No. Some owners don't mind offering one year deals.

Offer a 2 year deal if you don't like them.

If it's a player that would have only been worthy of a 1 year deal anyway, they won't cost you much to cut them after the first year. Probably only about $15-$20k in bonus money if you cut them during the post-season.

1 Year deals are for depth, If you feel like you want them longer then offer 2, If you dont think they are worth the risk, then you risk them hitting FA.

1 yr deals are also good for adding players in training camp.You sometimes find someone worth keeping over a veteran or rookie.Then you can always add longer yrs .

Yeah but after they turn FA

Agreed.

I offer 1 year deals to players to fill out my roster. I don't see why it's being considered onerous to have to offer fringe players a multi-year deal if I may want to retain them. If there was already so little interest in that player in FA that I could nab them on a one year deal, I likely didn't offer them much of anything in the way of bonus, so signing them to a two year deal wouldn't cost hardly anything if I chose to do that instead.

As far as 'prove it' deals go, as of now I like it the way it is. If they do end up proving it on a one year deal, why wouldn't they then test FA to see who's willing to pay for their services? Remember that those one-year deals are often intentionally requested by players in the NFL because they believe they're worth more, and they don't want to get locked down to a long, low paying contract. As it is now, if someone signed a 'prove it' player to their roster and he did end up being a hit, they likely have signed him to the league minimum, so giving exclusive resigning rights would provide a solid player for pennies when that new contract was inked. My .02 cents.

Here's the other side (and the reason that rule exists):

A superstar player enters free agency because for whatever reason his former team let him go. Now there's a bidding war on him. Someone offers him a 1-year deal that uses 80% of his salary cap, because he just happens to have that much free. As soon as he signs him, he renegotiates him to a deal that is favorable and that he would never have been able to sign him for during free agency, because every team in the league would have happily offered more.

For the 1-year deals that are roster fodder, you can make an offer during early FA the next year (they still show on your roster) and if there's really no demand for him, you can easily re-sign him.

Now that you mention it, I would like for players who are no longer on my team to NOT show on my roster.

It gets confusing when I'm trying to figure out my needs. I don't understand why they need to be there at all if they're no longer part of my team. They're no different than any other FA, right?

You can change the filter to show only players under contract or only players not under contract - those are two more filters that appear during the free agency period.

Thanks.

Will that keep them from showing up on my depth chart?

No, it won't - that's a good idea, though, to be able to filter those players off of the depth chart. Those players are not listed in your position distribution popup (MyTeam->Position Distribution) which is what I usually use to evaluate what positions I need to fill in FA and the draft.