Default contract

[bonscott]

All,

I've been dealing with contracts and such in my own league as I upgrade to 2008 and had some thoughts on ours in terms of a default contract.

Right now in FA bidding or in season blind bidding the rules say you have 24 hours to put a contract on a player or else they are cut. Now this takes some manual work for the commish to police this and I'm all about automating things as much as possible.

So to me it makes more sense to do this: Default contract assigned to all players is 1 year. This is easily automated by the MFL software. So if you win a bid for a player, either offseason FA or in season blind bid the contract assigned will be 1. If 1 is all you want then nothing needs to be done by you or the commish, player will not be dropped and all that mess, you simply have the player with a contract of 1. However if you wish to have a contract longer then 1 then you need to post within 24 hours and the commish will adjust.

I don't really think this warrants a rule change that needs to be voted on but it just seems to make more sense to me. This way everything is run on automatic and the only time the commish needs to step in and do something manually is if an owner wishes a longer contract then 1.

Thoughts?

[braven112]

[yugimoto]

No issue from my perspective.

[joe.commish]

[Achon44]

I think that when you make your bid you can write in the comment section how many years you want and then the Commish can see that after bidding ends. This would do away with all contract posts and Commish would only have to check once a day.

[braven112]

I think that when you make your bid you can write in the comment section how many years you want and then the Commish can see that after bidding ends. This would do away with all contract posts and Commish would only have to check once a day.

I think that would work as well, if you do nothing you get the 1 year contract and if you want something else, post that in the comments.

[yugimoto]

Right now in FA bidding or in season blind bidding the rules say you have 24 hours to put a contract on a player or else they are cut.

In looking at the constitution, I see in the rules for the in season blind bidding that you have to put a contract on a player within 24 hours, but I do not see it the rules in regards to FA bidding. For FA bidding there does not appear to be anything explictly stated as to when the contract years have to be assigned.

I had thought we had until about two weeks prior to the start of the season (i.e., sometime in August) to assign contracts to free agents aquired during the FA process.

Commish - can we get some clarification on this?

Thanks.

[bonscott]

Here is what I find on contracts.

Under Salary Cap/Contracts

* All Rookies acquired in the rookie draft must be assigned a contract prior to the third sunday in August each year. If no contract is offered by the deadline that player will be removed from the team's roster at at 50% cap hit.
* All Players acquired in the initial auction draft must be assigned a contract prior to July 1st. If no contract is offered by the deadline that player will be removed from the team's roster at at 50% cap hit.

So I think what you're thinking about is when you have to assign contracts to rookies, which is August.

In particular this one addresses your question, same section:

* All Players acquired in Free Agency after the Initial Auction must be given a contract within 24 hours after they are acquired.

So this is pretty much what we do every year now since the initial auction, off-season free agency/bidding and this is what will start March 15th. Perhaps language in the constitution in this section and others that relate to our initial auction could be removed for clarity or perhaps moved to a "legacy" section so that we don't lose the history of what our initial auction rules were.

Under the in-season Free Agent bidding section we have

During the In-Season Free Agent period teams that are awarded player(s) must submit the contract year for that player to the league message board within 24hrs. Failure to submit a contract for a player will result if a 50% cap hit of that player salary and the player will be released from that team's roster.

So in both cases (off-season free agency/bidding and in-season blind bidding) the constitution says that you have 24 hours to assign a player a contract or else they are dropped. My "tweak" was to simply automate this a bit so that the commish doesn't have to manually do something with every single free agent pickup. Basically all players when added to a team get a contract of 1. You have 24 hours to post if you want the contract to be longer.

Very minor tweak but the commish or the owner doesn't need to do anything if the owner wishes to keep the contract at 1. If they wish it to be longer then the owner needs to post (or put in the bid comments) the length of contract they want. Then the commish will need to manually adjust. And there would be no dropping of a player (again, manual process for the commish) since they would have a contract of 1 by default so again, less work for the commish and less worry on the part of the owner should they not be around after they win a bid.

All in all I see no downside and only upside in terms of ease and automation.

[yugimoto]

I completely agree about the automation - no worries there - as a commissioner myself I am always looking for ways to make my life easier as well

I think I was just getting confused between the various dates mentioned. I think what is throwing me off was the "initial auction" section. I did understand the rookie contracts.

I like the suggestion to move some rules to a legacy section if no longer needed.

So, if I understand correctly, going forward any free agent pick-up (sans Rookies from the Rookie draft) done via the Free Agency period or the In-season bidding we now want to include in the comments the number of years for the contract otherwise it will be assumed to be 1 year. And we still have 24 hours upon winning the player in which we can request an increase in contract years if we want.

Is that correct?

[braven112]

I removed the "initial auction" wording and added the revision of the rule that bonscott suggested.

[braven112]

How do I automatically make contracts default to 1 year in the MFL setup?

[yugimoto]

Go to the Salary Cap Setup section on the For Commissioners Setup Page and select "Enter Player Salaries / Contracts".

The very first entry is where you set the Default Salary/Contract information.

If you do not see that entry, make sure the drop downs say "Players" and "On Any Rosters"

[braven112]

Thanks!

[linc]

As MFL adds new enhancements each year some of our rules may need to be reviewed since this rule was written prior to MFL offering defaults on contract years.

[bonscott]

As MFL adds new enhancements each year some of our rules may need to be reviewed since this rule was written prior to MFL offering defaults on contract years.

Good point. Just an FYI that default contracts and salaries have been there since I started using MFL in 2005.

[braven112]

Just an FYI that default contracts and salaries have been there since I started using MFL in 2005.

I think he's referring to the fact that most of the league constitution was taken directly from linc's league so like linc was saying some of it may be outdated.

[Achon44]

All Players acquired in Free Agency will be given a default contract of 1 year, if you would like a longer contract, you must submit the contract within 24 hours of the signing

Does this rule still apply?

[braven112]

All Players acquired in Free Agency will be given a default contract of 1 year, if you would like a longer contract, you must submit the contract within 24 hours of the signing

Does this rule still apply?

Yes, that is what we changed the constitution to read.

[Achon44]

All Players acquired in Free Agency will be given a default contract of 1 year, if you would like a longer contract, you must submit the contract within 24 hours of the signing

Does this rule still apply?

Yes, that is what we changed the constitution to read.

I apologize for sounding like an ass, but are we going to support it?

[Achon44]

[braven112]

Well I'm not to big on being an ass and a quite a few people were unclear on the rules so I've let it slide this year. With so many people coming off the board so quickly it's also way to difficult to cross check every auction end date with the time that they post on the board. You can view it like speeding if you want, not strictly enforced, go 10 miles an hour over the limit in a metropoitan area and your fine do the same thing in podunk USA and you'll get a ticket. Now if there is some major development that effects a players value and a person takes longer than the allotted time to declare the contract then I will strictly enforce the rule.

To me, it's really all about the spirit of the rule in this particular situation; which is not to allow a person to have more information on a players status than when they signed them for the monetary portion of the contract. As long as that stays in tact I'm fine.

If you feel like the spirit of the rule as been violated let me know!