13.4 - Any veteran player whose contract has not expired must be protected or cut with a salary cap penalty unless they played in no more than three games as noted in Rule 14.14b.
My proposal is to increase the amount of games a player can play in and still be cut for free - from 3 games to 5 games.
I think it is too much of a punishment to make teams pay a fine Players who only play 3 or 4 or 5 games aren't very useful. I don't see why a player who plays 3 games is a cut and 4 games is a fine (if released). I think moving to 5 games makes a bit more sense.
If we are going to have a rule that you can cut a player who was injured without penalty, then we have to pick a number. That number has been 3 games for a long time. Playing in three games means the player missed 81% of the season. I am opposed to five games. Four? I am not sure I'd support it, but I am not 100% against it.
Five seems a reach but the idea has merit. Maybe another way to approach this would be to use the durability rating as the cutoff. I'm not sure, but I presume that the durability rating takes snaps played as a factor. That would be a much more accurate measure of participation.
Durability 3 seems to hit the target. There were 20 players on KRFL rosters with a durabilty of 3 or 3-. They averaged 4.45 game appearances and their performance in those games was uniformly poor. I would actually prefer using the durability as a cutoff rather than games played. Here is the list of players that would have been affected (list does not include 2 and 1 durs): Sean Witherspoon, Navorro Bowman, Antonio Cromartie, Shane Vereen, Eddie Lacy, Chris Johnson, Paul Turner, Andre Smith, Kalif Raymond, DeAndre Levy, Jason Verrett, Luke Joeckel, Justin Houston, Kevin White, Allen Bailey, Jonathan Cooper, Mike Pouncey, KJ Dillon, Terron Ward, Jalan Reed.
Five seems a reach but the idea has merit. Maybe another way to approach this would be to use the durability rating as the cutoff. I'm not sure, but I presume that the durability rating takes snaps played as a factor. That would be a much more accurate measure of participation.
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As far as I can tell, the DUR rating takes # of games on the active roster divided by 16. So if a player was on the active roster for a game in 13 games, he gets a DUR rating of 13 divided 16 = 81% or "8". Even if he never played in any of those 13 games he is still a "8", which is why all the back-up QB's who never play get high DUR ratings.
AND using the DUR rating for the cut-off would be so much easier on me. That way I don't have to look up how many games the players was actually on the active roster for. I proposed that a few years ago and it got rejected. Maybe that should be reconsidered as part of this proposal (hint, hint).
13.4 - Any veteran player whose contract has not expired must be protected or cut with a salary cap penalty unless they played in no more than three games as noted in Rule 14.14b.
My proposal is to change the wording from no more than 3 games to a durability rating of 3 of less.
