Madden NFL 08 Franchise Mode: Part 3

 After the Pro Bowl (which in 2008 was placed after the Super Bowl) you enter the Off-Season. This is where the business side of the player has to shine. There are a lot of negotiations, signings, firings and trades occurring during this time. First you start of by looking at your staff. Some of your coaches may have been offered jobs on other teams or may have retired, or maybe you want to fire your coach. You must hire coaches if you are missing some. In this part of the game you can also hire a Staffing Team, which is misleading name because it is actually a medical staff. This staff can help prevent injuries for happening as well as reduce the amount of time it takes to recover from an injury. The more expensive the staff is the better they are. You can also set prices for everything during the off-season but these prices can be regulated during the regular season as well. However you can not change your stadium during the regular season but you can do that during the off-season. You can rename it by choosing a sponsor that will give you money for achieving certain goals in exchange for naming rights to your stadium. You can rebuild a stadium entirely after your own design. Perhaps your fan support isn’t great, business isn’t blooming and you just want to move your team out and start from scratch. You can relocate your team during the off-season. First you must come with a proposal where you chose which city you go to, how you’re going to fund it and what your team name and uniform will be. If it is approved it takes a year before you are relocated. It is a very expensive process and hurts fan support throughout the remaining season. But desperate times call for desperate measures. If you chose not to relocate or rebuild your stadium you might just want to upgrade it. By having a modern and upgraded stadium more fans will attend and some of the upgrades comes with benefits. You can have an on-site medical staff which reduces injuries or a rain-water collection system that cuts down on maintenance costs by recycling water.

After deciding on staffing and stadium you move on to managing players. Some players decide to retire during the off-season and you must find replacements. First is the restricted free agents, some players are almost free agents (meaning they can sign with any team) but are restricted by a contract to your team. If you decide to match an offer they have received you can resign them. Next is resigning of any player who has expired contract. This is where Madden 08 becomes tough. It is impossible to have a full team of 99 rated overalls without going bankrupt within a few seasons. There is a very delicate balancing game of signing players will still remaining positive in the scheme of money. The player must decide which players are worth holding on to, and for how long and which players are becoming to old or expensive. Players that haven’t been resigned become free agents. As said before a free agent is without a team and can take any offer they want to. The player (user) can offer contracts to any free agents. Some of the biggest stars of the NFL may be in the free agent pool because their team decided to cut them or because they were getting to expensive. Free agents are also an inexpensive way to fill any holes in your roster that may just need backups and not a mega star. Next is the NFL Draft, the most exciting part of the off-season, but extremely poorly designed part of Madden 08.