Let’s break down contracts for a long franchise like ours. Understanding contracts can mean the difference between six successful years and a tough time. The main goal here is to figure out how to maintain a high-rated team while staying under the salary cap for six years.

I want to cover a few things to look out for, as well as a couple of strategies that you can implement to keep yourself competitive with what some of the top players in the league are doing. It is one thing for me to tell you how all this works, but it’s another for you to go out and actually understand it and put it to use. I am doing this because I think it’s better for all of us to be on the same page in order to keep the league as competitive as possible.

I may not cover everything that everyone does in the league, but I will cover what I know.

Keep in mind that the game changes and things may change from season to season.

There are a few things to keep in mind when sticking to your salary cap strategy:

• Figure out what is important to you. Different positions are more important to you than they may be to me. Depending on your gameplay or where your youth is, you need to identify what matters most to you. This is where you will probably spend most of your money.
• Different positions will make more money than other positions. A 99ovr RB will make less money than a 99ovr DE. Finding good deals at the more expensive positions might be something to consider.
• The salary cap does increase every year; however, so do the majority of your yearly contracts. If you look at most contracts, you will notice they make more money the next year than they did the year before. So just because the cap increases doesn’t mean that you are going to be okay.
• If you go negative, you will not be able to make moves until your team is back positive.
• When you franchise tag a player, it will allow you to make your cap negative. When you use a fifth-year option on a player, you will not be able to go negative. These are important distinctions.

Here are a few things to keep in mind about contracts:

• Bonus money is what causes the penalty. When you sign someone to a contract, if you can sign them with a smaller bonus, they will not hurt your cap penalty as much if you decide to trade them later on.
• As I said before, normal contracts pay less upfront than they do in the back end. There are ways you can take advantage of this.
• Make sure you keep in mind the players’ motivations. Some can start in the red, but there are ways you can improve that by understanding their motivation and trying to change things around to fix it. You can sign FA mentors. You can set your team to the scheme he thinks is best for him. So, take these things into account because the more motivated they are to stay with the team, the less you may need to pay them.
• Age, rating, and dev will drastically change the price of these contracts. Older players may start to ask for less money, but most of the time, players will ask for more money as they get older during their prime.

Franchise Tags and 5th Year Options:

These are tools you can use to give yourself some room to work. I do suggest that you stay away from 5th-year options unless you know for sure that the player you are using it on will want top-three money. They both work somewhat similarly, though. Essentially, you are paying the average of the top five players at that position over the last five years (who knows if they maintained that level for the entire period, but it does calculate the top five). This is important because if we overpaid a few players in the league, you may end up paying more for a player under a franchise tag than you would have if you had simply signed him. This is more of an issue with the 5th-year option since it is a choice, whereas a franchise tag might end up being the last option.

Franchise tags will allow you to go over the cap. I suggest you sign everyone you need to sign first and then apply the franchise tag. We do this so that the franchise tag doesn’t make the game think you have no more money to sign people. It won’t matter how much money you have once you sign the franchise tag, since the game lets you go over the cap.

5th-year options work similarly, but they do not let you go over the cap because they add onto the player’s original contract and are set up a year in advance. These are usually younger players who haven’t fully developed yet, so they may not have earned that top-five salary. So, why give him that contract if he wouldn’t ask for it anyway?

Something else to think about: if you purposely use the tag or option, consider how much better the player might be when it’s time to sign him the following year. Yes, you may get a deal right now, but if you do it with a younger player, he will be much more expensive next year when his rating is higher. Sometimes, this move is better suited for an older player—one who isn’t going to fade for the whole franchise. There is a chance they will want less money as they get older.

I like to use the franchise tag on players I don’t want to lose, but whom I might want to trade. That is my strategy for the first four years. Usually, these are good players who have not yet progressed the way I want them to. Kwity Paye is an example for me. He was a 28-year-old STAR DE, and I didn’t want to pay him if he was going to remain a star. I franchised him and was able to trade him without taking a penalty. If he had progressed to SuperStar, I might have kept him and paid him. The franchise tag gave me this option.

Towards the end of the franchise, I use this to keep players I know I need for the final season. I had to sign Bullock and Carlies this year, and I have 17 mil to do it. I know that I need to sign my RB, TE, and DE next year, which will be the last time I need to sign anyone for the rest of the franchise. All those guys are superstars, and I don’t know what they will ask for. I signed Bullock this year and want to tag Carlies. I might be able to actually sign Carlies this year and have a million dollars left over; however, if I tag him, then I am not locked into him. I can weigh his contract against the other three superstars next year and have an extra 10 mil to work with. I can decide who is more important to sign next year based on what they are asking for. I have left myself a cushion to trade any of the four guys I will have to sign before year six rather than signing everyone just because I can right now.

Contracts:

Half of you guys just have no idea what people are doing when they are asking for certain players from you. Seventy-five percent of the time, they are trying to get a deal on a contract and you are basically giving guys discounts on good players. I am not saying this is always a bad thing, obviously. If you have a lot of cap space and you are benefiting from a trade, then do it. The unfortunate thing is that most of you don’t realize what you are doing to your cap when you are trading certain players.

Cap Penalties and Re-signings

Cap penalties and re-signings should be one of the first things you look at when someone talks to you about a trade. What will this cost you, and can you handle that loss? Here’s a rough breakdown of how to figure it out:

• Step 1: Take the penalty amount (example: $10 mil).
• Step 2: Divide it by the number of years remaining on the contract (example: 4 years):
  $10 mil / 4 years = $2.5 mil.
• Immediate Impact: The $2.5 mil represents the penalty you take this year, affecting your current cap savings.
• Remaining Penalty: The rest of the penalty is $10 mil – $2.5 mil = $7.5 mil.
• Next Year’s Impact: The $7.5 mil will be added to your next year’s cap, affecting your ability to re-sign players for the following season.

A couple of ways to avoid this… When you sign players, give them less bonus and more salary. The penalty comes from what you pay the player in bonus. If you are willing to trade a guy, then it may not be smart to give him a long-term contract with a lot of bonus.

Some guys like to find free agents early in the year and sign them ASAP to long 7-year contracts before they turn them into good players. This is harder to do because it’s difficult to find players in free agency that you can turn into +90 players, but if you can find a good FA, then you can sign them for a couple million and have them signed through the whole franchise. FAs rated at 70 overall cost about $1–$3 mil per year to sign. Imagine filling a position with a guy you turned into a +90 overall and signing him for only $2 mil a year. This is something to look out for.

Sometimes people are looking to trade players they have to re-sign, and they are looking for players who are signed for the rest of the franchise. This is important because if you can trade for a guy with a big contract, you won’t actually pay his full salary. The team you traded him from will take that cap, and you will only be responsible for the salary for the rest of the contract. If you have to re-sign the player later, then you will be responsible for the full contract. The goal would be to find someone who is signed for many years. You will get a 40–60% discount and never worry about signing him again.

These are just things you have to do in order to create a super team. If you think you can have a 95–99 overall team in year 6 and not do any of these things, then you are just shooting yourself in the foot. Players with overall ratings of 85–99 cost millions to sign, and if you are not paying attention to your needs and just offering them anything they want, then you will never be able to field the team you want with the players you built over 6 years. These guys just cost too much money, and you have to make some moves to get some deals on contracts.

Another thing you can do is load up on draft picks—not in year 1, not in year 2, but in years 3, 4, and 5.

This is not an easy route because you will have to build a lot of players at once, and you may not have the time to catch up. You may have to do a hybrid strategy with this and anything we spoke about already, but the point is that you will never have to re-sign anyone you drafted in years 3, 4, and 5. They will always be under the rookie contract. If you can make a team out of those guys, then you can save a lot of money on contracts. The con to this is that you have to build these guys. You need to know how to build players, and you need to get what you need at all the positions on the field. It is not always that easy.

I always sign my untouchables to 7-year contracts. Once I know that I will keep a guy, I make sure I have the longest contract possible. I will not sign them to a 4-year deal if there are 4 years left in the league. Even if we are in year 4, I will still sign them to a 7-year deal. This goes back to a previous point I made: you pay less upfront than you do on the back end of the contract. The cost for each year goes down every year you add to the contract. You will still pay the same amount at the end, but early on it will be less—and I want to pay as little as possible. Stop signing people to small contracts.

There is a time and a place for small contracts. Older guys who you don’t think will make it all 6 years might be signed to smaller deals so you can see how they play for you for the first 2 years and then reassess their performance.

Cap Rollover

This gets people in trouble. This is the amount of money you did not use in the previous year that rolls over to the next year. It can get somewhat confusing. You still have a regular salary cap—and that cap does increase a little bit each year. Sometimes people think they can use all of their cap and be okay next year, but they do not realize that they had $10 mil in rollover from the previous year—meaning they were really $10 mil over the salary cap if they hadn’t had rollover. Guess what? Now you don’t, because you used it all last year, and you’ll be back to using the regular salary cap with no rollover. You might be surprised to find out you’re over the cap even though you made no moves.

Think of it like this: If the cap was $200 mil and you didn’t use $20 mil this year, the cap goes up to $210 mil, and $20 mil is rolled over. Now you have $230 mil to spend. You spend $225 mil of that $230 mil cap, leaving you with $5 mil.

But then the cap goes up to $220 mil, and you have only a $5 mil rollover while still carrying $225 mil from the year before. You might end up with no money at all to sign anyone.

At the end of every season, I like to cut everyone I will not sign who won’t give me a penalty to release. I try to increase my cap space as much as possible before the end of the year so that I have as much rollover as possible. I also try to never get to 0 cap—always leave a cushion.

Beginning of the Year Free Agent Signing

A lot of people get in trouble here. Many guys get lost in the bidding wars and end up paying players so much more than they would have ever asked for if they had been on your team. The market drives the price, but if you’re not careful, you could be locked into a player who will haunt your salary cap for years.

Remember, salary is better to go hard on than bonus. Bonus will increase the penalty, and you can get yourself stuck.

Many teams will give a player a LOT of salary for one year—way more than he is asking for. This is good if you have a lot of cap space and want the player on your team so that you have first dibs on him next season. He may ask for a regular contract rather than the pumped-up salary you would have paid while bidding against other teams.

How does this look? Maybe the player wants $7 mil in bonus and $5 mil in salary over 5 years. If the player is good, you might have teams offering him $10 mil in salary and $15 mil in bonus, which will give them a green bar. Some teams will instead give the player a one-year contract for $20 mil in salary and maybe $5 mil bonus. This can also get you a green bar offer. He won’t like the number of years, but he will love the amount of money. This contract will take up space this year, but it won’t matter if you have the space. Now that he’s on your team, you can re-sign him for a non-competitive offer or just let him go. You can even trade him since his bonus is so low—it won’t hurt you that much.

Restructuring Contracts:

This is a new feature that a lot of us are still figuring out. I personally do not touch this until the end of the year. I plan on restructuring everyone I can at the end of year 5 so I can sign the players I want. If I wait until then to use the restructuring option, I will never have to pay the consequences for using it. Remember, when you use this option, you will clear space for this season, but you will be adding more money to all the other years on the contract. You might be okay today, but if you overuse it, you might find that you have less money to sign players in the future. By using it at the last possible moment, I can free up cap space when I really need it, and all the money that gets pushed down the road will hit me after year 6—which is fine, since we won’t be playing in a year 7.

Summary…

This is basically everything I know about contract stuff. A lot of what I pointed out are things many of us have done for years and have probably held you back by not knowing better. I want to give everyone the same chance to start off on the right foot each year. It’s up to you to read all this and pay attention. You still won’t get it all right away… this stuff took all of us years to figure out. There is still nuance to a lot of this, too—I didn’t give you the keys to the castle. This should help you when you’re trading and managing your team.