Camp battles and the final roster

Cut day is the part of the job I keep trying to make less painful, and I keep failing at that.

Camp runs every day from its opening until the day before the cutdown. The plan you set says how hard each day is, what it works on and who rests, and the game keeps the record for each man separately.

A player who rested, or was hurt, or was away holding out has no practice day. Only the men who actually practiced can develop, get loaded up, get noticed by the staff, or get hurt in practice. Reopening the camp page does not make a day happen twice, so extra development doesn’t come from reloading a save.

Practice injuries used to not exist at all. A knee tweaked on a Wednesday now goes into your franchise’s injury records with the day it happened and the day he’s back, same as an injury from a game.

At the opening of camp the staff flags up to five jobs it can’t settle. Sometimes it’s two men close enough that the staff won’t pick one, or a high pick breathing on a starter. Sometimes it’s an ageing starter with a young man right behind him. Each one is listed on the camp page with the staff’s current read on it, they get played out across the preseason, and the winner goes into your depth chart on cut day.

There are three preseason games, and for each one you say how much your starters play: sit, a series, a quarter, a half, the whole game. The engine holds that line snap by snap. If a starter’s time is up he comes off the field, even in the middle of a drive. None of it touches your standings, your stats or your record in the regular season. The injuries do carry over.

The playing time screen changed its wording because the old version promised something it couldn’t deliver. “Sit them” does not mean zero snaps. If you dress one quarterback and you sit your starter, he plays, and every one of those snaps gets counted. The preseason page now names the positions where you have nobody free behind your starters before the game starts, so you know what sitting them costs.

In the franchise modes I played, cut day was normally the part I skipped or simulated past. That’s why I put so much work into making it worth playing.

Cut day is a board. Everyone you have is on it with four choices: active, practice squad, cut, or injured reserve. Injured reserve only opens for a man who is hurt. Sideline Legacy keeps a practice squad for the younger end of the roster, and a veteran’s practice squad button is closed with the reason next to it. You can start from the staff’s suggested board or from your roster as it stands.

Before anything moves, the board is previewed. Every change you make runs against a copy of your club first, and the preview tells you whether that board is legal, what’s wrong with it, which moves the league would refuse and why, what the dead money looks like and how much room you have left. Your club doesn’t change until you confirm it.

“Make the cuts” only sends a board the engine has approved, so if the preview finds a problem you fix it, run it again, and then confirm. Once a board is sent the page tells you what happened: which moves were made, which one was refused, and the reason the league gave.

The practice squad, injured reserve and the active roster are connected, so you can promote a man back up and move him between them. The waiver wire and the claims sit on the same page as the cuts, which is where you’d be looking for them anyway. Numbers get renumbered during the cutdown, so a legal board doesn’t fail the game-day check on two men wearing the same number.

The owner has opinions about who you release. Cut a man he cares about and he sends you a message, polite or blunt depending on his temper, and it stays in the Owner screen. When the cutdown window closes he reviews your cut day once a year: trust down for the calls you made against his, capped at two, or a little up if you made none.

You can tell each cut man yourself instead of leaving it to your general manager. He answers.

One thing to know about the preseason snaps. They count as context inside that camp week’s learning, not as practice days, so a snap a rookie takes in August isn’t logged the same way as a practice day in camp. What preseason playing should teach is still an open question in how the game learns.

For the plain version of how cut day fits into the job, that’s on the roster page. If you’d rather find all of it out by playing, the playtest list hears about tests before anybody else.