New Rookie Wage Scale

*THIS RULE HAS PASSED

Greetings and salutations, fellow Immersion owners. I hope this letter finds you well. We are living in strange times indeed, as I pen this from home, a place I haven’t left in about 2 weeks, thanks to the global pandemic known as COVID-19.

With nothing better to do (I’m on spring break and I can’t go anywhere), I decided now would be as good a time as any to present my latest rule change proposal.

Last year we voted to approve new RFA rules. Instead of bidding on RFAs, owners now have the option of adding a 4th year of service for a 25% raise. Additionally, we changed the rule to state you can only franchise tag a player once instead of twice (those owners who had planned on doing 2 tags can still do their second tag this year, but after that we’ll be on a one-and-done model).

The idea behind this new rule is to make free agents available sooner, which will in turn make the auction more fun. Let’s get some real juice in the system by making these drafted studs available after 5 years instead of 8 (potentially).

When we drafted last year, Adam and I had a lot of fun at the expense of owners who drafted defensive tackles and cornerbacks. Not because they are inherently bad (well, you need to start one of each anyway), but because the price was too high. $4 for a fourth rounder or $3 for a fifth rounder when you could (and should) just pick one up off the scrap heap for $1 just doesn’t make sense, financially.

We tended to agree that after the first couple of rounds, the pickings get slim. If you look back over all of the drafts, players of value rarely come out of the later rounds. It happens once in a while, but for the most part, the good players are the ones picked in those first couple of rounds.

And with salary structures being what they are, certain positions, like the aforementioned CBs and DTs, should never be drafted. Likewise for Ks and Ps of course.

But what if you could use the draft to fill some of those less glamorous positional needs? Then the later rounds wouldn’t be wasted on useless flyers like LB Dakota Allen (haha, burn). If we could restructure the salary schedule so that 5th rounders only got paid $1, then I think those later rounds could be more interesting (and useful).

I also thought of a new way to use the 4th-year option. This, too, is in service of juicing the free agent auction, by making more players available sooner. Here’s what I propose: have the fourth year option available to players drafted in the first and second rounds only. This adds some caché to those first 24 picks, and encourages owners to secure them. Now if I’ve got a late second round pick, I might not be spending it on a linebacker who may or may not start early. Instead, I might use it on a wide receiver in hopes of getting that cheap fourth year.

So what happens to players drafted in rounds 3-5? Nothing much is different. They get a 3 year contract. They will also be cheaper in my new salary structure. You get three years of cheap service and then they become unrestricted free agents. Did you find a real stud? Cool, apply the franchise tag and pay the man. Or take your chances on the open market. But those guys that might have been decent plug-in players for a cheap price become available to everyone, and the auction is more fun that way.

And, as an addendum to this, I’d also propose cleaning up a couple of little loopholes that allow owners to keep their players off the open market. Last year we agreed teams could only franchise tag a player once. I would like to extend this further to say that you can’t trade a player with an expiring contract after the week 10 trade deadline just so that another team can apply the franchise tag.

What I mean is this: I drafted Julio Jones, then kept him for 3 years on his rookie deal. Then I matched his RFA offer, and kept him 3 more years. Then I franchise tagged him twice. Then, last offseason, I traded him to Enright so he could franchise tag him. Julio Jones has been off the market for 9 years, which is longer than most players’ careers.

In my proposal, if I wanted to unload Julio because I knew I couldn’t keep him the next year, I’d have to do it during the season and thus feel a little bit of the impact of not having him.

Related to this, if you restructure a player’s contract because he has underperformed, then a new team can’t later restructure that same contract. Once a contract is restructured, that’s the contract, regardless of whether you trade the player or not. This happened with Aaron Rodgers, where I had restructured him once, and he was getting too expensive for me. I couldn’t restructure him again, so I traded him to Adam (I think?) who then restructured him because he hadn’t before. This kept Rodgers off the free agent market, as Adam extended him even further.

I believe that if were to implement these tweaks, we’d still be rewarding owners for good drafting and we’d make the later rounds of the draft more useful and interesting. Furthermore, each of these tweaks serves the purpose of making more (and better) players available for the free agent auction.

In terms of implementation, we are already in the process of exercising options on all of our drafted players from three years ago, regardless of the round they were drafted in. I’m cool with that.

In fact, we could allow players to option all their draft picks until this year’s rookie class reaches the age of maturity in 2023, and then begin implementing the 1st and 2nd round only rule. Alternately, I’m fine with making only 1st and 2nd rounders eligible starting next year.

As for restructuring contracts, the once-restructured-always-restructured rule would help me immensely from a commissioner standpoint. Adam was talking about restructuring Devonta Freeman and I was all like, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, his contract is already underlined?” Then I saw that it was actually Enright who restructured Freeman, and then later traded him to Adam, who theoretically could restructure him again. I’m spared all that confusion and guys can’t just get passed from team to team, constantly extended, and never hit the open market.

Click over on the next tab to see the proposed salary scale, and then watch Adam and Josh discuss it on the Immersion Cast.