Madden 13 Salary Cap Free Agency/Trades Penalty Calculator

With Madden 13 Connected Careers mode re-introducing the salary cap feature, many may be confused about how trades and free agent moves will affect their cap. In Madden 13, a player on your roster who was signed with a signing bonus will still be owed that money even if you trade or release him. This article will explain how these roster moves affect your cap and provides a calculator you can use to figure out the cap penalty it will cost your team for moving a player owed a signing bonus.

Madden 13 Salary Cap Calculator:

With Madden 13 Connected Careers mode re-introducing the salary cap feature, many may be confused about how trades and free agent moves will affect their cap. In Madden 13, a player on your roster who was signed with a signing bonus will still be owed that money even if you trade or release him. This article will explain how these roster moves affect your cap and provides a calculator you can use to figure out the cap penalty it will cost your team for moving a player owed a signing bonus.

Guaranteed Money:

Think of the signing bonus as guaranteed money. This money is typically divided evenly of the course of the contract. $500,000 signing bonus on a 5 yr contract is $100,000 a year for example. I already explained some of this while discussing the effect of releasing a free agent. When you release a player, you still owe him what's left of the signing bonus. The amount owed is the cap penalty which is applied towards your current year cap and the next year's cap. This cap penalty applies to releasing a free agent early and also when you trade a player away and still owe him a portion of the bonus. The calculator below allows you to easily figure out the cap penalty on a player's contract. Simply input the total length or number of years of the contract, the number of years remaining, and the total signing bonus. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate the current year cap penalty and the cap penalty for next season. See link below.

https://public.sheet.zoho.com/public/studs0n/contractpenalty

How does the cap penalty affect your team?

So now you know what the cap penalty is or how much it costs, but what does that really mean? In Madden 13 Connected Careers Mode, the salary cap for season 1 is $120 mil. In season 2 it goes up to $130 mil and continues to increase each year. So let's say you make a lot of roster moves in year 1 and your cap penalty is up to $20 mil. This means you will only have $100 mil left on your cap to spend on active players on your roster because $120 mil (league cap) minus $20 mil (your cap penalty) equals $100 mil. This just goes to show you that making a few bad roster moves - trading away a big contract player too early with lots of guaranteed money can really screw your team in the long run.

Hope this helps!