Piercewise1

Nice!

For those interested, here's how the requested Value was calculated. "Position" refers to the most granular level, so FS/SS are calculated separately, as are OT/OG/C. Also note that Overall refer to current year, before progressions. Value is equal to the highest-paid player at the same position whose Overall is equal to or lower than the requesting player. So if we rank all players at a position by Overall and the 8th highest player has the biggest contract, everyone above them will want a contract that size. The 9th highest player will want the biggest contract from anyone below them in Overall, and so on. If a player is top-5 Overall at their position, they want the above +5%. Aging players get a Value reduction of 10% per year of Experience beyond 10 (starting with the first year of the extension). So a player with a current Experience of 9 has a 10% lower Value expectation than a younger player. That increases to 20% for current year 10, 30% for current year 11, etc. There are a few edge cases where a single player's contract is extraordinary compared to their peers. All contracts where the highest Value is more than 150% of the second-highest have been removed from the calculations for that position. All instances are listed below. If these players are still edge cases when they come up for extensions, their expectation will be their current contract +5% (before adjusting for age) RB Michael Fulmer (20.4 vs 13.2) WR Mathew Madden (32.6 vs 22.5) TE Sebastian Moore (34.0 vs 14.7) OG Paul Caruso (68.9 vs 24.6) DE David Cunningham (47.6 vs 26.9) OLB Ramon Hubanks (40.1 vs 24.6)

Not currently. I've put a request in the Interface Feedback thread to have Injuries visible on the Roster page so it's more clear when a player is injured and when they have recovered.

EFFECTIVE DATE: 23 JUNE 2023 This is in response to teams not updating Depth Charts in a timely manner across both NFL and CFB which impacts the sim running games and causing the dev team to have to manually go in and adjust rosters. 1. All Gameplans AND Depth Charts are due by 11:59 PM EST Wednesdays. No exceptions (unless otherwise articulated by the Dev team, namely @Rocketcan or @TuscanSota. - Any failures to update Depth Charts to account for injuries, trades, practice squad moves, etc will incur an infraction (covered below). 2. At NO time may a team be over the Salary Cap – this would put them at a competitive advantage over teams that abide by that restriction. - Any team with negative cap space at the moment games are simmed for the week will incur an infraction (covered below). 3. Roster limit for Active players is 90 during the offseason & preseason, and 55 during the season. - Any team with more than the allowed number of Active players will incur an infraction (covered below). 4. Any further scheduling deadlines are dictated by the commissioner, or the admin team in his absence. - Any failures to complete manadatory scheduling will incur an infraction (covered below). 5. This list is not all inclusive and can/will be amended for future scenarios/situations that are deemed fit for addition by the community/simFBA staff. Infractions 1. Infractions will be increased pending for repeat offenders and will carry over throughout the duration of a season. At the conclusion of each season, everyone will be presented with a clean slate and start from ground zero once again but will maintain any penalties incurred from previous seasons if any. 2. Penalties will be on a case by case basis upon severity but for transparency a baseline will be as follows: - Depth Chart/Gameplanning/Salary Cap: In the event I am informed that you failed to correct your Depth Chart as previously described, or your team is over the Salary Cap, the team will incur a cap penalty of $2M and the loss of their lowest draft selection in the next draft year. Every additional infraction throughout the season will increase the severity of the penalty: two infractions will be an additional $2M cap penalty (for a total of $4M) and the lost pick will increase one round (or to the next available pick, at least 1 round higher); three infractions will be an additional $4M cap penalty (for a total of $8M) and the lost pick will increase another round (or to the next available pick, at least 1 round higher). Four and beyond will face the loss of team ownership, at the discretion of the commissioner and the admin team. - Scheduling: If the commissioner and staff are engaged, then any scheduling infractions will be levied against the teams. Any failures of teams to complete scheduling will incur cap penalties. ---- TENTATIVE SOLUTION: If a franchise incurs penalties and it is due to inactivity and the owner needs to be dropped from the team and made AI, draft picks may be reinstated until we come up with an alternative solution. I understand some of the penalties might seem steep, but coaches have a full seven days to tinker with depth charts. If you're unable to do something on Tuesday or Wednesday, there's nothing stopping you from gameplanning for your next opponent on Thursday after games have been ran. The penalties are in place because the lack of attention to detail prevents games being run appropriately and causes errors with the simulation engine. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please post them here.

As someone who is not familiar with IRL basketball: will there be penalties for switching formations in between weeks? Or can we freely mix it up based on our opponent?

Just in case it's not obvious, this was a HUGE amount of work and I can't say "thank you" enough to @TuscanSota and everyone who helped brainstorm, test, and otherwise participate in this process. In only its second year our pro football sim is taking a gigantic step forward thanks to all the hours collectively put into this project. Fantastic job!

Can we get some clarification on how Zone Defense works? Does CB1 still match up against WR1 automatically but use their Zone Defense score instead? Or is there more variability in the matchup? In a similar vein - how are coverage assignments calculated for safeties? Are they guarding TEs, slot WRs, etc?

So how are 3-4 OLBs factored into the pass rush if they don't count for blitzes? Are one or both always considered to be pass rushing?

I love you

As we prepare for the broadcast of our first Super Bowl, I’d like to reflect briefly on the current state of the SimNFL league and share my roadmap for 2023 and beyond. 2022: Year in Review I consider the 2022 SimNFL season to be a huge success. To start with nothing and build 32 NFL teams (with hundreds of generated players), over 300 custom “Star” contracts, a massive central Cap Sheet (thank you @alexfall862), and 96 other spreadsheets for individual team cap, gameplan, and depth chart is remarkable. Participation in free agency and the first NFL draft were high, and the trade thread saw a lot of action. My hope is that next year we can staff every team with a user owner for maximum buy-in. Thank you to the owners and coaches, media creators, and of course the admin team for making it all possible. 2023: Current State As @TuscanSota shared in his last 2022 SimFBA Show, there are a number of upgrades coming to the engine this offseason which should enhance the football experience for both SimFBA and SimNFL. We also share a hope that he can bring at least some of the SimNFL features onto the interface starting in 2023. While gameplans and depth charts are similar to college football, the NFL has contracts, trades, free agency, and the draft which all present unique challenges. I’ll be helping him as much as I can to make that a reality, but I don’t have any specifics at this time. My immediate next step is working to create the weekly schedule for 2023. Since the NFL has a clearly defined rotation system, we already know which teams will play each other next year. My goal is to have a fully realized schedule, including prime time matchups, to share with everyone before the start of preseason. Teams will still be able to set their own preseason opponents. 2023 Updates and Changes All changes (in bold) were recommended by the commissioner and then approved by the admin team. With a few days left for extensions, there are 18 “Star” players (Pool players with Overall of 60+ before progressions) that will be entering the free agency pool this offseason. 52 were in their final contract year, but 34 have been given an extension by their current team. Free agency will be very competitive, and I believe the contract offers will reflect that. This was expected - the generated contracts were conservative for all but the most advanced players, and the $150M cap was intentionally placed to give all teams purchasing power in the initial free agency period. Also, that first offseason free agency with 70+ quality players was always going to be an aberration, not a benchmark. But 18 is still very low for a league built to reflect the NFL. For this reason, the salary cap will remain static at $150M for 2023 and 2024. The sim is still finding its balance financially, and it will take a few cycles of free agency for prices to inflate to the point where maintaining a core roster becomes difficult for any but the biggest spenders. There are a few teams who will be in a crunch in 2023, but a quick spot check shows that with a few strategic cuts they will be able to get under the cap enough to pay the rest of the team + all their current draft picks next year (e.g. they have players whose contracts end in ‘23, so there’s no future year dead money if they are cut and the team can recoup the Salary cost). Rookie contracts will also remain at their 2022 levels until the cap increases. Any team that needs to get under the cap would need to do so before the start of the “league year”, so cut players could be added to the free agency pool. I’ll let you know a specific date as soon as it’s decided, but with an offseason full of work ahead that’s likely months away. When we do begin the 2023 offseason it will be time for free agency, and you will see a couple changes. First, we’re revisiting the time limit; in 2022 it was 3 weeks, with staggered starts for Pro Bowl, Starter, and Below Average pool players. Given the small number of stars this time around, we are shortening the free agency period to two weeks. There will still be an additional weeklong free agency period after the draft for UDFAs. Also, the single week deadline for star players required a certain amount of gamesmanship and made certain days more important from a strategic perspective. Therefore, we will continue the staggered start but let all contract negotiations play out over the full period. So for this year, the 18 players mentioned above will start accepting offers on day 1, with the remainder accepting offers starting day 8. Two weeks is plenty of time to reduce the number of contests that end in a “right of first refusal” matching opportunity, while still being short enough to encourage people to make realistic offers and not risk losing an auction. While we’re discussing contracts, let’s address the biggest move from last offseason. The Carolina Panthers ate multiple years of Bonus money all at once to trade away their star players for picks, and now the Denver Broncos only have to pay these players a Salary for the remainder of those contracts. To mitigate this going forward, in future trades only the current year Bonus becomes Dead Cap for the former team, and that the rest moves with the player to the new team. This sacrifices realism for balance; one cheap year is fine, but getting a star player for 2-3 cheap years is simply too powerful. Plus, this change should make trades more likely, as a team doesn’t need to eat as much dead cap if they want to trade assets away. Teams may still negotiate Salary for traded players, but only in the current year. Something I want to emphasize: Denver and Carolina made that trade in good faith and in accordance with the rules at the time. I’m not making any statement on the intentions of the owners, merely that it exploited a loophole that we will close for the future. There will be no retroactive changes to either team’s cap. Future Plans There are a couple of additional features I would like to add to SimNFL, but I believe they should wait a few years until player prices rise. One is rollover cap; currently there’s no point to save any money in the current year, so there’s an incentive to spend all your money even if the available players aren’t “worth it”. Rollover cap would fix that and encourage long-term planning, but currently most teams already have plenty of space and only a thin field of free agents to spend it on, so I don’t think it would do much to help those teams with a lot of unused cap space. The second is compensatory selections. If it becomes harder to keep good players away from free agency, teams should get some draft compensation when that happens. But with extensions already done it’s too late to implement for next year, and given the low number of free agents leaving and the complexity of the formula, it can wait. We will revisit the ideas of rollover cap and compensatory selections before opening the extensions window in 2023. Closing Summary I’m honored to serve as the SimNFL commissioner, and I hope you are as excited as I am for the future of this league. I truly love this community we’ve built and am proud to play my small part in its continued success. My proverbial door is always open, so please continue to share your thoughts, comments, ideas, and experiences with me. -Pierce Commissioner Goals for 2023: 1. 100% user ownership 2. Full schedule creation & release in off-season 3. SimNFL on the interface

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Belated, but welcome to the B1G!

Piercewise1#9467

Hello NFL owners! Today we are implementing the first iteration of a contract extension calculator. Going forward, a team has the option to offer any player in the final year of his contract an extension, to keep him on the team before he hits free agency. The Value required to re-sign the player is determined by the salaries of other players in the league who play the same position and have a similar skill level. This year, the extension window will open after the trade deadline (aka RIGHT NOW) and will close on the Saturday before the Super Bowl at 11:59 PM. The master list of players eligible for extensions, along with their current team and requested Value, is here. This Dev Diary will cover how those amounts were calculated. Value Calculation To figure out how much Value a player wants, we need to establish a baseline. To do that we take every non-rookie contract in the league, separate them by position, and rank them by their player’s Overall score. To determine an eligible player’s requested Value, we look at the 6 players at their position closest to their Overall - 4 above and 2 below. The average of these 6 contracts becomes the initial baseline. Seattle’s Eric Palkovich is an 80 OVR receiver. The salaries of the six veteran receivers nearest to his OVR are averaged and come out to 22.15. This is the initial baseline, but we’ll run through a few more checks. If that average is less than the player immediately below them in OVR, they will ask for that amount instead. This ensures that one other player being on a cheap deal will not devalue the eligible player’s asking price. In this case 22.15 is higher than 12.46 so no adjustment is needed. If that average is less than the player’s existing contract, they will ask for a 10% raise in Value over their current contract. This ensures that a player won’t take a pay cut without testing free agency. In this case 22.15 is higher than their existing contract of 8.73, so no adjustment is needed. Special case #1: if the player is one of the top-4 players at their position (i.e. there aren’t 4 players with a higher Overall with which to calculate the average) they will ask for a contract equal to the highest-paid player at their position. Special case #2: if the player is a sub-60 Overall veteran (a Below Average pool player), their required Value is fixed as the higher of 0.7 or 10% above their current value. This prevents 59 Overall players from asking for comparable salaries to 70+ players. Ideally, the sim will fill in the 60-69 overall range over time with newly drafted college players, lessening the gap between starter and non-starter and removing the need for this step. But for now it’s an important balancing measure. Once all these factors have been considered, we end up with a final number. If a team is willing to offer a contract with that Value, the player will sign the extension. How you reach that Value is up to you; you can offer any combination of Bonus* and Salary for any number of years to meet that Value, as long as the contract follows all the same rules from free agency (listed here under Contract Rules). The Value Calculator for NFL contracts is here. *Note that the rules include the 30% Bonus requirement - veterans will not sign extensions without at least some guaranteed money. Currently the sim has no mechanism for negotiation – you can sign the player for the Value they request, or you can let them enter free agency when the season ends and see what the “market” will pay them. The goal of this system is to provide teams with a means to retain good players already under contract, while ensuring that the salaries for star players make sense compared to the money they might expect to make in free agency. In an ideal world it rewards owners who can manage their cap, while still providing a robust free agent pool every off-season, while also pushing superstar players into bigger and bigger deals (as in real life). Of course this is a first attempt, and there may be improvements made in the future to better align the process with these goals. Next Steps To offer an extension, we will use the same form we used for free agency. I’ve added checks on my end to confirm that the offers follow all the contract rules and that the Value you list is accurate for the terms provided (and is sufficient for the requested player). You have until 11:59 PM on the night before the Super Bowl to submit extension offers. You do not have to submit all your offers at once, but you must submit them by the deadline or they will not be considered. As with free agency, any submitted offers are binding and cannot be rescinded. I will keep the master list updated as players sign, and might even write up some media headlines when big contracts are finalized. As always I am happy to address any questions or concerns that you have. -Pierce