Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Okay, well here's a fairly significant problem then - IMO: The draft means largely dick.
There's no rookie salary scale. I'm paying the same for 5 years of a first round pick that I'd be paying for an established free agent. That seems kinda shitty, especially when there's no pre-FA extension mechanism that allows us to protect ourselves from under-performing draft picks.
It seems like it should be incredibly easy to put in a salary scale for draft picks, especially since the 'money' is largely irrelevant and the only real concern is the length of service time. It could easily just be as simple as having no true 'contract' at all on drafted players, rather giving a team 5 years of that players rights if he's a first rounder, 4 as a second rounder, 3 for anything after that.
The NFL has taken great pains to iron this out and it certainly seems that we should endeavor to do the same. Otherwise there's not much benefit to drafting well.
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I don't understand your concern.
When you draft, you pay for a contract length for each player, and you can pick that contract length. It comes out of the same pool as free agent money.
We did ponder just having a scale along the lines of 1st round pick - 7 years, 2nd round pick - 6 years, etc., but decided that it would be better to give people the extra salary points so they can either do that themselves or go shorter or longer depending on their specific needs. If we make the rookie contracts standard, we would lower the number of signing points, which limits flexibility. Teams with low first-round picks might prefer to use fewer points on their draft, for example.