Question about releasing players with reserve era rules

[noelypants]

Trying to set up a college league. I want to kick it off with a big free agency where every player is on the market so the big-budget schools can have rosters that reflect their financial advantage (the randomly generated rosters give every player the same contract, and don't distribute the best players to the top schools). Problem is, when I release everybody from their rosters using the league functions screen, it doesn't send the payrolls down to zero, making it impossible for the smaller schools to sign a full roster.


I am using reserve era rules with no guaranteed contracts, so shouldn't releasing all players lower the payrolls to zero?

[Syd Thrift]

There’s an option to set the amount of salary a player is owed on releasing them. In the current CBA that amount is 100% but you can set it to something lower. 0% might work for your league; I do think that that number wasn’t automatically always at 0 during the reserve era - later on especially I’m almost positive teams had to pay off a player some amount, if not 100%. The reserve era didn’t really cover that anyway; it was all about teams interpreting a part of the CBA to mean that they could sign players to their previous contract in perpetuity.

[MathBandit]

Could you go into Commissioner Mode and just set every player to be a FA?

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

There’s an option to set the amount of salary a player is owed on releasing them. In the current CBA that amount is 100% but you can set it to something lower. 0% might work for your league; I do think that that number wasn’t automatically always at 0 during the reserve era - later on especially I’m almost positive teams had to pay off a player some amount, if not 100%. The reserve era didn’t really cover that anyway; it was all about teams interpreting a part of the CBA to mean that they could sign players to their previous contract in perpetuity.

The standard reserve-era contract prior to 1947* allowed the team to release a player in exchange for payment of ten-days salary. In OOTP, the options are to pay a released player 10, 15, 20, or 50 percent of his salary or else pay him nothing. Since a 154-game schedule was around 170 days long, ten days was closer to 5% than 10%, but since 10% is the lowest option available, that's the most historically accurate option in OOTP.


* It gets a bit more complicated after 1947. See this post for LGO's explanation of the rule changes.