Twenty players and the bill that comes with them

The draft is finally giving me something I can follow on a phone: twenty empty roster places turning into a football team. I can move between the available players, my shortlist and the roster without trying to fit the entire league onto one tiny screen. Some of it is still crowded, but seeing the team come together is pretty satisfying.

The Chicago run finished with all nine starter places and eleven reserve places filled. The annual salaries came to $92.67 million against a $300 million cap, and the game stopped at pregame so I could look the team over before kickoff. Those numbers sit beside the roster for a reason. The salary cap is an allowance; the club’s cash is a separate balance, and there are plenty of other things waiting to spend it.

The stadium is a good example. There are fourteen additions competing for the same funds, and the price on the purchase screen is only the start. A replay screen starts at $6 million and normally costs another $120,000 a year to run at its first level, before traits change the bill. Construction takes time as well: order after Season 2, wait through Season 3, and it opens for Season 4. Buying it is the easy part. Keeping enough money to use it is where I can get myself into trouble.

I’m also rebuilding the Inbox so I can find the decisions that need attention. The sender, subject and preview belong in the list, with the full message in its own reader. Going Back should return me to the same place. These sound like pretty basic expectations, but they matter a lot once a franchise has several seasons of mail behind it.

There’s still room for the silly player biographies alongside all the accounting. One player maintains a shampoo review blog called Mostly Bottle despite being bald. I’m keeping that one.

The next job is to keep using the game through the normal decisions and fix what gets in the way. The layouts still need work, the revised finances need a long career, and the phone and companion versions need more testing. For now, the draft gets me to a full team and a first game waiting to start. Time to see whether I spent the money well.