BYU v Oklahoma

There are times during a normal routine that one beckons for change for the sake of change — monotony is the leading cause of death in people with a life you know?  Change can be fun, it can be exciting, it can lift the spirits of a person depending on the situation.  Or it could confuse and annoy the piss out of people.

Right now I’m having mixed feelings.  Generally, I welcome change because of my indecisive personality (disorder?), but right now I don’t, only because having to re-learn something is slightly irritating.

I’ve been following the NFL for far too long and have come to understand a lot of the nuances of the operations side of things, and this new Final Eight Plan successfully nullified everything I know with regards to free agency.

With the final year of the current CBA upon us comes new rules for free agency aimed directly at the “elite eight” of the NFL, or all of the teams who played in the divisional round of the playoffs.  To better assist you in understanding what these new regulations are and how they work, I’ll let Mike Florio do the talking for me:

Article XXI spells out the terms of the Final Eight Plan, a provision aimed at preserving competitive balance in the uncapped year by preventing the teams that made it to the division round or better from buying up a bunch of unrestricted free agents.

For the final four teams (Saints, Colts, Vikings, Jets), no unrestricted free agents may be signed from other teams until one of their current unrestricted free agents is lost to another team.  Complicating matters is that the value of the first year of the replacement free agent’s contract must be no more than the first-year salary paid to the player who was lost, with annual growth of no more than 30 percent.

For the next four teams (Cardinals, Cowboys, Ravens, Chargers), one unrestricted free agent may be signed at a base salary of $5.5 million or more, and an unlimited amount of others at a first-year salary of $3.7 million with a 30-percent limit on growth.

It had been assumed by many that these teams nevertheless could trade for an unlimited amount of players.

Under Section 7 of Article XXI of the CBA, they can’t.

Here’s the key language:  “No Club subject to the provisions of this Article may, for one League Year, trade for a player it otherwise would not be permitted to sign as an Unrestricted Free Agent as a result of the provisions of this Article.”

That said, Article XXI, Section 8 expressly permits teams to negotiate with and sign unrestricted free agents limited by the transition or franchise tag.  But Section 7 apparently restricts the ability of the final eight teams to work out a trade for a franchise player for something less than two first-round draft picks — a common approach that multiple teams have used when shipping franchise players to new teams.

Keep in mind that none of this affects the ability of the final eight teams to sign or trade for restricted free agents, since the Final Eight Plan applies only to unrestricted free agents, and unrestricted free agency applies only to players who have six or more years of service.

Mike does a really good job of explaining how this works for dummies.  One positive out of all of this is the Colts rarely tap into the free agency market unless it’s a dire need (re: Adam Vinatieri), so these restrictions will have a minimal affect on how the Colts do business this offseason.

The other positive is, Jerry Jones won’t be able to buy up all of the good players and succeed in world domination.  Granted, he could still doll out the cash for someone like Julius Peppers, although I don’t see that happening, especially when he might have to break the bank on the new flavor month down in Big D, Miles Austin.  In addition to that, the Chargers — the Colts biggest rival currently — won’t be able to splurge in the free agency market either, and they certainly have a lot of holes to fill.

Hopefully with this new found knowledge, your worries have been somewhat quelled by the fact that not every team looking to break the bank can or will.  The Colts will not be at a disadvantage to the big market teams.  In order for a team to maintain success, they’ll have to build through the draft just like before and into the foreseeable future.  Money can’t buy you draft picks, just heartache.