It's going to be pretty straightforward for the 2012 system. We'll put a list of available players out there and will have open bidding. If you put in a bid and it's not beaten in a particular amount of time (72 hours as a current proposal), the player will be yours.

There'll be a slight twist on that after this season, but that's the system.

So, no chance of a list?

Give me another week (roughly) and I'll have the list of players for free agency. I'm guessing that there will be a few gems, but not a lot of depth on that list. Things will get more interesting in for free agency in January.

Tiebreaker? Long-term ramifications?

Because I'd be stunned if there weren't a number of teams that simply blow out the bid scale on Victor Cruz.

I presume you can't bid the same dollar twice, right? So I guess that's one way to keep folks from throwing everything at Cruz; if they lose, they've tied up their bid money and can't win on anyone else.

Thanks for explanation gentleman.

Is it an open bid system, where everyone knows how much each team has bid on said player, or is it more of a silent auction deal, where you put up your max bid, not knowing how much everyone else put up?

Those $1300 salary points have to be used to sign all of your other players too. The bigger the contract you give to a player, the longer the contract. If your star comes up in free agency, you have to top all bid offers to keep him. So strong teams are going to have a lot of their salary points tied up in guys already on the roster. You're going to have to evaluate Victor Cruz in relation to the value of all other players.

Open bid. You'll know what the high bid is and who made it. The going, going, gone period will last 72 hours to give people a chance to bid on a player they want.

Oh, and in league 2, the previous owner of the Los Angeles Knights was savy/lucky enough to draft him. He's not even on the market.

Ah...so at some point our own players end up FA eligible, eh?

Well shit...I'll have to actually pay for Aaron Rodgers some day. That makes me a sad panda...

How do you know if any of your players are FA eligible?

When we introduce the system, you will assign contract terms to your current players, with time periods ranging from 1 to 7 years. As you draft rookies you will do the same for them, but in both cases you'll only have a finite amount of cash, which means that you can't just sign everyone to a long term contract.

Our goal is to make a free agent system that's easy to use, so when you sign free agents their contract length will be based on the amount of money that you bid for them. If you sign a guy cheap (i.e., he's not in demand), it'll be a one-year contract. If you win a massive bidding war for a big star and pay through the nose, he'll have a seven-year contract. The beauty of this system will be that once guys are signed you won't have to worry about their salary costs, and you'll never have to cut someone for salary cap reasons. If you want to cut a guy before his contract is up, that's fine. It just means that you wasted a little money signing him.

For $1000 of your salary points, you will be able to tie him up until the ripe old age of 35.

Man, someone was a genius. I wonder who.

I don't keep track of who owned what team when, but I know that this one guy was making picks for a bunch of teams in league 2.

T minus 3 hours til the draft! Get them picks in early and often! Keep a PFF tab open!