holes in our capitalist facsimile. As the most broad category thus far, I will do my best to stay bounded strictly within the realms of contracts and free agency; topics like tampering and DSFL senddowns will have to be relegated to the margins.
One popular perspective holds that if money is undesirable as an incentive to take big contracts, the league should add a different incentive to sweeten the deal – namely, TPE. The most radical proposal along this line was from tlk (2017), who suggested that money be removed from the equation altogether and that teams should pay out players in TPE under a TPE cap. The logic is obvious. Money is a theoretically infinite resource, but TPE earning is strictly limited in available options. Under this sort of system, every player would have massive incentive to seek the biggest contract possible for themselves and to migrate in free agency to the teams willing to pay them.
If this sounds familiar, then it's probably because this is the same system used by the Super Casual Football Sim League (SCFSL) and many similar casual-style experiences. It's quick, it's intuitive, and it solves practically every one of the foundational issues around minimum culture and free agency. In my opinion, though, it is also an intensely unfun way of handling contracts. Players should be paid as a result of their importance to the team, not have their worth tied directly and immutably to their pay. This system would result in an equilibrium where young players are paid huge amounts, older players are paid almost nothing, and you are penalized in career potential and statistical strength if you choose to take a friendlier deal. I know this is fun for many in a casual league, but I think there's a reason it hasn't made the jump here.
But what if instead of replacing money altogether, additional TPE is brought in just to supplement it? This has been proposed in many forms. @jaskins811 (2017) floated teams being allowed to add TPE onto long-term contracts, with more TPE available to the worst teams. It would be unavailable to the team's top five members by TPE and capped at around 20 per player. On a similar vein, @Modern_Duke (2020) saw potential value in awarding a small sum of TPE (similar in scale to the 5-3-1 fantasy rewards) to the three highest paid players at each position. Max earners would then be heavily pressured to seek more money, to hold out for league-leading contracts or seek their fortunes in free agency.
Neither idea gained much purchase because the thought of paying players with TPE directly is a somewhat uncomfortable line to cross for many users. However, there have been other, more roundabout proposed methods of using TPE to encourage bigger deals. Dropbear (2018) went the route of adding new equipment options, totaling an additional $30 million cost altogether for a total of 120 TPE (per season!) that would push the yearly expenses of max earners to around $50 million. This, obviously, would drastically increase the incentive to earn a large contract. Commenters suggested that perhaps just increasing existing equipment prices (@timeconsumer 2018) or tiering prices on player TPE (37thchamber 2018) could accomplish a similar pressure without messing with the yearly available TPE.
But he wasn't the last to go down that round. @PMoney (2020) swapped the yearly equipment for a single sum payment of 10 TPE to recreates, available for the low, low price of 80-90% of the user's bank account. @Memento Mori (2020) countered with his own solution of paying some exorbitant fee for a flattened regression curve and an extra season or two of play. Pat (2020) included the ideas of regression cuts and a higher tier of equipment as potential bonuses teams could offer to free agents, but also proposed a rare negative incentive of capping the TPE earnings of players who sign deals below their "expected value". @The_Kidd (2020) went for a grab bag of available purchases, like better equipment and bonus TPE, regression and position switch passes, and pay-to-play weekly lotteries for perks like PT passes. PMoney and Pat – and @ItsJustBarry (2018) – also agreed on splitting contract and non-contract money and locking certain things like weekly trainings behind contract money only.
Perhaps more than anything else in this article, this family of suggestions would almost certainly succeed at transforming the landscape of the league. Market behavior would change overnight. Free agents would suddenly be clamoring for the biggest contracts they could find because their performance on the field was now at stake. This wouldn't be a positive thing. The most consistent criticism of every TPE-related proposal is that almost all would create a further imbalance between the haves and the have-nots, those who can afford to spend and spend on exclusive TPE and those who cannot. It would be a system where all but the most dedicated super-users fall behind.
Timeconsumer put it best.
Quote:… I think one of the most potentially damaging parts about contract TPE is the psychological effects of a player's earnings and worth being tied to something that he doesn't necessarily have full control over. As it stands right now in this league my earnings are 100% determined by my actions, my efforts, and my skills. What happens when you take part of that away from someone? If my newly created draftee is not able to secure a big contract right out the gate and is forced to settle for a $4m per season offer while someone else drafted by a team with far more cap space can secure double that, now I am suddenly not on the same level as someone else in terms of TPE earnings… I had no control over who drafted me.
Sure I could hold out to be traded to someone with more cap space but if the process takes too long I risk losing TPE because I'm not under contract and cannot earn. And what if I want to make a position that doesn't demand a high contract? I have to accept that I simply cannot be as good as others because I wanted to play something that doesn't demand top dollar, like tight end or safety. Now I might be an exception to the rule, but I think you could stand to lose players over something like this.
An indirect method of encouraging big contracts is to ease the pressure of their biggest deterrent, the abundance of money and stored wealth in the league. Some of the above ideas dabbled in this, but instead of trading that money for bonus TPE, what if that money simply… vanished? Bring out the tax collector, said @Cheech65 (2020), who suggested implementing a tax on earned wealth that progressively increases after a few seasons and would strip away most hoarded wealth. Crunk (2020) wrote about a similar concept, but instead of taxing earnings he would instead tax creates based on inherited wealth. For the record, his article was satire.
Eating the rich makes all the sense in the real world (seriously, screw capitalism) but not much of any in the sim world, where there are no budgeted expenses their hoarded wealth could pay for. And assuming you don't then jump to the 100% inheritance tax on recreates floated by @dogwoodmaple (2020), the next logical way to drain money is just to increase prices. Equipment should go up in price, said Cheech, and there should be more things like Dotts for users to spend their money on without any return on investment in the sim.
Changes could also be made to limit money flow at its source instead of draining it afterwards. The work of Swanty (2020) attempted to kill two birds with one stone by encouraging high contracts while limiting money made through other channels. His solution was to make salaries the only fixed income a user could receive, and every other source of money would simply be a percentage of whatever the base salary was, perhaps up to a cap on additional earnings. The hope here was to restrict max earning to those who could afford it from high enough contracts. Similarly to the split money situation above, however, it was viewed as discouraging new player retention and rewarding only the most slavishly devoted users while having the added negative of disincentivizing community content creation.
The third variable open to adjustment is contract structure and all the rules around it. There are so many different aspects that would alter the behavior of teams and of players. For example, Ephenssta (2020) suggested a small change to the free agency rules by allowing teams to contact players in their final contract year after the trade deadline instead of waiting for the free agency list, keeping the risk of tampering low but giving players and teams a little more room to breathe.
On the team side, sapp (2017) went for limiting signing bonuses to prevent super lopsided contracts and for imposing a minimum salary cap, somewhere around 90%. The latter in particular would boost contracts for players on rebuilding and tanking teams whose minimum expenses fell well under the cap limit. In a different post, also from 2017, sapp proposed exclusive, non-exclusive, and transitional variants of the franchise tag, giving teams greater control over rosters but increasing the cost of team-friendly deals. The biggest criticism of this idea was that stifling player movement and freedom was both unfun and highly counterproductive in a league whose free agency market is already so tepid.
Quote:Digression: The Restricted Free Agency (RFA) Tag
Sapp's idea of a franchise tag was also somewhat irrelevant at the time. Starting in Season 2, Head Office introduced the RFA tag to the league. Once per offseason, a team could tag any player who had been on the roster at least three seasons with the RFA tag. They would then have the right to match any offer that player agreed to in free agency and automatically win the player back at that price.
It took a few months for anything to come of this given the three-year prerequisite. In the Season 4 offseason, though, it received its first spotlight. Four teams – the Outlaws, Wraiths, Sabercats, and Yeti ¬– used the RFA tag on Jaylon Lee (@youngcricket), Alex Hansen (@acki), Ethan Hunt (@daBenchwarmer), and Alex Hayden (@Rich) respectively. Hansen migrated to the Sabercats without issue. Hunt very quickly made his feelings known about the tag and raised enough of a fuss to get it revoked, after which he signed with Yellowknife. Hayden signed for three years and $18 million with the Wraiths as well, but the Yeti used the tag for the first time in league history to bring him back.
It was shortly after Hayden's experience that adam2552 (2017) wrote about issues with the RFA tag as it stood – mainly, no limit on consecutive tags and no reason for any team not to match the free agency offer. He proposed changes like an automatically tendered single-year offer worth double the minimum from the original team and a requirement for the tagged player's new team to pay the old team a second-round pick. This would give some new incentives for all parties to behave more fairly. Then again, members as varied as timeconsumer, slm, and Dwyer all suggested the simple alternative of just getting rid of the RFA tag entirely.
But it really came to head with Jaylon Lee.
Youngcricket very much wanted to leave the Outlaws for the Liberty, and he was upset when Outlaws GM @4D Chess slapped an RFA tag on him by literally naming the thread "TAG". He got his wish a week later when he signed for a one-year deal in Philadelphia worth $10 million. Bad news arrived towards the end of Arizona's 48-hour window to match his contract, when the other Outlaws GM Dwyer announced that he was being stolen back and then immediately traded to San Jose with a S5 fifth for a S5 second. In one fell swoop, Dwyer denied the ambitions of someone he later called "the original Outlaws traitor" and described as an egotistical nuisance.
Quote:It's absolute bullshit that after playing three years in Arizona and agreeing to a contract that lets me choose where I get to go after, that I can't actually choose where I want to play football. The RFA tag is the dumbest rule this league has implemented and has absolutely pissed me the fuck off. If I would've known I couldn't actually choose where I wanted to play, I would've re-signed with fucking Arizona... To the league, change this rule because its bullshit.
This ignited quite the firestorm in his media comments, which quickly derailed well past the point of constructive arguments and into screaming at Head Office in all caps to accuse them of turning players into slaves… yes, really. The general assessment, aside from that, was that the RFA tag was really dumb and basically no one liked it. There was no fun in keeping players where they clearly didn't want to be under the guise of being realistic. Even daBenchwarmer chimed in to echo this sentiment to the instant consternation of ck, his now-former GM.
Quote:Quote:Quote:Preach brother
fuck the RFA tag
Quit your bitching! This never really affected you at all.
Go fuck yourself
The rules summit in December 2017 saw a proposal to limit RFA eligibility only to a team's drafted rookies at the end of their original contract; it fell one vote short of approval. Whether management disagreed with the restriction or simply didn't care didn't really matter; no one after Lee was ever given the tag again. The Season 6 rules summit in February 2018 finally abolished the futile experiment and sent it to the dustbin of history.
The most recently suggested structural change to achieve any significance had to do with contract lengths. Under the current system, and as it has been throughout history, players under 800 TPE can sign deals worth a maximum of three years. Players above this margin can sign for as long as they wish, which explains why so many sign for decade-long deals at the $4 million minimum as soon as they reach that tier. There was a proposal in 2017 to allow four-year contracts for those in the 400-799 range and limit 800+ to six seasons, but it garnered only six votes out of thirteen available.
Then two rule proposals popped up in the ballot of the S42 summit that caused a stir. The first proposed that players could not sign with anyone, even their own team, before their contract officially expired at the end of the playoffs and they automatically entered free agency. The second simply limited all contracts to a maximum length of three years without any grandfather exceptions, which would immediately cause around half the league's deals to abruptly lapse and would undoubtedly decrease minimum shenanigans. If ever there were a brute force method to encourage free agency activity, this was it.
Quote:There is a stigma in this league against users who leave the team that drafted them in Free Agency. This is entirely unfair. We all agree that the goal of the ISFL is for its users to have fun. If they are unhappy with their team, why should they be shamed for leaving for greener pastures. However, the current culture of the league makes Free Agency practically illegal in a de facto sense, even if it is technically allowed.
Almost no one agreed with the author of these suggestions. Besides necessitating a comprehensive salary cap overhaul, many argued that forcing users into free agency whether they wanted to or not would be intensely uncomfortable. Those who were not fans of the process would still have to go through the awkwardness and hard feelings of choosing between offers multiple times per career, a process many have described as supremely unpleasant. Players who wanted to experience free agency could do it under the old system anyways; if someone truly had no interest in playing for anyone else, why restrict them from a lifetime deal?
Unsurprisingly, neither passed. The first proposal actually had no supporters at all against 22 opposing votes, while the second scraped seven in its favor. Most saw this as a good outcome. But while the notion of forcing people into free agency proved too extreme to stomach, the problem it was attempting to solve still remains. It was, and is, true that the league's culture has grown attached at the hip to the idea of staying with one team and taking a long contract at minimum value, for all the reasons that have been extensively discussed, to the point that users who explicitly aim to buck the trend by chasing big deals or hopping between teams are viewed as niche anomalies. Will a healthy, active free agency always remain a distant dream?
Adjusting the Culture
We have approached the fourth and final stage of critical thought. In a sense, all other suggestions could be viewed as indirect expressions of this goal – to change the way that players, teams, and the league at large behave regarding contracts. In going far enough into the weeds of adjusting every little variable, we have looped back around to the issues discussed right at the introduction. No amount of chiding articles or impassioned pleas can realistically hope to simply change the culture through the sheer power of shame. Any shift would have to be imposed from the top down by changing the rules.
What would be the best solutions? I don't know. I've gone through tons of suggestions above, and there are certainly some I believe to be far less helpful than others. But nothing can be known unless something is done, and nothing can be done unless something is decided by an irrefutable groundswell of support to be worth a shot. Otherwise, I don't believe league management – and especially GMs – will ever willingly embrace reforms that might shift power and agency back into the hands of the players. The current system works for teams, and therefore it will have to work for everyone.
There is, of course, one supremely notable type of reform I left out of the discussions above. Its staunchest advocates argue that it may be the silver bullet the league economy needs to push up contracts and inspire a more robust free agency. Its fiercest critics argue that it serves a role that has no need to exist, inspires only dread and annoyance on the part of GMs, and poses a serious risk of tampering and team manipulation. I am talking, of course, about player agencies. To learn more about that, though, you should read the other essay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
@bex.
@Raven.
This was a bit of an experiment on my end, but I hope you enjoyed the end result.
Thank you to my contributors, as always. League research is an unenviable task when going it alone.
Transgender lesbian, S15 veteran, and media extraordinaire. Fascists and bigots are welcome to fuck off.
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For Your Reading Consideration:
Before the Butchers | The Jungle
The Giving Tree | Volume II | Volume III
A Winter of Discontent | Volume II
The Rockiest Road | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | Finale
Two Essays on Unfree Agency: On Agents | On Contracts
Eclipse of the Honey Moon | Volume II
Gemini Media Awards:
S39 | S40 | S41 | S42 | S43 | S44 | S45 | S46
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For Your Reading Consideration:
Before the Butchers | The Jungle
The Giving Tree | Volume II | Volume III
A Winter of Discontent | Volume II
The Rockiest Road | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | Finale
Two Essays on Unfree Agency: On Agents | On Contracts
Eclipse of the Honey Moon | Volume II
Gemini Media Awards:
S39 | S40 | S41 | S42 | S43 | S44 | S45 | S46
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