Tech Corner: Early Off-season Additions
Rookie Option
You can exercise the option on 1st round rookie picks for the average of the top 10 salaries at the position, similar to what happens in the NFL. This occurs immediately in the off-season during the same time that you place your franchise tag. The key is that this happens the off-season one year before their contract expires. This means during the off-season before the 2018 season, if you had 3 year rookie contracts that the 2016 rookies like Zeke and Michael Thomas would have been available for the option. If you had 4 year rookies then the 2015 rookies of Gurley and Gordon would have been available. Some other quick hitting items on the option:
- It’s a league setting that is ‘off’ by default. Your commish will need to turn on the setting in the ‘Draft’ panel of the league settings.
- Limited to just 1st round picks
- It doesn’t matter if you’re team drafted them or not. All that matters is if they are on their draft rookie contract, whether you traded for them or picked them yourself. If they were picked up in FAAB there’s no rookie option.
- There’s no limit to the number of options you can exercise. If they fit all the requirements above you can give them the option.
- Unlike in the NFL, we are treating these options just like any other contract on the platform which means that the option is 50% guaranteed. If your league decides they like to follow how the NFL does it, then the commish can easily remove the contract when the time comes from the commish tools with no cap hit.
Off-season/Tag Extension
You can extend the player that you used your franchise tag on in the off-season. The first step is finalizing your tag choice, either through the ‘Finalize Tag’ functionality or just waiting for 3 days before your rookie draft. Only after you finalize the tag will you be able to see the extension option. From that point, you have until 3 days before your league auction to extend the tagged player or not. Here’s a few other things you should know:
- A teams number of extensions used is reset with our site rollover that just happened in February. This means that last seasons extensions don’t affect your ability to extend this off-season or during the up-coming season.
- The flip side of that is that if your league only allows one extension and you use it on your tagged player in the off-season, no in-season extensions for your team in the upcoming season.
- Players do use their tagged salary as a bit of a starting point. Don’t tag someone whose not worth the tag thinking that their extension offer will be much lower…you’ll be sorely disappointed.
- Unlike the in-season extension, these values don’t fluctuate week to week. These extensions also take effect in the upcoming season basically replacing their franchise tag salary.
- You can trade for a tagged player and then extend them yourself as long as it’s before the auction as mentioned above. You don’t have to be the team that tags the player to extend them.
