2018 General Managers Discussion Thread

I already had the Bills invite out before Joe posted your list.

Torgo hasn't posted yet, so you may be in for the Falcons. If Torgo does come back you're probably looking at the Chargers because I already had an invite out to a Jaguars fan and he said he wants the spot.

If your interested, the Broncos may be open too. Munoz has not posted yet and I have emailed him twice.

 

Yep, I'm here.

 

Okay. I'd rather Denver before the Chargers.

 

Heads up Tim... in the free agent list spreadsheet, the OG page is just a copy of the OT page. There is no list of guards in the workbook.

 

Thanks, I'll get that edited in.

 

Sounds good.

 

Hey, I'll be joining to take the Rams.

Newbie here, so the first of what I'm sure will be many questions: is there any option to extend/resign players on my existing roster? If the real-life Rams sign a guy to an extension prior to NFL FA starting, am I able to keep them at that contract? Or do they just get thrown into FA and I can resign them if I win the bidding?

Also, I'm from England (I started supporting the Rams in 2001 because they were a really good team and good fun to watch while I was doing homework on a Sunday evening before school on Monday - that was a very poor choice...) so I might have some problems with timing on the draft (if people are drafting during the US evening, I'm going to be sound asleep). To avoid holding things up, I'd be really grateful if there was someone who could work with me on the draft - I'd provide the draft board and general guidance, but happy for that someone to have a fair degree of autonomy. After the first I mostly have picks late enough that I'm not gonna have much of a clue who I'm drafting anyway!

Also, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that the Rams sign Aaron Donald to a $20m per year deal (because that's what I would be doing), so will effectively add $14m to make cap commitments for this year (he's due to earn $6m).

 

These issues have happened before and another remedy is to PM your list of preferred picks to someone who can post the pick of your choice for you. If your #1 choice is picked ahead of your draft slot, the second player would come off your list, etc, etc. Usually about 3 picks would suffice. Others may/will have input on this potential dilemma.

 

The real life signings must happen prior to our "start" time deadline of February 8th. Everything after that will need to be agreed upon by both parties if it is a trade, and/or you can try to do a similar signing when our free agency begins. Unfortunately we do not forecast teams re-signing their own players, we only have the tags available for current players that will hit Unrestricted Free Agency, please see the rules pages for other designations like Restricted Free Agency. But, as I said, the timeline is for OUR start date, not the NFL start date for free agency. This is an exercise to see what we would do, and in most cases it looks different than what happens in real life. Anything that does happen in real life before we begin though, will be reflected as your "current roster".

You most certainly can re-sign them once bidding begins though!

We always have moderators available to give a list to if you won't be available to make a pick. What we do ask is during this exercise, especially during the draft, to check in as often as possible as things could speed up during any given day and even if you have a draft time slot, your pick could come up hours earlier than that. It will not be made prior to your time slot running out, but many get restless when a pick goes on the clock 8 hours early and we wait the entire time for someone to come on and make a pick.

Again, anything that would happen in real life, needs to happen prior to our official time of February 8th, otherwise you will need to try and mimic in our free agency. Remember, we are trying to grade out doing things differently (and possibly better) than the guys in real life..so there may be another GM that feels "stealing" Donald from the Rams would help his team more than allowing them to re-sign him. We do try to keep it as real as possible, but impossible to account for every transaction. Otherwise, no point in doing the exercise if we just mimic every real life move.

 

Cheers for the clarifications IrishDawg, that's really helpful.

On this one, Donald is under contract with the Rams for 2018 (and then eligible for the franchise tag for 2019), so no one will be stealing him off me - I'm just kinda putting on record that I'm gonna act as if he's had a new contract, which I assume he will get this offseason, but which will no doubt be a very long and protracted process.

 

Oh, gotcha...I didn't look up his contract. Well, again for the sake of the exercise, if he isn't signed to an extension by the 8th, it won't be reflected in this exercise and you might as well use that cap space to your advantage. We don't allow for extensions on this, I wish there were a feasible way to do that, but there really isn't. Besides, the extension won't change anything about this "one year" exercise, so I would just pretend it didn't happen unless it happens prior to the deadline.

 

Thanks for signing up and I'm looking forward to find out what you have in store for the Rams.

 

I'll be working to get some more spreadsheets up today.

 

Some of the stuff I had to edit seems to be done already as the group. I will have the updated figures soon. I gotta log in and update some Managers Assistant posts that have key information missing as well.

 

Chris,

I have a small child and was traveling during the draft last year. I tried to keep an eye on things as best I could and when I couldn't make a pick I just sent over a list of prospects ranked with how I would select them. The mods then drafted the top remaining choice on my behalf if I couldn't make my window. It worked pretty well for me.

The way the signings work is you basically sign a guy to a 1 year contract at the average value per year. If I remember correctly you are allowed to restructure 1 or 2 players to reduce their cap impact this year by 40 or 25%. Since Donald is on his 5th year option and under contract you just leave it if the Rams haven't given him a new deal by February 8 and enjoy the bargain of a top player for less than 7 million dollars. You can deal with reality when you return next year after they have given him a real contract or fight for him in FA if they didn't get it done in time.

 

Read the restructured contracts page. We are making some changes to that. Also we don't assume 1-yr contracts. It's left ambiguous unless it's a 1-yr contract by rule like a tender or vet minimum exception contract.

 

Just saw the other thread AFTER I posted this. I kind of like the Spotrac calculator idea.

I suppose I was thinking 1 year deal because what we did last year gets thrown out and you start over this year. Only the APY is really relevant for cap calculations etc... but yes lots of people announced the signings as multiple year deals once they went official so saying one year isn't quite right.

 

The non specific years deal thing is just so people can't bitch about players preferring what money for how many whatever years. Like "Why would Bell take 1 year at $17M when he could have 4 at $60M?". People are free to speculate on what they would have wanted to get when they explain their team but it isn't official or anything.

 

Cheers, that's helpful.

 

Cheers for sorting my contracts spreadsheet thing. Please can someone explain what cap space number I should be paying attention to - the Cap Space (Top 51) or the Cap Space (w/All) number. The difference is minimal (only about $500k), but I should probably pay attention. What's the difference?