Renegotiations in Front Office Football

One of the most important pieces of Front Office Football is managing your roster under the rules of the salary cap. I’ve chosen to simulate key elements of the NFL Collective Bargaining agreement, but I don’t expose the full agreement because the details require each team to employ a full-time assistant in real life.

Holding on to players is important. NFL teams tend to keep a core of essential players, most of whom will never see free agency. So renegotiating as a player heads into his “contract year” are important. The AI for Front Office Football does a fairly good job retaining key players.

Renegotiations are technically allowed during the season, with some restrictions. In real life, nothing involving the current year can be renegotiated once the regular season ends. I’m not certain if fully renegotiating a veteran to extend a contract late in the regular season is allowed, but in practice it just isn’t done. Last year, for example, the latest renegotiation/extension for any player was executed prior to Week 6, and only a handful of contracts were extended once the season began. There were also a handful of “cap-outs” early in the season, where a player takes most of his current-year salary in bonus money in order to free up some immediate cap room.

However, in-season renegotiation is possible in Front Office Football, and it apparently doesn’t work correctly. A salary change for the current year is properly handled with respect to the player himself, but an ensuing adjustment to cap room isn’t handled correctly. This was first reported as a bug a few months ago, and is on my list of issues to handle for the future.

Apparently, in many multi-player leagues, some owners take care of important renegotiations late in the season, or even after the playoffs begin. This then becomes a frustrating problem for them, as the cap is reported improperly. While the cap rules are only enforced at certain times during the season and this corrects in the new year, so it’s essentially a cosmetic error, it lessens confidence in the game handling finances properly.

I never anticipated this. When I test and play myself, I only renegotiate during the off-season. Which is not to excuse a bug – the goal is a bug-free game, regardless of the impact or how I feel about a particular strategy.

In investigating this report, I quickly realized that part of the problem is that there is essentially one major piece of AI where players analyze the value of a contract offer. And they will over-value a front-loaded contract if the front part includes money they will never see because it’s part of the current season. That’s a loop-hole. I could, in theory, close this loop-hole by fixing the bug and adding code to split the current season to the evaluation routines.

But am I doing the right thing? Analysis of NFL transactions suggests this is the wrong approach. Late-season renegotiations aren’t really a tool in the NFL GM’s toolbox, and I want to avoid unnecessary complications for players.

So I’ve decided to eliminate in-season contract renegotiations. The AI GMs don’t renegotiate in-season, so eliminating this shouldn’t have any unreasonable effect on the single-player game. I will leave the “cap-out” in place, and provide the correct adjustments. The “cap-out” is a tool most players won’t need at this stage of the year, but it may allow a team to sign a veteran free agent mid-season who otherwise wouldn’t fit under the cap.


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