The one thing that kinda frustrates me is the sniping. Then again, this is an odd FA cycle since there's so much money in it and it's the 'truncated' version that breeds that sort of thing.

But what might be interesting is a sliding scale on what the next bid requires as a bid sits longer. So let's say you make your bid within 2 hours of the previous bid, you can bid one more dollar to get back in the lead. If it's 4 hours, it requires $2 to bid. 8 hours requires $4, 16 hours requires $8. Something like that.

Because I kinda think that's how real FA is likely to work. If a guy is sitting on an offer and you come along immediately after he receives it and offer him $50K more, he might listen. If he's sitting there with his pen and getting ready to sign a deal when you offer that $50K, he's not going to. But if you offer him $250K, that may be enough to get him to put the pen down and think about it a little while.

But ultimately you could probably do nothing and be just fine. The ordinary season long FA process doesn't have this kind of frustration in it. Guys look at the 'opened' FA class every Monday/Tuesday, spend the week monitoring and decide fairly quickly if they're gonna splurge or keep powder dry until the following weeks class.

This really is something of a one-off. I hate it because I screwed up my contract offers last year and ended up having to get McNeill back in FA and it torched my planning and FA capital (so I've been knocked out of probably 8-10 guys who's bidding skyrocketed towards in the last day), but it's a problem of my own making - shoulda read my contracts more closely instead of forgetting to put a number in for McNeill and having to re-sign him for $1 last season.