* This Rule Has Passed *
So, last year we spent quite a bit of time going back and forth about the slotted salary schedule for drafted rookies. Then we changed the number of rounds in the rookie draft from seven to five. I would prefer not to re-litigate the whole thing from the beginning, so I propose using the same wage scale as last year. The only difference is that we lop the last two rounds off. In other words, players drafted in the fifth and last round of the draft would make $3. You can still get players for less than $3 in free agency. The salary schedule looks like this (if you want full screen mode, then just follow this link: )
Do you agree?
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That makes a ton of sense. The revamped slotted schedule is already in favor of the owners, so $3 for your 5th round pick is totally reasonable.
There will be a lot of crossed fingers for Your-Favorite-Sleeper to squeak by that last pick in the 5th round and onto the UDFA market!
Right! I think it just makes for another market…that last bit of blind bidding after the draft to round out rosters is all the more intriguing. You don’t want to bid “draft money” for an undrafted guy, but your $2.12 bid might not be enough!
Ok, I just voted for it. But I also just thought of another possible version, that’s probably too complicated. I’m not necessarily advocating it, but just thought I’d throw it out there:
Instead of fixed salaries at each draft slot, there are fixed percentages, and those percentages would be applied against some value by position. For example, let’s make that “value” the average of the top five salaries at that position. The first round pick would then be some fixed percentage (for this example, lets say, 25%). If the first round pick was used on a RB, then that player would get 25% of the mean of the top 5 RBs from the previous year. But if the first pick were a LB, then it would be 25% of the top five LB from the previous year. The second pick could be 22.5%, then 22, and so on.
I haven’t really given any thought to the actual percentages that would make sense, nor to whether the “top 5” is a good benchmark. I’m just thinking that now, since the salary is guaranteed, then there’s no point in drafting particular positions (i.e., CB) very early in the draft, and that RBs and QBs are probably most likely to be taken there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it sort of imposes a pattern on the draft. With my proposal, a team that really needed good LB or CB might take one with the first pick, and not have to worry about paying him $19 in year three. Just seems like it would increase the flexibility of the draft a little.
I know that’s not really a big deal, so I’m not really gung-ho about this. I know it is in the NBA, but is the NFL draft graduated like this? Is the #1 pick this year, if an OT or DT, going to get the same contract as Andrew Luck did last year? I have no problem if this proposal gets summarily ignored…
Another way to say it is that great RBs and QBs won’t be so cheap, and other positions won’t be so expensive (in the first round, at least).
Yeah, Jonathan, I threw something like that out there last year. I think the idea has merit. I don’t exactly recall how I got my numbers, but it was something akin to what you just proposed.
I do think that the “workaround” for teams that don’t need a RB or QB is that they trade down for players and/or more picks (or future picks.)