Rookie Reserve

So Madden used to not subtract the rookie reserve for the upcoming draft until the offseason.

Why did they change this?

I’ve learned mostly how to live around it, especially in a franchise where it’s easy to stack draft picks, but I think I’ve found what appears to be a very annoying bug.

Going into training camp, I had a rookie reserve of over $100M, which gave me negative cap for re-signing players during the season. I whittled down these picks to get at least positive in cap during the pre-season to get the rookie reserve around $60M.

Fast forward to Week 3, and I’m still in the process of trying to consolidate picks, and my rookie reserve is now under $25M, but my next year’s cap hasn’t changed. So my next year’s cap is obviously still operating as if I have around $60M in rookie reserve. Frustrating especially considering players seem to want a bigger portion of the pie more now than ever and keeping good teams together is hard enough as it is.

I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on this and if they’ve experienced this before.