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AllenMac

Salary Cap

February 13, 2011 at 06:47PM View BBCode

Your total team salary is 133322 which is 5322 over the league salary cap of 128000. Although the cap is not enforced during the preseason, you must bring your total salary below the cap before the first game of the regular season starts or you risk having players automatically waived.
The draft was just completed and a single pre-season game has been played in the Terry Bradshaw League, and I have this message.

Which players count against the cap?

Only the active players? Or inactive players as well?

How does ABE determine which players "automatically waived"?
Penguin

February 13, 2011 at 06:49PM View BBCode

Both active and inactive players count towards the cap. As for who is automatically waived, I'm not sure how that's decided, but the easy solution is to not leave that up to ABE and meet the salary cap or roster requirement
thatrogue

So I have a fundamental problem with...

February 15, 2011 at 10:53AM View BBCode

...punishing a team for drafting well.

After seeing the results of my first draft, I signed up for a second team and revised my bidding strategy. It seems to have worked a little too well as [url=http://football.simdynasty.com/roster.jsp?teamid=645]my team is 30824 over the cap[/url]. Normal cuts won't get this team below the cap.

If you force an owner to drop an expensive player (or two) in addition to reducing my roster size down to 53, then someone else undeservedly gets one or more good to great players via free agency. And, with the significant size of rosters, executing a reasonable trade during the four "real time" days of preseason could be difficult. And, that's not to mention the uproar that could occur if an owner in a pay league goes on vacation over a long weekend and returns to find his #1 drafted QB and #1 drafted CB cut by the game engine to get the team under the cap.

I'm not sure how to fix this, but punishing a team for being too good (if we equate salary to value) from the beginning does not sound right.
phen0m

February 15, 2011 at 01:38PM View BBCode

yea same thing happened to me, ive cut down my squad to the bare minimum of 45 players (including cutting some good backups in the $2,000 range) and im still over 10k over the cap. Im pretty much going to have to cut a few integral parts of my team to get under.
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 02:39PM View BBCode

I think being so far over the cap implies that the rest of your league had lousy drafts and there will not be competitive balance. There has been discussion elsewhere about league preferences in seasonal leagues that would set the cap so high as to make it not affect anyone. However, I figure that in the pay leagues, more people will set their draft settings more carefully, and this won't happen.

At 128000 cap space, you can afford to pay 45 players an average of about $2800 each. 53 players would still get around $2400 each. The median salary in my league of the top paid 848 players (making more than $667) is only $1602. I picked 848 because that would be 53 players times 16 teams . This means half of these "rosterable" players make more than this and half make less. If you have a team where 45 players still busts you cap, than there must be multiple other teams with mostly "nonrosterable" waiver wire fodder.

This is the purpose of the salary cap. Anybody making much more than the league median should most likely be a starter somewhere. After all, if you only took the players at the median or higher, you would only get around 26-27 players per team, which would barely be enough for starters alone! How many guys do you have at over the league "rosterable" median of around $1600? If two thirds of your guys cost that much, it is a waste, statistically. So, you SHOULD dump/trade some of your expensive backups that won't play so that they can play elsewhere and replace them with some adequate depth that cost 1000 or less. There is no reason to keep only 45 guys on your team.

If you are looking for a place to fix something, I can tell you that the salary cap isn't the place. It isn't broken at all.
Hamilton2

February 15, 2011 at 03:10PM View BBCode

I think that the overall league talent impacts the cap significantly. I've seen leagues where guys get 30,000+ over the cap, and other leagues where the "best" team after the draft is still 4,000 under the cap with 80 players on his roster. I definitely think the salary cap needs some work. Maybe there would be a way for the football engine to recalculate the cap to be a league-specific number based on overall league talent? Maybe I don't understand how the cap works.

(Also, the special teams players get paid waaaaaaay too much. Backup CB's and WR's and LB's who also happen to have decent hands and a KR rating of C+ or higher tend to get huge salary bumps. That is the thing I would start with adjusting.)
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 03:46PM View BBCode

Hmmm, I would have thought that the total salary across leagues was pretty similar. I'm going to ask celemantia to send me spreadsheets from the leagues and I will do some statistical analysis, but in the meantime, is it possible to send me the link to the player ranking page of some of the leagues you are referring to? I'm not sure if it is possible to view other league data...

If not, I would sort by Salary on the ALL player rankings and see if the 424th highest paid player differs much from $1600. In my league, that where we stand. I personally have 25 players making more than the league median salary of $1600, which just a little less than half (I have 53 now), and I am 6500 below the cap.

The way I see it, 2 factors could force the salary cap into consideration

1.) you have a strong majority of players making more than the league median

2.) your league has a relatively high median (424th highest paid player)


I would really like to do a more complete analysis (I am a PhD Statistics student) with means (averages) and maybe salary histograms from league to league. That would help greatly in deciding whether the salary cap needs to be variable or fixed, and whether it should be higher or lower.
Hamilton2

February 15, 2011 at 03:54PM View BBCode

You know what ... I think that Chris mentioned that the salaries are set "relative to league talent" already ... so I'm probably completely wrong in my analysis. Maybe some leagues just have people who really do very, very well in the initial draft. LOL

The 424th highest paid player in the RMFL is at 1540. This is a league that doesn't have any teams with salary cap issues. (As far as I can tell, anyway.)

I have two other leagues drafting today and can provide that data after the draft.

I'd be interested to know what the median salary in some other leagues is.
phen0m

February 15, 2011 at 04:27PM View BBCode

Originally posted by zoom
Hmmm, I would have thought that the total salary across leagues was pretty similar. I'm going to ask celemantia to send me spreadsheets from the leagues and I will do some statistical analysis, but in the meantime, is it possible to send me the link to the player ranking page of some of the leagues you are referring to? I'm not sure if it is possible to view other league data...

If not, I would sort by Salary on the ALL player rankings and see if the 424th highest paid player differs much from $1600. In my league, that where we stand. I personally have 25 players making more than the league median salary of $1600, which just a little less than half (I have 53 now), and I am 6500 below the cap.

The way I see it, 2 factors could force the salary cap into consideration

1.) you have a strong majority of players making more than the league median

2.) your league has a relatively high median (424th highest paid player)


I would really like to do a more complete analysis (I am a PhD Statistics student) with means (averages) and maybe salary histograms from league to league. That would help greatly in deciding whether the salary cap needs to be variable or fixed, and whether it should be higher or lower.


I think the biggest reason of being way over the cap is drafting 'well' and getting the #1 or #2 pick at a few different positions. The top player at a position usually makes around 2k or so more than the 2nd or 3rd best players at that position and sometimes even up to 5k more. Even though most of the time they arent even all that much better than the rest.

All this probably will be a moot point anyway, it probably wouldnt happen in a pay league were most people wouldnt just leave all their draft bids on 100 and 1 person could get a bunch of #1 picks. And i think most pay leagues will end up not using the salary cap anyway.
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 04:34PM View BBCode

Originally posted by phen0m

I think the biggest reason of being way over the cap is drafting 'well' and getting the #1 or #2 pick at a few different positions. The top player at a position usually makes around 2k or so more than the 2nd or 3rd best players at that position and sometimes even up to 5k more. Even though most of the time they arent even all that much better than the rest.

All this probably will be a moot point anyway, it probably wouldnt happen in a pay league were most people wouldnt just leave all their draft bids on 100 and 1 person could get a bunch of #1 picks. And i think most pay leagues will end up not using the salary cap anyway.


I agree, that's why I would like to look at the data more carefully. I would guess that a larger proportion is spent on the top few players than on anyone else. Personally, I did set my draft preferences to pick high in "thin" positions and towards the middle in "deep" positions because I was worried about the cap and I also didn't want to get stuck with lousy players in a few positions. However, that was just intuition. Now I'm 6000 under the cap and clearly could have gotten at least 1 more great player.
Tutori

February 15, 2011 at 04:52PM View BBCode

Median salary means absolutely nothing in this discussion. Or, well, almost nothing. Basically, if my median salary = salary cap / 53, then I am over the cap, so I'm thinking we need to look at the average salary of the top (53 *16) players.

I am one of the players that was significantly over the cap with my initial draft, I ended up trading my #1 DE for a top 20 DE and a top 5 safety to get under the cap with 53 players (as compared to the 42 I would have needed otherwise). I had the #1 DE and DT pick, but mostly I picked in the top 1/3 for everything except QB, RB, #1 CB, and special teams positions. I think it has more to do with the overall strength top to bottom than it is with any one or two guys. Yeah, that's how I fixed my problem, but I don't think that's what got me there in the first place. If I'm 10-15% more expensive at 45 positions, that's going to have a bigger impact on my overall salary than a handful of guys at the top.
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 07:34PM View BBCode

I agree that median doesn't tell the whole story, but your argument actually makes a stronger point for the median than for any other statistic. A few very highly paid players at the top of the pay scale would drastically push the mean salary upwards, higher than the median. If the few highly paid players at the top, in your opinion, don't make as much of a difference, than the median is a better statistic because it is not moved significantly by a few players.

All that being said, I used the median because it is easy to find (the middle number). I would need a spreadsheet of the data to compute the mean of hundreds of players. I actually think looking at median, mean, and a histogram (or bar graph) taken together would be more complete information.

By the way, I looked a little more closely, and 2/3 of the "rosterable" players, or top 848 paid players in my league, make less than $2415, which is the salary cap of 128000 divided by 53.

66 make 5000 or more
47 make 6000 or more
33 make 7000 or more
20 make 8000 or more
10 make 9000 or more
6 make 10000 or more, of these we have 3 at 12000+

As the salaries get smaller, the numbers of players goes up. My hand drawn histogram shows a steady decline in numbers of players at each salary level. So, this is not a bell curve. We have the a large number of players making near the minimum salary. What this implies to me is that the median is the best indicator of the true salaries of a typical player because very few players will have a salary anywhere near the average.
dirtdevil

February 15, 2011 at 07:38PM View BBCode

Originally posted by zoom
I agree that median doesn't tell the whole story, but your argument actually makes a stronger point for the median than for any other statistic.

i don't know if this is the case, but outside of the realm of formal Statistics (as opposed to statistics) not everyone knows the difference between mean and median.
Bowerz101

February 15, 2011 at 07:38PM View BBCode

Remember, you only have to carry 24 players on your roster and suffer no penalty from having less than 45 players. I was over 13k over the cap and just cut all my inactives and got under the cap. Its not ideal in the long term but it helps you keep all the players you drafted.
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 07:51PM View BBCode

Originally posted by dirtdevil
Originally posted by zoom
I agree that median doesn't tell the whole story, but your argument actually makes a stronger point for the median than for any other statistic.

i don't know if this is the case, but outside of the realm of formal Statistics (as opposed to statistics) not everyone knows the difference between mean and median.


Ok, well the bottom line is this (I only looked at the top 848 paid players, given 53 roster spots times 16 teams):

Based on my histogram for my league, I figured out the mean (which is the total salaries of all players divided by the number of players) to be between $1734 and $2733. I can be more precise if I have a spreadsheet of all of the data, but I think its safe to say that the mean salary is a little over $2000

The median is simply the salary of the 424th highest paid player (or to be precise the average of the 424th and 425th players) or about $1600

The reason the mean is higher than the median is because a few players make a lot more then the bulk of the players. The average value for a player on a team using every last dollar of cap space would be 128000/53 or about $2400. This is probably higher (slightly) than the mean salary of typical players. It is definitely higher than the median salary of typical players.

I wonder, based on this, whether the cap was set up to match the mean salary of "rosterable" players.

In any case, it is pretty clear that we can find quality players a lot closer to $2400 than to $12500. This is a cost/benefit analysis. If you have 2 or 3 $9000+ guys as well as several $6000 guys, I would argue that you did not have a good draft because you could have found a very similar player that cost a lot less (since most players are closer 1600 and the average salary is only around 2100 to 2400. It would imply that you will end up with big holes in your roster elsewhere, since you would need a lot of cheap guys to make up for a few high salaried guys.

[Edited on 2-15-2011 by zoom]
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 07:55PM View BBCode

Originally posted by Bowerz101
Remember, you only have to carry 24 players on your roster and suffer no penalty from having less than 45 players. I was over 13k over the cap and just cut all my inactives and got under the cap. Its not ideal in the long term but it helps you keep all the players you drafted.


Thats true. If you happen to have high stamina guys you might be able to get away having just a single backup for multiple positions also.
thatrogue

February 15, 2011 at 07:56PM View BBCode

Originally posted by zoom
I think being so far over the cap implies that the rest of your league had lousy drafts and there will not be competitive balance. There has been discussion elsewhere about league preferences in seasonal leagues that would set the cap so high as to make it not affect anyone. However, I figure that in the pay leagues, more people will set their draft settings more carefully, and this won't happen.


...

This is the purpose of the salary cap. Anybody making much more than the league median should most likely be a starter somewhere. After all, if you only took the players at the median or higher, you would only get around 26-27 players per team, which would barely be enough for starters alone! How many guys do you have at over the league "rosterable" median of around $1600? If two thirds of your guys cost that much, it is a waste, statistically. So, you SHOULD dump/trade some of your expensive backups that won't play so that they can play elsewhere and replace them with some adequate depth that cost 1000 or less. There is no reason to keep only 45 guys on your team.

If you are looking for a place to fix something, I can tell you that the salary cap isn't the place. It isn't broken at all.


This game is called SimDynasty Football...not Competitive Balance Football. The object is to do everything you can to build a winning team. If an owner does that by ranking the draft in a way that results in getting a above average amount of top tier talent, forcing them to give it away is problematic.

Salary caps make sense in terms of controlling bids for available talent. Limiting how long a player can play on a team makes sense in terms of refreshing available talent. But a salary cap that prevents a player drafted in an initial draft from playing on the team that drafted it seems to unfairly penalize an owner that did nothing wrong (i.e. said owner did not intentionally exceed the cap...but instead just happened to do good work in bidding on positions and ranking the players) .

Wait until a team has to give away talent, then loses a spot in the playoffs to the very team that received said talent. That will be a kick in the gut, for sure.

[Edited on 2-15-2011 by thatrogue]
Bowerz101

February 15, 2011 at 08:05PM View BBCode

Salary cap isnt perfect but its not obnoxiously out of whack. Just cut all of your unused players and you will get under. I think mainly its the very expensive kickers and punters that are kind of odd.

The fundamentals of the code are solid from what I can gather. Just allow the site to get everything straight and then join a non-salary cap league that will most likely be available.
dirtdevil

February 15, 2011 at 08:06PM View BBCode

i can see your point d'aren, although i don't think i agree with it. but assuming for a minute that i do, what then, would you suggest? if we allow guys to go over the cap, what's the point of a cap? in a long-term league that owner is going to be able to trade those assets for draft picks or something, and get some future help that way. that route isn't available to us right now, but we have to formulate the site as if it is, because it will be down the road. even if the owner who drafted better has to trade some of the fruits of his labour to a team that wasn't good enough to do it, in a long-term league that will still put him at a distinct advantage over that team.
phen0m

February 15, 2011 at 08:15PM View BBCode

Originally posted by Bowerz101
Remember, you only have to carry 24 players on your roster and suffer no penalty from having less than 45 players. I was over 13k over the cap and just cut all my inactives and got under the cap. Its not ideal in the long term but it helps you keep all the players you drafted.


Thanks, didnt realize that. Finally got below the cap by cutting my squad down to 36 players. Wonder what will happen if i get a bunch of injuries? might have a QB playing DT or something lol
redcped

February 15, 2011 at 08:15PM View BBCode

If anyone is still interested in these numbers, the Brett Favre League's #424 player makes $1443.

Any other numbers that would be useful?
Bowerz101

February 15, 2011 at 08:34PM View formatted

You are viewing the raw post code; this allows you to copy a message with BBCode formatting intact.
Just make sure you have plenty of O-Line depth...seems to be a huge factor in an offenses success throughout 4 quarters.
zoom

February 15, 2011 at 08:50PM View BBCode

Originally posted by redcped
If anyone is still interested in these numbers, the Brett Favre League's #424 player makes $1443.

Any other numbers that would be useful?


No, getting any more information out of the league would be time consuming. In my league I also found home many guys in the top 848 had salaries below 1000, 1000-1999,2000-2999, etc to eventually get a rough estimate of the average just to show that it is higher than the median and also not as comparable to a typical player.

If your league is similar to mine, then I would expect you get numbers similar to these:

under 1000 -> 242
1000-1999 -> 253
2000-2999 -> 140
3000-3999 -> 99
4000-4999 -> 47
5000-5999 -> 19
6000-6999 -> 14
7000-7999 -> 13
8000-8999 -> 10
9000-9999 -> 4
10k-10999 -> 2
11k-11999 -> 1
12k-12999 -> 3

I think I messed up somewhere because I only get a total of 847 above, but its pretty much like this in the Johnny Unitas league. Notice how the larger group of players falls closer to a value of $1600 (median) than to our average of a little over $2000 (mean). A more detailed table with smaller intervals (plotted graphically) would be better, but it takes too long and would reveal much the same information in my opinion.
redcped

February 15, 2011 at 10:11PM View BBCode

under 1000 -> 278
1000-1999 -> 269
2000-2999 -> 128
3000-3999 -> 66
4000-4999 -> 36
5000-5999 -> 26
6000-6999 -> 17
7000-7999 -> 8
8000-8999 -> 8
9000-9999 -> 4
10k-10999 -> 4
11k-11999 -> 2
12k-12999 -> 2
thatrogue

February 15, 2011 at 11:37PM View BBCode

Originally posted by dirtdevil
i can see your point d'aren, although i don't think i agree with it. but assuming for a minute that i do, what then, would you suggest? if we allow guys to go over the cap, what's the point of a cap? in a long-term league that owner is going to be able to trade those assets for draft picks or something, and get some future help that way. that route isn't available to us right now, but we have to formulate the site as if it is, because it will be down the road. even if the owner who drafted better has to trade some of the fruits of his labour to a team that wasn't good enough to do it, in a long-term league that will still put him at a distinct advantage over that team.
I don't have a good answer...I was pointing out a potential problem. As private leagues can set their own prefs, I agree that the issue will most likely arise in the football equivalent of Dynasty Leagues. A number of Dynasty Leagues have less experienced owners that make sub-optimal amateur draft picks...and tend to be dominated by a few astute owners. I'm just anticipating that cap problems resulting from draft bidding/ranking discrepancies may be met with disatisfaction.

$30K in cap room is a lot to clear. I could drop all 25 of my current inactive players and still not hit that number. With regards to trades, without understanding the cap number on potential draftees, it's hard to know if that will be a helpful option. In the trial salary league, some owners try to squeeze their fellow owners who are having cap troubles (and there is nothing wrong with that, by the way...it's part of the game) by offering lower than normal market value exchanges. Plus, if I deal away a number of second tier players and my $11K CB to barely squeeze under the cap, it won't help me to get a good draft pick in return if that draftee carries an $8K or $9K cap number. (Unless I trade away my own draft pick too, to avoid their cap impact.)

Again, I'm not sure how I would rectify the situation if I were designing the game. I'm curious to see what other people think, though.

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