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

Sponsoring NFL Super Bowl Company: Kotex Maxi Pads Tagline: "Maximum Protection" Sponsor for all red zone opportunities. Will trigger once a team gets into the red zone. Script: "This trip into the Red Zone is brought to you by Kotex Maxi Pads. When it's your time to enter the red zone, rely on Kotex hygiene products for maximum protection."

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

How does the sim decide which defender(s) will blitz? If I turn on safety blitzes will they be equally as common as LB blitzes? Basically I want to know how to maximize my chances that my one good non-DL pass rusher is doing the bulk of the blitzing.

Huge thank you to @Rocketcan and all the users that help test, crunch numbers, and do a truly IMMENSE amount of work to improve the sim!

Hello coaches! Quick update today as we publish a couple additions to NFL free agency. We're working on a megapost to combine everything FA-related in the same place, but want to make sure that everything that has been discussed & published in other places (like Discord) is reflected on the site. Any future updates will also go here, in addition to the compilation post. Minimum increases To outbid a competitor for a player, you must exceed their offer by a minimum amount: If the contract Value is less than 5.0, the next offer must exceed it by at least 0.25 Value. If the contract Value is 5.0 or greater, the next contract must exceed the Value by at least 5% of the previous contract's Value Final day matches If you were outbid on day 7 and choose to match the other team's bid, you only need to match their Value. You can match their contract exactly, or create your own contract - as long as it meets or exceeds the previous offer's Value. The choice is yours, but the default is the contract as offered; that will be used unless you supply an alternative. All matches must be made within the site thread to be official. Salary cap calculation A team's official salary cap spending is the sum of their 51 highest contracts, plus any dead money (see below). As long as the total is below the salary cap for that year, you can sign players to minimum salaries without going over the cap. Dead money Teams are always responsible for the full amount of guaranteed (Bonus) money paid out to players. If a player is cut or traded, or chooses to retire, the remaining Bonus on their contract is accelerated into the next cap year as dead money. For example: if a player is cut with 2 years remaining on a contract that has $5M in Bonus annually, that next year they will have $10M of dead money count against the salary cap as the player's remaining guaranteed money is accelerated into the next cap year.

Hello coaches! Free agency is just around the corner! In Dev Diary #50 we explained the process by which teams will bid on free agents during the offseason, and what rules the offered contracts need to follow. We also explained how players will decide which offer to accept. Today we’ll discuss some additional features that we are adding to the free agency process, lay out the order of events day by day, and then go through specific instructions for how to fill out the form and submit a bid. Right of First Refusal This is a major development, so we’ll address it first. We mentioned last time that the leading bids for all free agents will be published each morning: player, leading team, and current Value. While testing, we realized that being the leading bidder going into the last day of the week was actually a DISadvantage; other teams could see exactly how much they should offer to outbid you, so you’d either end up losing the player to someone else or submitting an even higher bid (basically betting against yourself) to hedge against the other teams. To mitigate this, we’re adding a new rule: The team that has the leading bid on a player going into the last day of the FA period will get the chance to match any team that outbids them. So if your 15.0 value bid is the best offer out to a star CB at the start of the final day (Sunday morning) but someone submits an 18.0 value bid on the last day, you’ll get the chance to match that exact offer and sign the player. Though this is mostly a rule to patch an issue with the process, we feel it also represents a player (and their agent) being willing to work with a team that has shown interest in the player throughout the process, while still getting the most money out of the deal. Remember, this isn't an auction: it's a series of negotiations in a very tight window. Sample Calendar Free agency week 1 begins on Monday, March 28th. For each week, here’s how the days will go: Day 1 (Monday) List of free agents taking offers is published on the forum* Teams can begin submitting offers via the Google Form, to those players only [*]Day 2 (Tuesday) First leaderboard is published in the morning [*]Day 3 (Wednesday) Updated leaderboard [*]Day 4 (Thursday) Updated leaderboard Any bids unmatched since Tuesday become accepted offers & the player signs Teams claiming a player this way should post a reply to the leaderboard** [*]Day 5 (Friday) Updated leaderboard Bids unmatched since Wednesday are accepted [*]Day 6 (Saturday) Updated leaderboard Bids unmatched since Thursday are accepted [*]Day 7 (Sunday) FINAL DAY for teams to submit offers Updated leaderboard; teams listed will have right of first refusal Bids unmatched since Friday are accepted [*]Week 2, Day 1 (Monday) Winning bids for week 1 free agents are published Teams who were outbid after leading on Day 7 can match winning bids Teams matching offers this way should post a reply to the results post** [*]New list of free agents taking offers is published; process begins again *Just a formality and for ease of reference. We’ve already listed the players and the cutoffs for OVR rating (79+ in week 1, etc), so there shouldn’t be any surprises **Teams need to take initiative when claiming players; once the free agency lists get huge in later weeks, the admins won’t necessarily be able to keep track of every player’s bid history Do’s and Don’ts DO check the daily leaderboards to see how your bids compare to the leading bids DO post in threads to claim players with 2-day unmatched offers or to exercise right of first refusal DO message the mods if you think an error has been made or a rule broken DON’T submit multiple offers to the same player in the same day DON’T post anything else in official free agency threads (chatter, hype, etc) DON’T complain when you don’t get a player you really wanted Free Agency Form Training To make absolutely sure we’ve covered all our bases, here’s an example of how to correctly fill out every entry on the free agency bidding form. We’ll use the sample contract from Dev Diary 50 for our tutorial. Use no more than 2 decimals in your submissions. Reminder that the Value Calculator with this output can be found here. Form Questions What is your team abbreviation? See Dev Diary 50 for the official list. As the Browns, I would enter CLE What is the Player ID? These will be published along with the players’ names and positions; for year 1 these will all be 5-digit numbers How many years is the contract? 4 What is the total signing bonus in $M? (number only, no more than 2 decimals) 16 What is the total dollar amount of the entire contract (signing bonus + total salary), in $M? (number only, no more than 2 decimals) 36 What is the calculated Value of the contract? (2 decimals) 18.80 What is the salary in year 1? (no more than 2 decimals) 2 What is the salary in year 2? (no more than 2 decimals; can enter 0 if no year 2) 4 What is the salary in year 3? (no more than 2 decimals; can enter 0) 6 What is the salary in year 4? (no more than 2 decimals; can enter 0) 8 What is the salary in year 5? (no more than 2 decimals; can enter 0) 0 Breaking Ties Total Value is always the deciding factor in where a player will sign. If Value is somehow tied between two or more blind bids (and right of first refusal is not applied), the following tiebreakers will be used: Highest total signing bonus Highest total dollar amount Earliest submitted bid Between the form and the calculator there are multiple checks to validate your bids. However, it is ultimately the owner’s responsibility to ensure that all rules are being followed and that all bids are legal. Improper bids can be invalidated, resulting in sim players signing with other teams. That’s all for this Dev Diary! Please ask any questions you have, and I will do my best to answer them. Free agency begins Monday! -Pierce

Indiana Hoosiers Piercewise1#9467

Hello coaches! Last time, we walked through the generated contracts for existing players – those selected out of the player pool. Today we’ll cover the rules for offseason free agency: how to make legal contracts, how to submit bids, and how competing offers will be compared. Finally, we'll reveal the list of free agents who are available in 2022. But first, let's start with some announcements: Free Agency will open on Monday, March 28th! The first SimFBA NFL Draft will take place on April 23rd-24th! April 23rd: Rounds 1-2 April 24th: Rounds 3-8 Read on to learn everything you'll need to know about free agency. Player Selection Currently the list of available free agents is a subset of players not selected out of the player pools; it will eventually include players undrafted out of college (more on that in a minute). In the future it will also include all players who are cut by their team or who play out their contract with a team and are not re-signed. Presently all free agents are unrestricted and can sign with any team. There may be features added later for restricted free agency (for younger players whose contracts expire), but that isn’t relevant at this time. There were 570 players selected for free agency: 30 Pro Bowlers, 90 Starters, and 450 Below Average players. Player selection was mostly random, but with a preference for an even distribution between age groups at each skill level. The intention is to provide enough talent and depth that teams can, via free agency and the draft, fill out a 90-man camp roster with players who are scheme fits and are capable enough to compete for a roster spot, while also creating a competitive environment for the most talented free agents. The 30:90:450 ratio is also in line with the number of selections allowed by each team from their player pools (roughly 3:9:43). Contract Rules As mentioned in the previous Dev Diary, there are two components to any contract. Bonus is guaranteed and is always pro-rated evenly over the life of the contract; Salary is the remaining money which is not guaranteed and can change year to year. All offered contracts must conform to the following rules: Duration of at least 1 year, but no more than 5 years Salary cannot decrease (but can remain flat) Total pay cannot increase by more than 50% from one year to the next (or $3M, whichever is higher) The highest year's pay cannot be more than double the lowest year's play (or $6M more, whichever is higher) Before the draft, at least 30% of any offer must be Bonus money After the draft, Bonus can be any amount, even 0% The percentages in rules 2 & 3 exist to minimize back-loading of large contracts - you cannot sign a player to a contract of 5/10/25 million over 3 years. The dollar amounts exist to ensure small contacts are still feasible - you can sign a player to a contract of 2/4/6 million over 3 years Contract Value Free agents will always sign with the contract that offers them the highest Value. To compare contracts of different lengths and Bonus/Salary amounts, the following formula is used: Each $1M of Bonus is worth 1.0 in the first year, and 0.1 less each year thereafter Each $1M of Salary is worth 0.8 in the first year, and 50% less each year thereafter (0.4, 0.2, etc) An online calculator is available here. It includes checks for all the rules mentioned above. Please save your own copy before using. Here is a sample contract – manual entries are in yellow, formulas in white. Here the player is being offered a 4-year, $36M contract with a $16M signing bonus. That bonus automatically works out to $4M a year, with a salary that is increasing slightly every year. The total value for this contract is 18.8; that is the number that will be compared against competing offers to see where the player signs. Note that the contract meets all the requirements mentioned above. The total money increases gradually over time and never goes down; the cheapest year of the contract is $6M, which is still 50% of the most expensive year ($12M); and the signing bonus is 44% of the total value. Free Agency Process Off-season free agency will take place over 3 real-time weeks (Monday-Sunday) before the draft, with a 4th week coming after the draft. Free agents will be split into groups based on their Overall score. Each Monday, a new group of players will become available for negotiations and will start accepting offers. At 11:59 PM on Sunday night the offer window will close, and those players will sign with the teams that offered the highest contracts. Then the second group begins negotiating, and so on. Week 1 (3/28-4/3) will be players with an Overall of 79 or higher (this year there are 25 such players) Week 2 (4/4-4/10) will be players with an Overall of 61 or higher (another 95) Week 3 (4/11-4/17) will be all remaining players (another 450) Draft week (4/23-4/24) [*]Week 4 (4/25-5/1) will be undrafted rookies and any remaining pool players Note that the Overall cutoff may change in future years depending on player availability. These values are only guaranteed for the current off-season. The first week of free agency will only cover those 25 highly rated players in the first group. This is intended to mimic the NFL by having teams focus on the most talented and expensive free agents first, then allowing those results to impact how teams approach the rest of free agency and the draft. To submit an offer, teams will use the form below. Enter your team abbreviation, the player ID, and the details of the contract - years, signing bonus, total money, calculated value. Make sure the final 3 fields are only numbers, with no symbols or letters (decimals are fine). There is no limit to the number of offers you can submit, but all offers are binding and must be fulfilled if accepted. https://forms.gle/TdnwS8NSVfqW76LD9 The abbreviations below will be used to determine the winning bids: make sure to use the correct letters for your team. Each morning, site admins will publish the current best offer (by value) for every free agent, along with the team that made it. If that offer goes unmatched for 48 hours, the player immediately signs with that team. Otherwise, after the deadline on the 7th day the player signs with the highest value contract offered. Signings and contract details will be posted on Monday morning. If a player receives no offer, they will remain available into the following week(s). Offers will only be pulled once per day, to avoid giving admins inside information. For total transparency, the entire list of day 7 offers (with team names and timestamps) will be posted publicly as well when signings are announced. The goal with this system is to provide some information on how much players are being offered, and by whom, without revealing the full scope of negotiations. It attempts to force teams to make realistic offers by limiting the amount of time teams can negotiate with key players, and so avoid lengthy bidding wars. To prevent manipulation, there is also an “anti-sandbagging” rule in effect for the first two weeks: A team cannot make their first offer to a player on day 7, unless that player has not received any offers from any team previously This rule ensures that teams participate in the negotiation process and don’t attempt to “steal” players on the final day after other teams have done the work and set the price. Because this process is meant to simulate teams meeting with players, negotiating, having them compare offers, etc, it is unrealistic for a team to sign a free agent without showing some measure of interest beforehand (unless that player truly has no other choice). The rule is removed for later weeks, when there are hundreds of free agents to consider and offers are smaller/less competitive. Further rules can be added if teams attempt to manipulate the system in unforeseen ways. Please participate in good faith. Free Agency Pool The list of 2022 free agents can be found here ! That’s all for this Dev Diary! Please ask any questions below and I will answer as soon as I can. -Pierce

Hello coaches! Today’s update is all about the NFL salary cap, with a focus on generated contracts for existing NFL players. I’ll break down how I calculated the total value of those contracts, as well as the Bonus amounts and starting contract lengths. Then I’ll go over the rookie pay scale for our first draft class. By the end you will have all the data on your current cap expense and remaining cap space, and a link to the cap sheets with all your current information already loaded. This is a dense update with a lot of charts and math but, given the huge impact this has on the formation of the league, I want to be completely transparent as to how these contracts were created. Also, apart from the initial copying and pasting of roster pools, everything was calculated and reviewed with team and player names hidden. A note on terminology before we dive in: Bonus is the guaranteed money on a player’s contract; it is always pro-rated evenly over the life of the contract. Salary (capital S) is the remaining money which is not guaranteed and can change year to year. To avoid confusion, I’ll try to always refer to a player’s combined pay as their “contract”. Also, “star” player is my term for Pro Bowlers and Starters (your pool selections that are better than Below Average). Baseline by Position All the Below Average players, regardless of position, are on minimum salaries (0.5M Salary per year, no Bonus). Their contract length was determined the same way as star players, which we’ll cover a little later. For star players, I began with the table below; this was calculated from a list of the NFL’s top 1,000 cap hits of 2021 (via spotrac.com), with some rounding for simplicity. They follow a pattern that should look familiar: QBs make by far the most money, followed by OTs, then edge rushers, etc. These numbers constitute the baseline, which I modified using the other available criteria. Modifiers The factors below raise or lower the player’s pay in year 1. When more than one apply, they are added together: 50% + 10% = 60%, not 65% Tier Pro Bowl: +50% Starter: no change Pro Bowlers are the extreme end of the bell curve, the best of the best, and are paid a premium even compared to other starters. Experience Young: -30% Prime: no change Vet: no change While we don’t have retroactive draft classes and rookie contracts, there is still a financial benefit to having less experienced players that are still developing. Young players make less than their peers at the same position. Overall High: +20% Medium: +10% Low: no change Within each of the six groups (Pro Bowl/Prime, Starter/Prime, Starter/Vet, etc) I broke down the player pool by Overall score and created 3 ranges: High, Medium, and Low. Ranges were created such that ~50% of players fell into the Medium category, ideally with 25% each in the Low and High categories (though that wasn’t always possible). Players with higher Overall score make more money; for example, a 79 Vet Starter makes more than a 73 Vet Starter at the same position, though the impact is not as large as the other modifiers. Note that the ranges are wider for Young players and get smaller with each age category. Bonus Money All star players have a minimum 50% of their year 1 pay as a Bonus. That allocation increases by 10% for each age range, with an additional 15% for Pro Bowl players. Basically, the older and better the player, the more guaranteed money they get. The remainder of their pay is Salary. Subsequent Years The default contracts increase in value by 10% each year. So a player calculated to make $5.0M this year will make $5.5M next year and $6.05M the year after that (if they have a second & third year on their contract, see below). The Bonus amount will remain flat, as Bonus is always pro-rated evenly over the length of the contract; the increase will come in the form of additional Salary. Contract Length Now that we know how much players are paid, we need to determine the length of their current contract. I started with the age categories: Young players (years 2-4) had 2-year contracts Prime players (years 5-7) had 3-year contracts Vet players (years 8-11) had 2-year contracts However, this would leave a barren wasteland in free agency next year, so any player that has the most experience of their age group has one year taken off. Thus, Young players with exactly 4 years’ experience have only 1 year on their current contract, Prime players with 7 experience have only 2 years, and Vets with 10-11 experience (there are only a few each) only have 1 year. All together it looks like this: The intention here is to mimic the pace of real NFL contacts without recreating entire historical drafts or past free agency periods. Experienced Young players are still cheap but are about to sign their first non-rookie deals; Prime players are locked up in long expensive contracts (a boon if they perform well, but an anchor if they don’t), and Vets are looking for shorter deals that pay them a lot of guaranteed money in a short amount of time. The possibility of having multiple Young players already in a contract year represents a distinct challenge, especially since it was not established before pools were selected. To mitigate this, all owners are allowed to select ONE (1) Young player and automatically extend his contract by 1 year. Any Young players can be selected for this benefit, regardless of their years of experience. This is a unique, one-time choice due to the nature of the pool selection process and will only occur in this first league year. The contract value of this additional year will be automatically calculated based on the rules outlined above (10% increase in total value, in the form of additional Salary). There will be a separate forum post where you will make your selection. Rookie Pay Scale Drafted rookies automatically sign 4-year contracts for a set amount, depending on when they were drafted. Picks from rounds 2-8* are paid by round (all 2nd rounders have the same contract, etc) and their Bonus and Salary are predetermined Round 8 will only occur in the first league year, since we are starting with a snake draft; all future drafts will be 7 rounds in a standard format [*]1st round picks are paid differently by pick, and the team must negotiate their Bonus amounts individually. The team will also have the future option to extend the rookie contract into a 5th year at a predetermined rate, but that won’t come into effect for several seasons. The annual value of all contracts are flat over 4 years; only the distribution of Bonus and Salary changes. Salary Cap The salary cap for 2022 is $150M. This ensures that all teams have a chance to sign impact free agents in the initial offseason. Factoring in the cost of star players, below average players, and allocations for draft picks, teams will have anywhere from $35M to $66M in available cap space at the start of free agency (see below). You can see all the details on your team’s cap sheet, which can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dE-pZ8bbi_Z6oYoeGkAvvjoYmiQ6zwDr?ths=true That’s it for this Dev Diary! A lot to process, a lot to consider, but hopefully a lot of excitement as we get closer to our inaugural NFL season. Please discuss or ask any questions below and I will answer as soon as I can. -Pierce

Thank you for this write-up (and the clarifications), it's extremely helpful!