Free Agency.

YEAH! The draft is done and everybody has kicked a goal.

The Free Agency Period will begin shortly, and will run for 24 hours,
closing at approximately 2am US EST. The Free Agency is to be conducted
ONLY in League Manager.

DO NOT PICK UP FREE AGENTS ON THE XBOX.

You must make bids through League manager. The bidding will be secret
ballot, but this is the first year we have used this tool on LM, so I'm
not too sure how it looks.

A couple things to remember for the remainder of the off-season.

1 - Get under cap. There are a number of teams (including the Titans!!)
over CAP. You must get under the 700 CAP, before the start of the
season. If you haven't done this by the time the Free Agency has closed,
the League Admins will drop your players until you are under (we will
of course drop sensibly, just as we drafted sensibly). Don't ask us to drop your players though, please do it yourself.

PATRIOTS
BENGALS
COLTS
TITANS
RAIDERS
GIANTS
EAGLES

2 - If you want to, now is the time to drop your scrubs. They will be put into the giant pot of Free Agents.

3 - You can only bid within your cap room and roster spots. If the Free
Agency closes and you have bid on a number of players with only a
limited CAP space or open roster spots, you will only win the bids that
you can afford.

4 - Trading. Starting from now, all trades must keep both teams under
the CAP. No trades that make a team over 700 CAP points. Trades also
must be done through a add/drop system while Free Agency is open. You
can make a trade offer through Online Franchise Madden site, or in-game.
I feel like most people are all traded out, but now is the Titans
moment to SHINE!!!!! In trades at least.

5 - Rookie Contracts. If you rookies have only a 1-year contract, email
me and I will bump it up to 3 years. No rookie would only sign for a
single year. I Call bullshit League Manager! (We did this last year)

6 - In-Season Free Agency. Once the Off-Season Free Agency closes (in 24
hours) you will find out who won the FA bids by the guys simply being
on your team or someone elses. You may be short a couple of positions,
so we will keep the FA in a bid-style running for 24 periods for a
couple of days. This means that no 1 team can swoop in and get all the
"best of the rest".

7 - Future CAP Space. We will plan to bump up the CAP in the NEXT
OFF-SEASON, as earlier reported. We were discussing numbers between
10-20 point increase, but it has yet to be decided.

I think thats everything.

*Slow clap*

Is that the enthusiastic and congratulatory slow clap, or the "Dar-rell, Dar-rell" retarded guy slow clap?

radioheadhead wrote:Is that the enthusiastic and congratulatory slow clap, or the "Dar-rell, Dar-rell" retarded guy slow clap?

Either. Both.

After some time checking out the FA pool, LM has now gone to shit on me. Neat!

Yeah LM was working. Now not

Hoping we can consider changing the way we go about Free Agency next season. Right now, you have to live in the right time zone to have any shot of signing your top choices. Staying up until 2 AM on a weeknight is not an option for me.

Is there a way to have it completely blind, so that you don't see other team's bids? Owners would simply make their one best bid for each player and hope for the best.

cmonks wrote:Hoping we can consider changing the way we go about Free Agency next season. Right now, you have to live in the right time zone to have any shot of signing your top choices. Staying up until 2 AM on a weeknight is not an option for me.

Is there a way to have it completely blind, so that you don't see other team's bids? Owners would simply make their one best bid for each player and hope for the best.

I'd be for this if the system allowed you to not lock the cap in at your bid, but one above the person you beat, eBay-style.

So if you bid on a player for 20 cap and I bid 15, it'd be nice if you then won the player for 16 instead of 20. It doesn't really reflect real life, but it sure makes things easier in the game.

I like the idea, but wouldn't people just bid really high, knowing they wouldn't have to pay that figure, just 1 more than the next highest bid?

So that would make too much sense to do Mike. Proxy bidding is what eBay uses. Basically, the second highest bid is the winner. It works since you can't just bid super high and win at a low price unless you happen to be the only one that bids super high. To me it's a fair way to help out everyone with different time zones and not create a need for last minute sniping on a player.

I don't know if it's an available feature on League Manager though? 'Cause doing it via email would be a NIGHTMARE. I really hope its possible to do, it would solve the whole free agency period for everyone to have a fair shot at bidding and not staying up at an odd hour.

I think we should do a Free Agency Draft.

(and we'll need to do just that when we get around to moving to Madden 12...)

We can still bid on the ' players right?

Yeah, hoping we can stop the bidding and open everything up.

I have only one QB on my roster. Is the the game going to let me play my Week 1 match? If not, how can I add a QB if free agency is still blocked?

- c

I played my week 1 game with one QB on the roster.

Ok, good to know it works with one QB.

Still, though, our system is flawed. There's no reason why we should have to play with our punters as our 2nd-string QBs. I bid on QBs in the first round of free agency and didn't get any of them, largely because of my time zone. Now I have to hope my QB doesn't get hurt during game 1.

- c

I cant even bid on a fa QB (or any free agents) at the moment. I have plenty of cap room but the my league manager says I have none of that available to submit a bid. I havent put any bids in on any of the free agents.

Interestingly enough, I have a QB on the trading block. . . .

When is the current phase of Free Agency going to be over?

I need to add backup QBs, I'd like to do that before my Week 2 game.

Cheers.

FYI league, I'm giving the Cards 2 crappy QB's for this week, in case McNabb gets injured. They will be dropped next week.