FFMD

[ny92mike]

Just now, CWood21 said:

Then don't ping me.  You keep pinging me, and I'm the one whose taken the time to respond to you.  You wanted a discussion, I made my point, and as soon as I disagreed with your stance, you decided to take your ball and go home.  If you didn't want someone to disagree, you shouldn't have pinged me.

Stop pinging me.  This entire conversation is a joke.  

 

[EaglesPeteC]

[squire12]

The desire to get FFMD more participation....yet not be willing to explore the options to take something that is gaining in popularity and use the extensive parts of that product for the betterment to make FFMD an option for the 2018 offseason.

[EaglesPeteC]

I mean it's just fake offseasons

 

[Tugboat]

I still just think that inherently, any time you're trying to incorporate a "Free Agency" element into the game, you're basically just inviting whatever appointed user(s) to a power position that is inevitably going to make others upset.

Free Agency is just too complicated to "simulate" properly.  And it's too massive in shifting where team focuses are going into the draft.  Which imo...should still be the bread and butter of a "footballs future" draft oriented site like this.

[CWood21]

8 hours ago, Tugboat said:

I still just think that inherently, any time you're trying to incorporate a "Free Agency" element into the game, you're basically just inviting whatever appointed user(s) to a power position that is inevitably going to make others upset.

Free Agency is just too complicated to "simulate" properly.  And it's too massive in shifting where team focuses are going into the draft.  Which imo...should still be the bread and butter of a "footballs future" draft oriented site like this.

The first thing you have to do is admit that you're not going to eliminate all the complaints.  The goal is to mitigate the number of complaints.  No matter what you do, you're going to have someone complain that they're getting shafted, even if in reality they're not getting totally shafted.  I'll use one of the Packers as an example.  We made a competitive 4 year, $38M (w/ $10M signing bonus and $12M guaranteed) deal to Randall Cobb to sign an extension with Green Bay.  Despite being franchise tagged (which meant a very limited market), the Packers were forced to sign him to a 5 year, $57M deal (w/ $15M signing bonus and $26M guaranteed) in order to retain him and lower his cap hit.  Cobb ended up getting a 4 year, $40M deal (w/ $13M signing bonus and $13M guaranteed) in real life.  Packers fans felt they were essentially bidding against themselves, since it was unlikely that the Cobb would receive any real interest due to him being franchise tagged.  So they were forced to either let Cobb play at his franchise tag value (which IIRC was close to $12M) or go to an even higher price tag.  IIRC, that made Cobb the 4th highest paid WR in the NFL in terms of AAV at the time.  IIRC, the contract comparison the committee wanted to use was Dwayne Bowe, despite Bowe significantly outproducing Cobb at the point each signed their contract extensions.  To me, that extension should have been approved and not forced to bid against themselves.  You're not going to eliminate those issues, especially when it's an imperfect situation.  That's why when we asked teams to sign players to extension that they submit a contract comparison with them.

The Talent Agency was created in response to complaints that posters wanted a more interactive FA, and more importantly they didn't want top FA essentially become a bidding war where bids were upped every few minutes (exaggeration obviously).  So the Talent Agency was created where the top FA were plucked from the Shark Tanks, and given "agents" to act on their behalf.  Despite not knowing the contract offers aside from the one their team's proposed and the winning bid, they had no idea of other bids.  Obviously, some posters felt their offers were better and vocalized their issues.  Could it be more transparent?  Absolutely, in fact I proposed a situation where the Talent Agency was watered down (taken from the ~25 players it normally includes to ~10 players) to keep the interactive part of FA, and then go into the Google Doc but that wasn't a viable solution.  It had to be everything or nothing.

And there's the bigger elephant in the room that you have to train or teach the GMs how to use the Google Doc.  At a bare minimum, I'd probably really only feel comfortable if we had at least 4 people who were committed to this.  And that meant that they couldn't participate in FFMD on behalf of their team, something that quite frankly I can't speak for others but I can for myself that I'd like to avoid if possible.

[Scoundrel]

Y'all ain't ready to use the greatness of TCMD in FFMD so we are happily moving on. 

[ny92mike]

On 11/4/2017 at 2:02 PM, CWood21 said:

The first thing you have to do is admit that you're not going to eliminate all the complaints.  The goal is to mitigate the number of complaints.  No matter what you do, you're going to have someone complain that they're getting shafted, even if in reality they're not getting totally shafted.  I'll use one of the Packers as an example.  We made a competitive 4 year, $38M (w/ $10M signing bonus and $12M guaranteed) deal to Randall Cobb to sign an extension with Green Bay.  Despite being franchise tagged (which meant a very limited market), the Packers were forced to sign him to a 5 year, $57M deal (w/ $15M signing bonus and $26M guaranteed) in order to retain him and lower his cap hit.  Cobb ended up getting a 4 year, $40M deal (w/ $13M signing bonus and $13M guaranteed) in real life.  Packers fans felt they were essentially bidding against themselves, since it was unlikely that the Cobb would receive any real interest due to him being franchise tagged.  So they were forced to either let Cobb play at his franchise tag value (which IIRC was close to $12M) or go to an even higher price tag.  IIRC, that made Cobb the 4th highest paid WR in the NFL in terms of AAV at the time.  IIRC, the contract comparison the committee wanted to use was Dwayne Bowe, despite Bowe significantly outproducing Cobb at the point each signed their contract extensions.  To me, that extension should have been approved and not forced to bid against themselves.  You're not going to eliminate those issues, especially when it's an imperfect situation.  That's why when we asked teams to sign players to extension that they submit a contract comparison with them.

The problem with applying the franchise tag to a player is you've given them the power to lead the negotiations, once they've signed the tag they are guaranteed that money in this case 12 million.  Less than the apy deal when the offer was at 57 million.  From my little bit of research, teams typically need to exceed the tagged amount for the average per year amount.  In Cobbs case, his stats haven't been great with the one season reaching over 1000 yrds.  Not really enough to warrant the tag in my opinion.  It clearly would of been a better deal if the agent had agreed to the extension.  Why wasn't that extension offer accepted?  Was there an issue with the contract structure?  Reason I ask is because I noticed that the 57 million offer that was accepted didn't fall within the 15% annual increase rule in both year 2 and 4.  

http://www.footballsfuture.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=19279791#19279791

This isn't the first time and you weren't the only one to do this, but its just a fact that when you have that many contracts pouring into these agents, all of which are written differently than the last, there are going to be mistakes.  Mistakes if found early enough can get corrected but if found later while the mock is still in full swing carries the ability to create all kinds of issues.   

 

On 11/4/2017 at 2:02 PM, CWood21 said:

The Talent Agency was created in response to complaints that posters wanted a more interactive FA, and more importantly they didn't want top FA essentially become a bidding war where bids were upped every few minutes (exaggeration obviously).  So the Talent Agency was created where the top FA were plucked from the Shark Tanks, and given "agents" to act on their behalf.  Despite not knowing the contract offers aside from the one their team's proposed and the winning bid, they had no idea of other bids.  Obviously, some posters felt their offers were better and vocalized their issues.  Could it be more transparent?  Absolutely, in fact I proposed a situation where the Talent Agency was watered down (taken from the ~25 players it normally includes to ~10 players) to keep the interactive part of FA, and then go into the Google Doc but that wasn't a viable solution.  It had to be everything or nothing.

Right, I felt that the flaws with ffmd weren't just within the talent or shark tank but that the structure created other underlining issues that have been stated by others.  For example, 32 teams chasing 35 players in a span of 12 days.  Simply not enough food for the dogs to stay on the porch, so we venture out into trading, and trading we do, to the point that everyone calls it unrealistic.  You can't have 32 teams fighting for that small of a number and not expect us to get restless.  Now enter the shark tank, where teams are bored coming off an uneventful talent agency where they weren't able to fill their rosters, @EaglesPeteCsaid it best, Rage Bidding, which rides for 4 days before the draft starts   Just seems like a lot of game planning goes out the window during this time of bidding in favor of getting as many players as possible as well as driving the prices up for their opponents.  Which is a major complaint about the realism aspect that gm's would prefer to have comparable IRL contracts rather than bloated deals, yet the open auction's design does just the opposite in many cases in other cases the jems are snatched up for vet min deals.

This is why its all or nothing for me.  Just too many issues in my opinion with ffmd that isn't going to get corrected by just creating a google sheet to track the highest bids for the open auction.  That sheet isn't going to correct the mistakes made when generating the contracts, its not going to speed up the process of the talent agency, its not going to allow teams a fair shake over the course of the mock.  It doesn't allow for proper game planning.

 

On 11/4/2017 at 2:02 PM, CWood21 said:

And there's the bigger elephant in the room that you have to train or teach the GMs how to use the Google Doc.  At a bare minimum, I'd probably really only feel comfortable if we had at least 4 people who were committed to this.  And that meant that they couldn't participate in FFMD on behalf of their team, something that quite frankly I can't speak for others but I can for myself that I'd like to avoid if possible.

Why would these four members not be allowed to participate in ffmd, if they are teaching members how to use the docs?

 

[ET80]

If you ask @fretgod99 he'd tell you I ruined FFMD.

[fretgod99]

1 hour ago, EliteTexan80 said:

If you ask @fretgod99 he'd tell you I ruined everything I’ve ever come into contact with.

FTFY

[Hockey5djh]

On ‎10‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 2:03 PM, CWood21 said:

I've asked ny92jefferis and even to a lesser extent EaglesPeteC why they think that relabeling TCMD as FFMD is going to suddenly going to change the activity issue, and I still have yet to hear a viable answer.  All I've heard at this point is that the mock is gaining in popularity, which is completely subjective given several teams had threads in their respective team forums that didn't really get much traction.  I'm not sure anyone is writing this option off, but I've yet to hear a viable reason why they think their solution will work.

@CWood21 I'm a little late to the game but i'll speak to this from the Eagles forum standpoint. We have a TON of active members that have been here for many years that have soured on FFMD because of past issues (talent agency and whatnot). I'm not sure if this is the same across the other forums because frankly I don't visit other team forums very often. I think a re-branding of FFMD and or joint venture with TCMD would be an awesome way to introduce the same basic concept (GM-ing your teams offseason) and promote it as a site wide event.

[Hockey5djh]

On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2017 at 1:45 PM, ny92jefferis said:

In 2010, the integrity of the FFMD: Trade Council was fingered involving a rejected trade between the Bills and Eagles to which the decision decline it took 5 days.  This debate went on for several pages, with an Eagles fan calling out the trade council demanding an explanation.  The Eagles fans were so turned off by this that there were even talks of boycotting FFMD. 

Oh Jeez. I forgot about this debacle. A lot of the Eagles forum still boycotts FFMD because of it.

[Hockey5djh]

On ‎11‎/‎4‎/‎2017 at 3:02 PM, CWood21 said:

The first thing you have to do is admit that you're not going to eliminate all the complaints.  The goal is to mitigate the number of complaints.  No matter what you do, you're going to have someone complain that they're getting shafted, even if in reality they're not getting totally shafted.  I'll use one of the Packers as an example.  We made a competitive 4 year, $38M (w/ $10M signing bonus and $12M guaranteed) deal to Randall Cobb to sign an extension with Green Bay.  Despite being franchise tagged (which meant a very limited market), the Packers were forced to sign him to a 5 year, $57M deal (w/ $15M signing bonus and $26M guaranteed) in order to retain him and lower his cap hit.  Cobb ended up getting a 4 year, $40M deal (w/ $13M signing bonus and $13M guaranteed) in real life.  Packers fans felt they were essentially bidding against themselves, since it was unlikely that the Cobb would receive any real interest due to him being franchise tagged.  So they were forced to either let Cobb play at his franchise tag value (which IIRC was close to $12M) or go to an even higher price tag.  IIRC, that made Cobb the 4th highest paid WR in the NFL in terms of AAV at the time.  IIRC, the contract comparison the committee wanted to use was Dwayne Bowe, despite Bowe significantly outproducing Cobb at the point each signed their contract extensions.  To me, that extension should have been approved and not forced to bid against themselves.  You're not going to eliminate those issues, especially when it's an imperfect situation.  That's why when we asked teams to sign players to extension that they submit a contract comparison with them.

The Talent Agency was created in response to complaints that posters wanted a more interactive FA, and more importantly they didn't want top FA essentially become a bidding war where bids were upped every few minutes (exaggeration obviously).  So the Talent Agency was created where the top FA were plucked from the Shark Tanks, and given "agents" to act on their behalf.  Despite not knowing the contract offers aside from the one their team's proposed and the winning bid, they had no idea of other bids.  Obviously, some posters felt their offers were better and vocalized their issues.  Could it be more transparent?  Absolutely, in fact I proposed a situation where the Talent Agency was watered down (taken from the ~25 players it normally includes to ~10 players) to keep the interactive part of FA, and then go into the Google Doc but that wasn't a viable solution.  It had to be everything or nothing.

And there's the bigger elephant in the room that you have to train or teach the GMs how to use the Google Doc.  At a bare minimum, I'd probably really only feel comfortable if we had at least 4 people who were committed to this.  And that meant that they couldn't participate in FFMD on behalf of their team, something that quite frankly I can't speak for others but I can for myself that I'd like to avoid if possible.

Cwood I hate to say it but I think you're too invested in FFMD to be able to step back. I think FFMD got too big for its own good with contract committees and talent agencies and trade committees. As someone who has participated extensively in both FFMD and TCMD I honestly believe that TCMD has somewhat solved all of the subjective issues and evened out the contracts with his entirely different FA system because it forces teams to decide what they valued the most and how much they valued that resource rather than leaving the values of the resources up to other individuals. If your biggest complaint is teaching a bunch of teens, 20, and 30 something people how to used a google doc I think you should at least open up to the idea a little more than you have been.

[CWood21]

51 minutes ago, Hockey5djh said:

Cwood I hate to say it but I think you're too invested in FFMD to be able to step back. I think FFMD got too big for its own good with contract committees and talent agencies and trade committees. As someone who has participated extensively in both FFMD and TCMD I honestly believe that TCMD has somewhat solved all of the subjective issues and evened out the contracts with his entirely different FA system because it forces teams to decide what they valued the most and how much they valued that resource rather than leaving the values of the resources up to other individuals. If your biggest complaint is teaching a bunch of teens, 20, and 30 something people how to used a google doc I think you should at least open up to the idea a little more than you have been.

Honestly, at this point I'm probably not participating in it either way.  I'm tired of being attacked for presenting the facts as I see it, and quite frankly I'm not going to waste my time arguing over it.  EVERY year there are always a new form of complaints, and we as mods try our best to fix the issues that plague it.  I'm tired of hearing about these grand conspiracy theories, or using outdated examples to prove a point.  The 2010 trade isn't something I'm aware of off the top of my head.  Since I've been involved with FFMD from this side, we've only "nixed" one trade and that was when RG3 was traded and we nixed that because of cap ramifications.  In hindsight, we probably should have let them figure that one out.  That being said, the trade council is simply there to make sure that there is a single point to receive trade offers.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Using an outdated example to prove a point is a logical fallacy.

The overwhelming issue that seems to have been presented is that FFMD has gotten too big and too meticulous.  Do you truly believe that inserting a google doc is going to magically fix all those issues?  LIS, I'm tired of wasting my breath.  And I know that feeling is mutual amongst others.

[ny92mike]

1 hour ago, CWood21 said:

Do you truly believe that inserting a google doc is going to magically fix all those issues?

Cwood, I know we haven't seen eye to eye in this debate and things got heated which I'll admit it shouldn't have gotten to that point.  So I forgive you...  (I think that's a wink)

This isn't just about inserting a google doc that magically fixes all those issues, the docs are designed to reduce the workload and provide a way to make a complex system easier to manage for both the GM and the owner.  Take for example, the google workbook for creating structured contracts.  The light blue cells are cells that you can edit, while the other information is protected from damage. (anyone interested in taking a look and give it a go on creating a structured contract can do so, I've posted a link to the latest workbook that I'll be using for TCMD this year at the bottom of this post) 

Being able to create a structured contract in a matter of minutes, and know immediately that the contract you've created is going to pass inspection and contains no mathematical errors, is a huge bonus not only for the GM but also to the person in charge of collecting this data.  

Once the time allowed has expired for submitting the contract, the GM is locked out of the document from making any last minute changes, or changing information should they discover they've underbid, due to open discussions prior to the announcement.  A private workbook automatically collects all of the bids, sorts out the highest offers in real time, removing the need for a team of agents from even needing to sort any of it.  Because it's a numbers game, any possible subjective opinions on where a player should land based on pitches is removed, putting the trust back into the system.  

What I'm trying to say is that it isn't the google doc, its the system of rules and guidelines that provides an impartial system, that can be managed by a minimal number of members (1 to 2).  The system allows for members to focus on who they value in the free agency, rather than someone else determining the short list of talented players.  The process allows for teams to fill their rosters in a timely manner, the system allows for real game planning.

Take last years TCMD for example, the number of free agents signed during each free agent bidding round.  Being able to sign this many during each round, keeps the members entertained, imo.

FA Bidding Round	Number of Players Signed
FA BIDDING ROUND 1	64
FA BIDDING ROUND 2	62
FA BIDDING ROUND 3	68
FA BIDDING ROUND 4	56
FA BIDDING ROUND 5	39
FA BIDDING ROUND 6	28
FA BIDDING ROUND 7	27
FA BIDDING ROUND 8	22
FA BIDDING ROUND 9	16
FA BIDDING ROUND 10	8
FA BIDDING ROUND 11	7
FA BIDDING ROUND 12	8

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k-gOzenf6jf4Dro0wtiDRCQhsN6yqokmFQ5Z8Ym2be8/edit?usp=sharing  

I truly believe that the system I've created with the help of so many other members, whom enjoy these mock drafts as much as I do, voicing their opinions is awesome.  A collaboration of thoughts and ideas with the intention of making each mock draft better than the last. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RtcmJjcZzbss7Q2BugaiW-bUHu2DTR7NP3Pdtz_ZZ88/edit?usp=sharing   

Edited December 29, 2017 by ny92jefferis