League settings to model the modern NFL

[QuikSand]

In this thread, I will hope to get some feedback from more learned players than I... in an effort to help out new FPS PF20 players who, like me (and I'd think a fair share), would like to start out with a league that looks, feels, and works more or less like today's NFL.

My plan will be to edit this first post with any batch of settings that this forum concludes, more or less, work well for this purpose.

In Progress... Stay Tuned

[QuikSand]

So, with only one career launched (and a mess due to unwise initial settings), I want to take a stab at parts of this... just with some educated guesses.

FINANCIAL SETTINGS

If you don't want to play a game where cap management, salaries, and free agency are major parts of the game... this discussion isn't for you. For some of us, including me, this set of constraints is basically the most compelling thing about a football management sim.

First - the in-game default financial settings do not seem to be workable, at all. Here are my thoughts:

-Based on my first run, the league salary cap needs to be adjusted up from $100M, if you start with the default rosters and the salaries attached to them. Most of the NFL teams start out with something like $150-170M committed in salary. The real NFL salary cal for 2019 is about $191M... that seems too high to me, given the current salary situation, but using that might make for a more aggressive free agency early in your career, if you think that sounds good.

(Note: this game doesn't include any sort of inflation year by year, so your financials don't drift...worth keeping in mind here, but also in-game as you consider contract offers)

My thought: Salary Cap $175M

[QuikSand]

The league settings also include a "maximum salary" value. That sounds a bit NBA-ish, but I think it's being used not as a limit in the human GM, but rather as a guide for the AI teams to scale their offers. I think the game more or less figures what salary to offer a player (or what he demands) in terms of this maximum number. So, a player at a key position, with a very high rating might go through the in-game analysis and be determined to be worth "90% of the league maximum" ... and then, based on what the league maximum salry is set to be, that gets translated to a dollar amount. From a programming perspective, this makes sense, even if it's a bit wonky from a football perspective.

So, what works? Surely not the in-game $10M, that pushes way too many marginal players right up to the limit. I don't think that's either realistic or good for game play. In the NFL, top QBs are making north of $30M (over 15% of the NFL cap)... the problem here is if we set this maximum number too high, then the request/demand for too many "pretty good" players will become too much of a drag on the team's overall affordability. I think the ideal setting here is something more along the lines of 10-13% of the league cap.

(In a patch, making these values even more sensitive to position importance could improve this logic, in my view. I think a more realistic and probably more enjoyable setting might be QB max of $25, and non-QB max of $20, with an implied scaling that means a Max P is $5 but a max OG is $12, and so forth)

The top draft picks should be paid fairly handsomely, like a starting caliber player, but that seems to drop off rapidly in this game - so I'm ok with the "drafted" maximum being a healthy number.

My thought: Maximum Salary: $20M, Maximum Draftee Salary: $10M

[QuikSand]

MINIMUM SALARIES

Okay, this also drifts away from NFL logic, but after playing a few seasons, I think I understand why it does, and why it's pretty important to get these settings right.

In the NFL, the minimum salary is what you'd think... a limit on how much the team has to pay a player. It's adjusted by years of experience, but that's relatively gradual. BUt the details aren't important here, because that's not really what this is about for DDS PF20.

It appears that in PF20, players who go through the two whole phases (5 days each) of free agency and remain unclaimed, are then basically willing to sign a "minsal" contract for one year with any willing team. On its surface, that sounds okay -- but this is one of the subtle things that a text sim needs to get right. You don't want the ideal strategy to win the game to be to just sit back and let a ton of high quality unsigned players fall to you for peanuts. Nor do you want free agency to be so desolate that a team missing out on a fairly important position has to sign up a clerk from the Piggly Wiggly with ratings to match.

So... in FP20, these players will sign their 1yr deals for an amount you set on the "Financial Settings" page, and it's a function of overall rating, not experience. Okay, this is a video game (rather than real football) mechanism to keep your team, or some random AI team, from just grabbing 1 dozen star players for super cheap. Except... the default settings are indeed, super cheap. That's a problem. So, to make this system work better, we need to use a more realistic floor to sign quality players.

I confess I have only recently sorted this out (at least I think I have) so I haven't played even one full season cycle with these settings, but for now my thinking is-- you have to enforce legitimate salaries for high-level contributors, overall ratings of 80 or better. Those guys can't be $300K, they have to come at a real price. Draftees at 300K is fine, some modest grading upward for guys who are more or less replacement level seems okay, but 80+ need to make real money, and 90+ need to make more serious money. If anything, I think these high numbers might be too low, but time might tell... I'd be delighted if someone could step in based on experience and offer a revised batch of settings here.

My thought: Minimum Salaries, bottom to top: 300K 400K 500K 1.5M 3.0M 4.5M

[QuikSand]

ALLOW TEAMS TO EXCEED CAP FOR EXTENSIONS

Okay, here it is, potentially, the fork in the road between realism and enjoyment. You make the call, I guess. If you loathe the idea that your WR who nearly put up 2,000 yards past year is threatening to walk without a fat new deal that you can't easily afford... well, leaving this setting checked (meaning yes, teams can exceed the cap) is potentially for you.

Or, you could grow a pair. Football is not basketball. There are no Bird rules, no absurd wizardry required to make simple trades work... it's just a hard salary cap. If you really want that WR to come back, then pony up, and cut that safety or linebacker or whomever it takes. That is FAR closer to how the NFL works, and in my view makes the game about the things I want to do in a text sim -- make consequential and challenging decisions that connect to my team's success.

So... easy call for me. I don't know how much leaving this checked would upend the cap/max/min numbers above, but for me...

My thought: No

[QuikSand]

PENALTY % FOR DROPPING PLAYER

Okay, in the real NFL, contracts are (to simplify) in two parts -- bonuses which are either paid up front or otherwise guaranteed and therefore spread across the life of the contract for cap purposes, and base salaries who are earned each year based on the player remaining with the team. That means, in essence, that a real NFL player on a $10m cap hit for this year probably would not relieve the team of $10 in cap hit if he were to be released (or traded). Rather, it would be the base salary that the teams saves (plus maybe some performance incentives, etc) - but they'd still be liable in cash and in cap space for the bonuses already paid/guaranteed.

PF20 doesn't seem to model this logic at all, so this one number has to be our proxy for this entire concept. The main weakness here is, in real life, the share of a given contract that is guaranteed is a function of the player's leverage in negotiations. Top tier players get a larger share guaranteed... marginal players typically have next to nothing guaranteed. So, how should we model this in PF20?

I'm going to lean toward making this fairly realistic for quality players, knowing that we do so at the expense of realism for marginal players. To me, that means putting this number non-zero (the initial default setting) but somewhere in between there are NBA-style full guarantees. I'll split the difference as a starting point.

With a non-zero setting here, you'll be less likely to bring in a handful of extra guys for training camp (like NFL teams routinely do), but it makes the signing of impact players far more consequential and I think that's the better priority here.

My thought: Drop Penalty: 50%

[QuikSand]

FORCE STRICT CAP

I don't even know what this means, but I'll take it at face value and assume it means that at multiple times through the offseason and season, teams will have to comply with the cap limitation - meaning they may have to release players, etc to do so. I haven't played the game enough to know if this ends up as an AI trainwreck (I'd set the chance at above zero this is so) but my fondness for challenge and realism says... lay down the law.

My thought: Strict Cap, Yes

[QuikSand]

ROSTER SIZE

I am troubled by this, as PF20 pretty clearly isn't using the terms to mean what the NFL thinks they mean. (I may be wrong about this, and will edit out this commentary if that's pointed out) The game here has a "Modern" setting for 53 players, and then a "Practice Squad" of whatever number you want to enter.

I don't think PF20 uses these terms in the way that the NFL does, and if I'm right, there's no legitimate way to model true NFL settings in-game, since there are only two roster limits available.

In the NFL, there are really three tiers of assignment for non-injure players: 46 active, 7 inactive, 10 practice squad. The 46+7 = 53 all make their actual NFL salary. Players accepting a practice squad assignment (typically after being waived and made available to other teams at their NFL salaries) accept a much-reduced salary ($8k per week currently) that, I'm fairly sure, does not count against the salary cap. This puts them at a distance from the NFL team roster - they are available, as the name implies, to participate in practices, but using them in a game is a somewhat complicated matter.

It appears to me that the 53 players in PF20 are all active. So... the game doesn't model the week to week decisions of who should be active/inactive among that group of 53. It also allows players to be immediately shipped between the team roster and the practice squad - more or less replicating the way that the active/inactive system works. (There are other elements of the NFL practice squad setup, including other teams being available to poach them) In short the way PF20 uses the 53 Active plus X Practice system is basically the way the NFL uses the 46 Active + 7 Inactive system.

It's not a crisis to keep it this way... but the liberal rules for the practice squad in PF20 make roster-building much more forgiving. I think too forgiving. I think if I had my druthers, we'd have an in-game means to change the roster rules to 46 Roster and 7 Practice Squad, and that would work more or less fine. Given the setup we have to deal with, I think the most realistic move is to minimize the practice squad and just put all (or most) of those players into free agency. (Edit: looks like the game won't allow a practice squad of zero, so I'll use 1 player there)

My thought: Use Modern (53 Players) roster, and 1 Practice Squad

[QuikSand]

Okay... I think those are all the areas where I have thoughts on creating a financially constrained roster-building model that works more or less like the modern NFL, to the extent we can do so in this game.

The best outcome from here will be for a few (or a wave of) veteran PF19/PF20 players to come in and tell me where I'm wrong, and improve the model. I take no real pride in authorship of the specifics, and if it turns out my logic is flawed someplace, I am very open to amending it as well.

Fire away.

[brooks_piggott]

Love this... have no idea if it will work but love your thought processes.

Some background: The game was never really built to model a true NFL financial system... it was built for 2 main reasons. First, historical players/teams scenario building (Can you re-create the dynasty of the Cowboys, or can you win a SB with the 85 Bears and so on). Secondly it was built as a multiplayer online sim engine for people (me) to run leagues with. At the time I cringed at the thought of having to manage the modern NFL salary cap both in code and as a team owner. That's why it's so simplified... it was meant more to make online leagues competitive and give enough controls to commissioners to manage player movement, but it was never intended to try and replicate current salary, bonus, guaranteed money, restricted, unrestricted, cap casualty, and so on...

So I give huge kudos to you for taking on this challenge. I'll keep an eye on this thread so if we find additional settings or concepts we need to add in to fill in the gaps we can look at that for patches or future versions.

*note* There is a patch coming that will resolve the initial default rosters going over 100M, so if future people are reading this that part may not need to be adjusted as much.