As it stand now when you have a player with 1 season left on their contract you have to sign them before the end of the season. Basically you have to use this season's cap space to sign a player to next years contract. Would love to see it be like the NFL where you have some time after the season before they hit FA where you can sign a player whose contract has expired before they hit FA using the upcoming seasons cap space.

Or just extend a contract.

+1

+1 would like it like NFL here's the difference

MFN - End of Season, Unrestricted Free Agency

NFL - End of Season, Restricted Free Agency, Unrestricted Free Agency

for those that don't know Restricted Free Agency is where only the team a player currently plays for can tender them a contract offer, in Unrestricted anyone can tender an offer

That's incorrect, in the NFL Restricted Free Agency just means a team can match any offer that is tendered to their players that are restricted free agents.

+1

The only problem I have with this is that a lot of teams will end up retaining ALL of their studs if they can use next year's cap. As it stands now I rarely have trouble re-signing my own players, and the free agent pool each new season is typically lacking in young elite players. Giving teams more cap space only reduces the quality of free agents available and makes it even harder for rebuilding teams to get talent.

-1

If an owner has put in the necessary effort to recruit stud players why should he lose them just because he has to pay essentially a double bonus on his resign year?

Also having to resign using this years cap can make it impossible to keep decent players, as an example I've seen a team where they had 26 players all hit their FA the same year.......how is he supposed to keep his team competitive if he has to resign that many players? and if you say he can just get FAs, that's just a joke having to sign that many FAs after end of season means he's not going to have quality at hardly any of his positions cause he can't afford high bids on that many players.

also from your comment the main reason you don't want it to change is because the current way its set up you get an advantage out of it. As it makes it possible for you to poach players that you weren't able to get in the draft and are unwilling to trade enough to get the owners interest while they were on a team.

You see elite players hit free agency all the time in the NFL. Teams like the Broncos are able to take advantage and sign those players to bolster already elite teams. Teams on the rise like the Raiders and Jaguars recently are able to sign those players in an attempt to help get a young developing core into the playoffs. By removing the talent from the free agent pool in MFN, no team will be able to do that here. This would completely remove an interesting facet of the game and the opportunity for savvy managers to engineer quick turnarounds for their teams.

With the examples you've mentioned, maybe if the managers had paid more attention to their cap management and the contracts they handed out, they wouldn't have found themselves in such a position. I have never had a problem signing any of my free agents and have built championship teams where my star players never hit free agency until they approach the age of 30.

Perhaps you want to change it to gain an advantage on YOUR end - the ability to retain all of your best players despite screwing up your financial situation. Giving teams more time and cap space to re-sign players simply allows managers to put even less effort into roster management to keep stacked teams stacked.

If you put in the necessary effort to recruit star players you should put the necessary effort into ensuring that you can keep them too. If teams are given more cap space, you'll find that there are no star players to recruit at all in free agency.

I do however find the idea of restricted free agency (and by extension franchise/transition tags) interesting, but like in the NFL there needs to be limitations on this. You shouldn't be able to make all your free agents restricted or tag all your free agents.