Cap trouble; and, new Lake County owner pizzaddict!

[Cory]

If you look at your roster in contract view it will tell you what their cap hit is and how much you'll save by releasing them.

This is a watered down version of how the NFL works. Basically you're just looking at it backwards. When you give a player a $5 million dollar signing bonus on a 4 year contract they aren't actually getting $1.25 million extra every year. They get that $5 million up front and the league allows you to spread the money out over several years so that you aren't taking such a huge hit in the first year. That money is already spent, though. There is no getting it back even if you release or trade the guy. A more accurate way to represent this would be to add your player's signing bonuses to the lost cap each year, as you're not actually paying it out in future years but the prorated amount gets taken off of what you're allowed to spend under the cap. The reason it's not looked at that way is because Lost Cap is what the NFL would call Dead Money and it's not considered Dead Money unless the player is no longer on the team.

I hope that that makes sense.

[Guest]

pizza, even though Scortch did an excellent job explaining things wouldn't bother trying to understand the NFL's salaryrules and attempt to apply that understanding here. It's super confusing.

[Cory]

If the Dolphins were to trade Suh tomorrow (or wednesday since they haven't officially signed him yet) they would still have to pay the 60mil they are rumored to have guaranteed him?

I believe it depends on how the guarantees are worded in the contract. Guarantees are different than signing bonuses. An example of this is the Bears' current Jay Cutler scenario. If he's on the roster when the season starts tomorrow his salary for 2016 is guaranteed. That's not signing bonus money, it's just a guarantee that he'll get paid for the next two years no matter what happens during the season this year. If he got traded the team he got traded to would be on the hook for that guaranteed money, but the Bears would still take the hit for the signing bonus that they gave him last year when he signed his new contract. If they cut him today they'd only take a hit for his signing bonus and his guaranteed money for this year, but if they cut him on Wednesday they'd take the hit for his bonus plus his guaranteed money from this year and 2016.

[Aston]

@Matt, yeah, when you trade for a player, you always only take on his salary. No bonus.

@pizza, I think that's what guaranteed means, so the Dolphins would not really be able to trade Suh for a few years. Generally, the NFL is a lot more complicated.

For example, Devin McCourty's 5 year, 47.5M contract has a $15M signing bonus. See ESPN's contract breakdown.

$10M of the signing bonus is paid this year; $5M is paid next year. So within two years it's all paid. However, for cap cost purposes, the cap impact of the bonus is spread evenly over all 5 years (that is, $3M per year).

He has a $0.5M roster bonus every year (per game he is on the roster).

His salaries for the 5 years are $2.5M, $4.5M, $6.5M, $7.5M, and $9M. The first two years' salaries are fully guaranteed. The third year is effectively fully guaranteed (they'd have to cut him by mid March before that season to avoid it becoming fully guaranteed). The last two years are not guaranteed at all.

So in total that's:

1: $0.5M roster bon. + $2.5M guar sal. + $3M guar signing bon. = $6M
2: $0.5M roster bon. + $4.5M guar sal. + $3M guar signing bon. = $8M
3: $0.5M roster bon. + $6.5M guar* sal. + $3M guar signing bon. = $10M
4: $0.5M roster bon. + $7.5M sal. + $3M guar signing bon. = $11M
5: $0.5M roster bon. + $9M sal. + $3M guar signing bon. = $12.5M

In year 4, presumably the Patriots could cut him and be spared $7.5M that year.

There's a difference between "cap cost" and "cash spent" in the NFL that doesn't really appear in FOF. Here are two articles that go somewhat in depth about this:

Andrew Brandt: The Salary Cap Myth, and More Insights Into Deal-Making Season (This one talks about cap outs! They seem very similar to FOF cap outs)

Cleveland Browns Salary Cap: Understanding the 89% Cash Spending Requirement (This one talks about the rule governing cash spending relative to the salary cap, and illustrates cap cost vs cash spent very well with Kruger's contract)

So, in short, the NFL is more complex than FOF. In FOF there aren't roster bonuses or guaranteed salaries. It's a straightforward bonus / salary structure.

That's maybe too bad; FOF contracts would probably mirror the NFL much more if we could do things like guarantee salaries for the first X years of the contract. In FOF, you have to impress with bonus, so when you want to land a prize FA, you might do something like Yuma did with WR Bruce Perkins and give him $10M bonus per year. Whereas say, the Patriots guaranteed a lot of money to McCourty -- 60% of his $47.5M contract is guaranteed, basically. But despite that, his per annum bonus is only $3M, making it not that hard to cut him in the later years of his contract. So in FOF, offering a long term contract with equal guarantees is a much stronger commitment to keeping the player for every year of that deal, no matter what happens to him in camp, injury, etc.

(edit, @scortch: you explained it very well, and much more concisely! :P)

[Cory]

I think garion hit it on the head. You're better off not getting too into the NFL stuff unless you're interested in that for it's own sake. For FOF you're better off knowing that you pay whatever bonus you promise whether you have that guy or not.

Aston, I see your point but you have to draw the line somewhere. You included roster bonuses in your example, do you want those in the game as well? What about performance incentives? It'd be interesting and definitely add depth to the negotiation process, but I think you'd end up losing people that didn't want to dive that deep. This game is already too deep for 95% of "football fans".

[pizzaddict]

Thanks guys.

So, if I'm under the cap before the draft, then over the cap after the draft when I take on the rookie salaries am I forced to cut more players to get under the cap?

[pizzaddict]

BTW, this game really needs a better salary screen. I'm thinking something like OOTP has where it breaks down every players salary for each year.

[Aston]

Haha, no, I agree. I mean, I wouldn't mind the guaranteed salary thing, just because I think people being forced into big signing bonuses can lead too easily into cap unhealthy teams way down the line.

But yeah, by and large, I think the FOF system is good. It's got only a few components to it, and is easy to understand. They probably compensate as well by giving some extra cap cushion than NFL teams have; you should *not* have to employ a full time staff to sort out your cap situation for a game!

The flip side is I think people have to accept that FOF contracts do not end up looking like NFL contracts. These are two different beasts. "Guaranteed money", and also just the amount of cap teams have available, they're very different looking quantities. But for each universe, FOF and NFL, it's still balanced within itself.

@pizza -- the "View Salary" or "Renegotiate" screen brings up a breakdown of salary and bonus each year, for one player.

[pizzaddict]

I want to be able to see everyones salary in 1 screen so I can plan better. You can get a breakdown of the current year by looking at the contracts view in your roster but can't what is happening the next year, or the year after.

[Cory]

Just to back up the fact that trades result in dead money in the NFL, here is a quote from Bleacher Report regarding the Jimmy Graham trade:

"Trading Graham would eliminate $7.9 million in cash, but it would still cost the Saints $900,000 in dead money this season."

There are bonuses and guarantees in place that become complicated, but the bottom line is that the Saints are getting docked for the prorated portion of Graham's signing bonus for the contract he signed last year.