The Nuts and Bolts of Game Planning

One of the great things about the online football management simulation MyFootballNow is the level of control you can have over the decisions your team makes. You can choose to focus just on roster management - signing players, drafting rookies, renegotiating contracts - and let the AI do things like manage your depth chart and game plan.  Or, if you want to get more involved with the day-to-day decisions, you can choose to take on more of the responsibilities - and be rewarded by seeing your creation come to life on game day!

Perhaps the most daunting task in managing your team is the weekly game planning. While you can set your game plan once and forget it, you should at least jump in and tell the AI to update your game plan between each game. Under the menu "My Team->Gameplanning" you will be presented with the game plan control panel. In the upper right corner you'll see a button that says "Load Recommended" - if you click this button you'll get a popup dialog where you can determine what aspects of the game plan you want the AI to set for you. If you leave everything checked, it may take a minute for the processing to complete - but once it's done, you'll have a game plan that is tailored to your strengths vs. your opponent's weaknesses.  But you might want to go a bit further and adjust the game plan yourself; this post will detail what the various options mean, and how to use them.

The first two tabs in the game planning control panel are the offensive and defensive game plan. This section determines what plays are called by your team in any situation during the game.  They are broken down into types of plays.

The top row of buttons define the situation - down and distance. The field graphic below illustrates what quadrant of the field the line of scrimmage is located at. The direction of the offense goes from left to right. The graphical view here illustrates what weight each decision has in the final decision; if you have half of the graph filled with run plays and the other half with pass plays, then you should run 50% of the time.  If your inside run takes up 20% and your outside run takes up 30%, those plays will be called in that frequency. So, each control element determines the probability that you will call a play with that decision based on the down, distance, and field quadrant.

Graphical View vs. Text View

You can switch between the graphical view and the text view; the text view gives you sliders that you can move to adjust the weights of each decision. It is entirely up to you which method you use. You don't have to worry about the sliders summing up to 100%, the game will automatically normalize everything for you.  Just move the sliders so that you get an acceptable balance for what you are wanting to do.  In either case, there is a button beneath each quadrant that allow you to copy a set of decisions to another quadrant and situation, and also a button to view the plays in your active playbook that apply and what each play's probability for being called is.

Offensive Decisions

Your offensive decisions are made up of "Gameplan" and "Personnel." The Gameplan is broken up into 5 options: Inside Run, Outside Run, Short Pass, Medium Pass, and Long Pass.

The Personnel decision decides what offensive personnel you will have on the field. Of the eleven players on offense, five are on the offensive line and are not eligible to catch a pass. Five players are considered eligible receivers, meaning that they are allowed to run downfield to catch a pass.  The eleventh player is the quarterback (who is technically eligible to catch a pass, although at this time there are no plays in the MyFootballNow playbook where a quarterback will receive a pass).  The five eligible receivers are the players that will get subbed in and out depending on the play. They are made up of the Wide Receivers, Tight Ends, and Running Backs (which include the Halfback and Fullback). Your personnel determines what combination of players make up your eligible receiver package. So you might have 5 Wide Receivers as a high option when it's third and long, or have two Tight Ends and two Running Backs in a short yardage situation.  Note that Personnel is not the same as Formation - a Formation is where a player lines up on the field, and while each Formation consists of a single Personnel package, each Personnel package will have many available Formations.  You don't control the Formation for each play, it is automatically assigned via the play.

Defensive Decisions

On the defensive side of the ball, the decisions are a bit more complicated. Because the defense is somewhat reactionary to what the offense does, the first decision is made for you - the defense will deploy personnel to match what the offense sends on the field. So if the offense has extra Wide Receivers, the defense will choose a play that has extra Defensive Backs to match.  Or, if the offense has extra Tight Ends and fewer Wide Receivers, the defense will deploy extra Defensive Linemen.

What you do have control over is the play of the Secondary and the play of the Linebackers.  There are multiple combinations of options here, but the general choices are whether the play is primarily a Zone, Man-to-Man, or Blitz.

Zone vs. Man-to-Man vs. Blitz

Zone coverage means that the player is responsible for an area on the field.  If an eligible receiver enters that area, they will cover him until he leaves his area.  Against a pass play this can be effective as the receiver will not outrun a defender; but it leaves areas of the field open where the receiver can catch the ball between two zones, or if one zone is flooded with two receivers.  A zone defense is good against a running play because the defense shouldn't get drawn out of their area to cover a receiver, leaving it open for the running back to go to.

In a man-to-man defense, the players are assigned an offensive receiver to cover.  They're responsible for this receiver for the entire play.  If they are fast and have good man-to-man coverage skills, they will make it difficult to complete a pass to their man, and may even be successful at intercepting the pass if it's tried.

In a blitz call, a player who is normally in coverage will rush the quarterback, with the idea being that even though a receiver might be left open, the rusher won't be met by an offensive blocker. Calling a blitz can result in a big loss for the offense if successful, but can also result in a big gain if the quarterback is able to throw the ball to the uncovered receiver.  The more familiar an offense is with a blitz, the more likely it will fail, so you will want to use blitzes with caution.

MyFootballNow Version 0.2 Released!

It's hard to believe that it's been a full year since we publicly released our online pro football management simulator, MyFootballNow.  As we enter the 2014 football season, we are also excited to announce the release of Version 0.2!  As existing leagues complete their current seasons, they will be rolled into the new version after the End of Season stage.

Version 0.2 features a handful of bug fixes, including some game rendering errors.  But the most exciting new feature we are announcing is the ability to create game plan rules!

Game Plan Rules: Amazing control over the plays that are called

So, what can you do with a game plan rule? When you set a rule, it will be considered before your regular game planning options are looked at.  If a play is selected from your rules, that will be the play that you run.

You set conditions based on the down, distance, location on the field, quarter, and score.  If you are setting a rule on defense, you can also set a condition based on the offensive personnel. Then you choose the weight of each play parameter, much the same way that you do in the regular game planning screen.

One of the most obvious uses for game plan rules is going for it on 4th down - until now, the only time your team would go for a 4th down conversion was if they were in hurry up at the end of the game. Now, you can set specific conditions where you want to go for it instead of punting or kicking a field goal.

Once you've created a rule, you can save it (to use in another league), deactivate it (which will prevent it from being used, but retain it in your list), as well as view the plays in your playbook and the probability of each play being chosen based on the rule.

We're excited about this new addition and hope you have fun with it!

Creepers and Busts: Don't throw away your late round picks!

At first glance, draft picks selected beyond the 3rd round or so appear to be serviceable backups at best. It might be tempting to throw these picks away in a trade, or cut any players selected during the later rounds because they don't look like they'll be any kind of an impact with your team. With this post I hope to give you a few tools to find possible gems in these later rounds so that you can get more value out of them.

When you look at a player's attributes, you will see their current and future values.  The future values are not static, in fact they can vary considerably, until the current value catches up to it.  The further away the future value is from the current value, the less certain a player's future value is. So when you draft a player with a rating of 30/90, they most likely will not arrive at 90/90 in the peak of their career. This is no where near certain, however; built into each player is an average rate at which their future value will adjust.  For most, this value is very small, for others, this value may be very large in either direction.

The early round picks will obviously go to players with a high future value.  You're hedging your bets well by doing that, and while it's still possible that a first round player will completely bust, you're doing well to minimize the effects of that bust by giving him further to fall before his current value catches his future value. Later round picks are always cheaper, and as such are a much lower risk if they bust - many don't even have a signing bonus that you'll have to deal with if you end up cutting them. But if you don't pay attention, you may end up cutting a player that could boom into a great player.

Here's the strategy I use to decide what to do with my late round picks. First, unless I just have too many players on my roster, I bring everyone into training camp (you can bring up to 60 players into camp). The training camp stage is a very important stage to reveal how your new rookies will end up looking. After training camp, I go into each of my rookies pages and select the "Progress" tab. There, I look at the red bar and see what it did. If there was a significant jump, the odds are in your favor that this player will boom - I'll put a note on his page (select the "Notes" tab to write notes about any player) and will make a point to keep him around and see what happens. If the red bar has a sharp decline, then he's probably going to bust out - unless he's an early pick, he'll probably be a roster casualty.

This isn't a sure thing, because it is possible for a rookie to have a great camp but still have a downward trend. Over time, you'll be able to monitor his progress and see whether he maintains that upward trend. If he does, you may have just gotten a steal in a late round pick.

Here is an example of a player that I selected in MFN-2 in the 6th round. He landed to me at 33/46. At first glance, this rating wouldn't even be considered for the final roster. It was a simple "best player available" pick, nothing more. After training camp, his rating was 37/49. Not a huge jump, but enough of a positive movement that I decided to keep him around and see what happened over the season. By the end of the season he was rated 42/54.  At the end of his second season, his rating was 55/61 - clearly, his future rating is growing almost as fast as his current rating. At the time of this blog post (the end of his third season), he is at 59/66. Already he's 10 points higher than his predicted max when I drafted him - not bad for a 6th round pick - and it appears that he will continue to improve, because he gap between his current and future values hasn't hardly reduced at all. If you want to look at his page for yourself, here it is.

Is this typical? No, it's not. Most late round picks will be just what you thought they were. But even if your 6th or 7th round pick grows into the 60's and stops, you could have someone that could be in the second position in your depth chart if not a lower-value starter. And the more of these picks you have, the greater your chance of finding a hidden gem. So before you cut those low-rated rookies, check out their trending - you may just have a diamond in the rough.

New game engine features in Version 0.1.2

Version 0.1.2 of MyFootballNow has been released, featuring a number of game engine improvements that make the game sims even more realistic with their results. As leagues conclude their current seasons using the 0.1.1 game engine, they will switch to version 0.1.2 after the End of Season game stage. I wanted to take a moment to detail a little bit about the changes and what they mean.

If you ever wonder what version of the game engine a league uses, simply look at the bottom of the page while you are in the league.  You'll see the game engine version right there.  With the exception of MFN-1 - which is the official beta league where players get to use new features as they are built and are able give input on those features - leagues will remain in their current game engine until the end of the season.  (If you're interested in being on the cutting edge of the game engine, click here to take over a team in MFN-1 now!)

Smaller Tweaks

First I'll briefly discuss a few minor adjustments have been made to some of the game engine logic:

Tipped Ball Action

When a ball is tipped, its flight path is altered based on the proximity to the player and the various directions both are headed. The logic for this has been revamped to deliver more realistic tipped balls.

Field Goals

Long field goals were far too accurate. This has been dialed back. I have written a separate entry about field goals and how they are simulated - click here to read it.  I"ll wait.

Punting

Punters are now better at aiming the ball to drop inside the 10 yard line, especially as they are kicking from deeper in their opponent's territory.  There is also a greater range of hang time which is helping the coverage team get into position more easily and increase the number of fair catches, as well as more frequency of punters outkicking their coverage.  The punter's accuracy attribute drives these actions.

Penalty Frequency

The frequency of penalties has been increased in this release. Penalties are almost primarily driven by a player's discipline, with a smaller weight applied to their fatigue and experience. Whenever a penalty event opportunity occurs, a calculation is made to determine whether the player will commit the penalty.

Prior to 0.1.2, the average penalties per game were half or less of what occurs in real life. This has been increased to more better mimic a real football game.

Contract Negotiation

We have increased the values used by players when making contract requests. This should make it a little harder to retain a full roster of really good players without being forced to let some of them go to free agency, which should also in turn make early free agency a little bit more interesting.

Passing Game Updates

With version 0.1.2, the passing game has received a complete overhaul. The way that defensive coverage works and the way the quarterback throws the ball has been updated to have more realism.

Quarterback Progression Updates

The quarterback will now favor his #1 WR above the rest of his receiving options. This will result in wide receivers getting a greater share of targets.  The #2 WR will be next in line, followed by the TE and RB, and so on.  There is a good deal of randomness still in the progression order, but the changes should eliminate the Tight Ends being the leading receivers as they were in version 0.1.1.

Man-to-man Coverage

A significant improvement has been made to the coverage logic for defensive backs. When a player is covering a receiver using man-to-man, the game now considers their man-to-man skill against the receiver's route running skill.  If the receiver has a better route running skill than the defender's man-to-man attribute, the defender will have a hard time staying with the player. On the other hand, if the scales tilt in favor of the defender, the receiver will have a difficult time getting open.

Currently the #1 CB always plays on the same side as the #1 WR.  It might seem like a good idea to place your #1 WR lower in the depth chart to get your #1 WR to go against your opponent's #2 CB, but keep in mind that by doing that you will reduce the number of targets to your best WR, even though he may get more open than he would otherwise.

Quarterback Passing

The last significant update to the passing game happens when the quarterback actually throws the ball.  Previously, every pass was aimed at the optimal location for the receiver to make the catch, with the only consideration of the coverage influencing whether or not to throw the ball. In version 0.1.2, the quarterback will now choose a location to throw the ball to that he considers to be the safest location based on the surrounding coverage while still considering placing it in a catchable location, which may reduce the ability for the receiver to catch the ball or even have the quarterback intentionally throw the ball to an uncatchable location. A quarterback with less experience will have a higher probability of not taking a certain defender into consideration when making this decision as well.  Also, once the aim spot is chosen, the quarterback's accuracy attribute will influence how far away from that spot the ball actually travels.

Running Game Updates

We've been working hard to find a good balance to get rushing yardage more in keeping with real life. We've made it more difficult to keep your #1 running back on the field - if you overwork him, he will become more fatigued and even more injury prone.  Keeping the default values for fatigue should see your #2 running back with more snaps than he had previously.

Defensive Game Plan Updates

Another major update to the game engine falls on the defensive side of the ball.  We have added a new game planning feature to key on the run, key on the pass, or play a neutral defense.  The neutral defense will be the default if you don't make any adjustments to your game plan, and operates identically to the previous game engine version.

You will find the Run/Pass button next to the Linebacker's button on the Defensive Gameplan screen. It operates in the same manner as all the other game plan screens, with both a graphical interface as well as a slider interface.  At the bottom of each quadrant is your opponent's tendencies over the current and previous season.

When your defense calls a play, the run/pass/neutral emphasis is appended to the regular play call, so it does not affect the actual play that you choose.  The recommendation will always choose a neutral value plus either a run or a pass value, but not both; you can certainly have both settings for a particular situation if you would prefer, however.

Run-Focused Defense

When your defense plays in run-focused mode, players in zone coverage will cheat up toward the line of scrimmage, and players heading into the backfield will head directly toward the running back.  If the quarterback performs a play action fake, your defense will always bite on the fake.  Your defensive backs in man-to-man coverage will not cover their receivers as effectively.

Pass-Focused Defense

In a pass-focused defense, the players in zone coverage will do the opposite as in a run-focused defense: they will play further away from the line of scrimmage.  The focus in this defense is more to prevent the long pass as opposed to stopping shorter plays; your defense will probably give up more short pass plays in this defense, but should be better at stopping the long pass.  Players in man-to-man coverage will perform better in this situation than they will in a neutral or run defense.  The defensive line and blitzers will not bite on a play action fake.

Keep the feedback coming!

Thanks to everyone who has been playing and especially to those of you who have provided invaluable feedback as we have been working on the game over the last several months.  We value your feedback, so please continue to offer your suggestions, areas of confusion or frustration, and general feedback on the forums.

Passing the Bar: How field goal logic works

In MyFootballNow, each game is simulated using a complex 2-D game engine. Each player in the game is what is called an "autonomous user agent" - which basically means that they make completely independent decisions based only on what they know about their place in the game, without any sort of overview that we as the viewer might have.  There are several games that use this type of logic - Madden NFL is the most obvious one - and it is contrasted with games that might use probability calculations to derive an approximate result based on the attributes of players on the field.

While the players are simulated in 2-D, any time the ball is in flight it is simulated in all three dimensions. The height of the players it passes determines whether or not they are able to touch and consequently influence the flight path of the ball. This is illustrated in the game center by the size of the football as it rises and descends in altitude. I wanted to write a short blog entry detailing how something like a field goal is simulated to illustrate how it's not just a "72% chance for success," but instead the chance of success is determined by far more complex math as the actual physics of the ball are simulated in the game engine. A gentle warning, there is math in the following description; but hopefully I'll be able to explain it in such a way that makes sense even to the greatest mathophobic.

When a field goal is attempted, the direction that the ball needs to travel to arrive at the center of the goal posts is calculated. Then, using the kicker's accuracy attribute, a value is arrived at that is the standard deviation for the launch angle.  The lower the accuracy attribute, the larger the standard deviation.  Then the launch angle error is calculated using a normal distribution, and the flight path of the ball is adjusted to go in that direction.

That last sentence may have flown over the head of most casual text sim gamers. What in the world is a standard deviation? There is a principle in statistics that states that if you have enough samples of data for what is known as a "normal population," that most of the data will be close to the "mean," or average value. 68% of all samples will be within one standard deviation of this mean, and 95% will be within two standard deviations, with 99% being within 3 standard deviations.  The graph looks like this:

Note the hump in this graph, where the middle line indicates the mean. As you go further and further away from the mean, the number of times that value exists becomes less and less, indicated by the graph getting lower and lower.  Each vertical line indicates one standard deviation.  The larger the standard deviation, the greater the range of the resulting values.  There are lots of random numbers generated in MyFootballNow, and most use some form of the normal distribution.  By choosing a mean and a standard deviation, we are able to generate random numbers that will be distributed with a range that matches the graph above.

So, we decide the amount of error based on a normal distribution, with the standard deviation being dependent on the kicker's accuracy attribute.  The strength attribute applies in the same manner, except instead of the standard deviation being calculated from the attribute, the mean value is used. A strength value of 100 will be able to kick a 70-yard field goal if the random value is 3 standard deviations away from his mean.  As mentioned above, 99% of all values will be within three standard deviations of the mean, and the remaining 1% will be split between the high and low side; so if a kicker has a 100 strength score and his launch angle error is 0, he will have a 0.5% chance that a 70-yard field goal will be good.

One more comment about standard deviations.  I said that 68% of all values will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, which is where the 70% accuracy value comes from on your misc. game planning screen.  Yes, I took a little liberty and rounded the amount to the nearest 10%.  This it is the distance where your kicker is within one standard deviation of making the field goal, using the shortest distance when considering his accuracy and strength.

Scouting

I've received a lot of questions about how scouting works. The real-world analogy is that the plays you scout are the plays that your team practices against during the week. To understand how the game engine simulates this, we need to go into a bit more depth about a player's familiarity with a play and what that does in the engine.

Play Familiarity

Each player in the league has a setting for how familiar he is with every play that exists in the game. If you go to a player's page, under the "Off Plays" and "Def Plays" you will see his familiarity with each play in your playbook. The size of the red bar indicates how familiar he is with each play.

There are several events that increase a player's familiarity with each play. The most significant happens during the Training Camp stage. It is in this stage that each player on your team increases in his familiarity with each play in your head coach's playbook - the offensive players learn the offensive plays, and the defensive players learn the defensive plays. During the season, as you install plays into your game plan, the players will increase in their familiarity with those plays. Then, throughout the course of a game, each player grows in familiarity with each play  that occurs while they are on the field.

So, what impact does play familiarity have on the play? As the game engine sims each play, the players are all autonomous user agents that make decisions independently of each other. Most of the rules that govern this logic are tied to their attribute values. Attributes are reduced by fatigue and injury, but not by play familiarity. Being more familiar with a play does not make you stronger or faster. What familiarity does influence is reaction time and decision making.

A very obvious example of this is a quarterback's familiarity with a defensive play. Let's take as an example the defense is blitzing the cornerback, with the deep safety taking the coverage of the outside receiver. As the quarterback's familiarity with the defensive play and his own offensive play increases, the probability increases that he will audible to a hot read which often will result in a large gain as the safety doesn't have time to get to the receiver that the blitzing cornerback has abandoned.

Another example of the impact of familiarity is a player's reaction time to an event. For example, a defense that is highly familiar with a particular outside run will close on the hole faster than a defense that is less familiar with the same play. This is taken on a per-player basis - so if you have a young, inexperienced linebacker playing next to a wily veteran, the veteran will have a faster reaction time than the rookie.

In addition to the play familiarity, a player's positional experience, crowd noise, and fatigue are taken into the equation.

So, about scouting

Now back to the scouting page. Under your game planning screens, you have a tab for scouting the offense and scouting the defense of your upcoming opponent. While your offensive and defensive game plan screens show your head coach's playbook, the scouting screens show your opponent's playbook, as well as information about how often your opponent uses each play and how successful they have been. The list is sorted by the plays that your upcoming opponent has used most over the current and previous seasons, as well as an indicator of the composite familiarity of your team. Here, offensive plays show your defense's composite familiarity, and defensive plays show your offense's composite familiarity. You can choose up to five offensive and defensive plays to scout. If you load your coach's recommended game plan for scouting, he will select the 5 most used offensive and defensive plays for your opponent.

This is where there is a little cat and mouse game, because in order to gain a good familiarity with your own playbook you need to use the plays in games. But, the more you use certain plays in your playbook, the more likely your opponent will scout those plays.

I usually will scout the top 5 plays for my opponent unless my team is highly familiar with the play, in which case I might choose one further down the list. You might also try to include a play that you struggle against and have poor familiarity - as long as the play is in your upcoming opponent's playbook.

One more word on plays

I'll conclude this topic with a comment that is loosely linked to scouting, and that's pointing out the play card. On the game log and on the game planning pages, you can open a card that displays information about the play.

As you can see in the example here, it details information about the play - the formation, play type, your team's composite familiarity, how often you have used the play in various situations and how successful the play has been in those situations. There is also a tab for a large diagram, as well as a list of each position in the formation and their assignment. As it says in the fine print, the times used and the success values reflect how your team has performed using this play in the current and previous regular season.

Successful scouting can have a positive impact on your team's performance, so don't neglect coming in and setting up your scout plan before each game.

Hats off to Salary Cap Management

In previous posts, we've discussed how to evaluate your players and manage your depth chart. In today's post, I'm going to talk about how you get those players on your roster in the first place, and how to keep them there.

When a league is created, the teams are all pre-populated with 53 players. After that, each season there is a 7-round player draft, where teams choose from the rookie pool in reverse order of their previous season's standings. A drafted player will automatically receive a contract, which you can choose to void if you'd like. This topic is not going to discuss the draft, but instead signing players from free agency, and keeping the players that you have.

Making a contract offer

Let's start by taking a look at the player contract offer screen. If you are able to make an offer on a player, his player card and payer page will have a "contract" button that will load up a form with which you can make an offer:

The bar across the top is a display of your current salary cap and the implications this contract offer will have on it. The color coding is as follows:

• Current Contracts - this is the sum of the base salary for all players currently on your team.  Cutting players will remove their base salary from your cap.
• Current Bonuses - this is the sum of the bonuses being paid for the current season. Cutting a player will move their bonus into dead cap. I'll detail a bit more about how that works below.
• Pending Contracts - If you have any pending contracts, they are represented by the blue bar. This will help you be aware of the sum total of all your contract offers as you are working through them.
• Dead Cap - Cap room you have given up by cutting players with bonuses.
• Min for Remaining Players - The amount you should reserve to be able to fill your roster with minimum-salaried players. If the draft has not yet happened, this will also include the amount of money your draft picks will consume from your cap.

The next section is a quick way to build an offer. It will default with the player's current request, or if you have a pending offer on this player, it will default with your existing offer and give you a checkbox to withdraw it. The values are:

• First Year Base + Bonus - this is the total amount that this contract will count against your cap for the current year.
• Years - The length of the contract.
• Bonus - What percentage of the First Year Base + Bonus is the bonus.

You must offer a bonus to a player if you are signing him for longer than a 1-year contract, and the minimum bonus is based on the salary cap for the season. You will get a warning if you attempt to sign a player without the minimum required bonus.

Below the sliders is a section where you can manually enter numbers to get a finer level of control over your offer. You can enter the total bonus as well as the base salary for each year. The only requirements are that the bonus meets the minimum amount required (if you are signing a multi-year contract), and that the base salary increases 5% or more per year.

The chart shows you the year, the base salary, the bonus, and the total offer for each year. The final column displays the difference in the year's cap impact, if the player is on your team. You will be using this quite a bit when trying to free up cap room by renegotiating with your players; when you are signing a new player, his salary difference will be N/A.

How the bonus impacts the salary cap

When you offer a player a contract that contains a signing bonus, he gets that money when he signs with you. However, the cost of that signing bonus is spread out equally across the duration of his contract. If you ever renegotiate his contract, his previous signing bonus stays on the books, and the new contract's signing bonus will be added to any existing cap impact. If a player is cut, is traded, or retires while he still has bonus money impacting the cap, the current year's bonus goes into the dead cap space for the current year, and any future year's bonus is accelerated into the following season's dead cap space.

 Here's an example:

This player currently has 4 years left on his contract, with a bonus of $852,899 being applied to our cap for each year. 

If we were to cut or trade this player in 2017, his $852,899 bonus would continue to apply to the 2017 salary cap, but his base salary of $3,846,145 would not. (Actually, depending on how far into the season he is cut, his base salary will be pro-rated into the salary cap.) Further, the remaining balance of his bonus will be accelerated into the 2018 season - meaning you will incur a dead cap penalty of $2,558,697. When you click on the "Cut" button, you will be presented with the actual numbers that the transaction will have.

If you renegotiate his salary, the $852,899 per year will continue to apply to his bonus, in addition to the new bonus. So, let's click on the "contract" button and see what we are presented with:

Notice that his offer request is for $2,885,284 for the first year, with 16% of that being his bonus, for a total of 5 years. In the contract details below, we can see that the $462,842/year distribution of the bonus money has been added to the $852,899 per year for 2017-2020, and then in 2021 the new bonus only applies. We can also see that we can save a significant amount by offering this contract.

Players will look at other similar players in the league to determine their offer requests. Many times you can free up cap room by renegotiating with your higher paid players. Other times, you may have to offer a raise to keep a player around. When renegotiating with a player, note that he will not accept an offer below what he is asking.

This last sentence bears some explanation. A free agent will always accept the best offer available when he signs with a team. If you are renegotiating a contract, however, the player has his minimum that he will accept, or else you will have to let him become a free agent. But you do have room to move the values around a little bit. How a player evaluates an offer is first and foremost by the total amount of bonus money in the offer. That money they get to keep, even if you cut them in the next sim; of course that is worth the most to him. Then, the base salary has some weight, with later years being less important than early years. The bonus cannot exceed 75% of the first year base plus bonus, and each year's base salary must increase by at least 5%.

Your Pending Contracts

If you have contracts pending for players or coaches, there is a submenu item in the "Team" menu that lists your pending offers. If it is during one of the free agency stages and there are other offers for the player, you will see the best offer from the previous stage listed as well. In addition to this, if a player has pending offers from the previous stage, they will be listed on his player card. Note that the other teams' offers are listed with just the total number of years and the total amount of the offer. You are not privy to the details of how much of each offer is base and how much is bonus.

Expiring Contracts

When a player is in the last year of his contract, you must either renegotiate his contract before the end of the season, or let him become a free agent the following year. You also cannot renegotiate a contract of a player who was signed in the current year - meaning that if you ever offer a 1-year contract to a player, he will enter the free agency pool the following year, there is no way to guarantee that you can keep him.

The last stage that you can re-sign players is the End of Season stage, which is the stage immediately following the league championship game.

When contracts expire, the player will be available for all teams starting with the first Early Free Agency sim. He is still listed on your roster until the draft, though. If you want to see a picture of your current contract situation, click on the "Filter" button above your roster on your team page, and choose either "No Current or Pending Contract" - which will list any players on your roster who are free agents and whom you have not offered a contract to - or "Only Under Contract" - which will show a list of all players on your roster who are secured with a contract.  Those two options are only available during the early free agency stages. Once the draft hits, the free agents on your roster are removed if they have not signed a contract.

Signing players during the season

Prior to Training Camp, you can have as many players on your roster as you wish; your salary cap and roster limit are not enforced until Training Camp. You must cut your roster down to 60 players by the training camp stage, otherwise the game engine will do it for you. And you must be under the salary cap by the first pre-season game, or again, the game engine will do it for you.

During the season, you may need to make a roster move. Perhaps a player is injured and you need to sign another player at that position to give you enough depth. Or perhaps you are placing a player on injured reserve, and need to add another player to your roster. The best time to do these sorts of moves is during the midweek sim. When you make an offer to a player, he will be added to your roster as an inactive player. The midweek sim gives you a chance to place that player into your depth chart, and cut another player to get you under the roster limit. If you need to make the move on a game stage (because you missed the midweek stage), you will want to cut the player you intend to cut, and ensure that you have 46 players active. If your team has fewer than 45 players active on a game stage, the game engine will reset your depth chart to make sure you have 45 active players. Note that the game engine uses 45 and not 46 as the magic number, this is designed to give you a one-player grace in case something happens that you were not expecting.

How the game engine "fixes" your roster

When the game engine must make a change to your roster because you are over the limit or over the salary cap, it  will take the following steps:

If you are over the roster count limit...

...the game engine will auto-update your depth chart, and then cut players based on where they land in the depth chart. Positions that have an excess of players will have the lowest rated players cut first, until you are under the roster count limit.

If you are over the salary cap...

...the game engine will cut players to get you under the roster limit, starting with  the player with the highest base salary. The implications of having each player cut apply as if you cut them yourself.

If you have fewer than 45 players...

...then the game engine will sign players to your roster until you have 45 players. If you don't have the cap room for this, the game engine will make more roster moves to cut players to free up enough cap space to handle a 45-player roster.

If you have fewer than 45 players active...

...the game engine will reset your depth chart, giving you 45 active players.