10 Football GM Mistakes Every New Player Makes

Every football GM player makes mistakes when they are starting out. The learning curve in management sims is real — there are salary caps to manage, drafts to navigate, rosters to build, and a hundred decisions per season that can go right or terribly wrong. The good news is that the mistakes are predictable. Nearly every new player falls into the same traps, and knowing about them in advance can save you seasons of frustration.

Here are the 10 most common mistakes that new football GM players make, and how to avoid each one.

1. Spending All Your Cap in Free Agency

The most common mistake new players make is treating free agency like a shopping spree. You see 80+ OVR players available, you have cap space, and you sign three or four of them. By the end of free agency, you have used 90% of your cap and your roster looks great — for one year.

The problem comes in Year 2 when those free agents are a year older and still on expensive contracts, your drafted players need extensions, and you have no cap space to address new needs. Suddenly you are cutting players, eating dead cap, and your "great roster" is falling apart.

The fix: Never spend more than 60% of your available cap in a single free agency period. Reserve the rest for in-season moves, re-signings, and next year's needs. Think of free agency as a supplement to your draft, not a replacement for it.

2. Ignoring the Draft

New players often treat the draft as an afterthought — they auto-pick, do not scout, and focus all their attention on free agency and trades. This is backwards. The draft is the most important roster-building tool in any football management game. Drafted players are younger, cheaper, and under team control longer than free agents.

The fix: Invest time in scouting before every draft. Use Pro-level scouting on your top targets, Deep Scout the players you are torn about, and build a real draft board. The 30 minutes you spend on pre-draft scouting will save you from years of bad picks.

3. Reaching for Positional Need in the First Round

Your team desperately needs a cornerback, so you take one with your first-round pick even though a significantly better edge rusher is available. This feels logical — you need a corner, so you draft a corner. But it usually results in a worse roster.

The edge rusher you passed on becomes a star. The corner you drafted is average. You filled a need but missed out on a franchise player. Over a multi-season run, these missed opportunities compound into a mediocre roster.

The fix: Draft the best player available in round 1, regardless of position (with the exception of kickers and punters). Address needs through trade, free agency, or later draft rounds where the talent gap between players is smaller.

4. Keeping Aging Stars Too Long

Your franchise quarterback is 33 and starting to decline. He was amazing in his prime, and you cannot bring yourself to move on. So you keep paying him $25M per year while he drops from 85 OVR to 78 OVR to 72 OVR. By the time you finally accept reality, he has no trade value and you have wasted three years of cap space.

The fix: Trade aging stars one year before you think you should. A 32-year-old with an 80 OVR still has significant trade value. A 34-year-old with a 74 OVR does not. Sell high, get draft picks, and use those picks to find the replacement. Sentiment is expensive.

5. Not Scouting Before the Draft

Some new players do not even know the scouting system exists. They look at the Entry-level ranges, pick the player with the highest ceiling, and hope for the best. This is how you end up with first-round busts — players whose wide scouting range made them look better than they actually were.

The fix: Scout every first and second-round target to at least Pro level. Use Elite scouting on the players you are most likely to draft. Use Deep Scout when you are torn between two players. Scouting reduces uncertainty, and reduced uncertainty means fewer busts.

6. Trading Away Draft Picks When You Are Not a Contender

If you are not making the playoffs this year, your future draft picks are more valuable to you than any player you could acquire via trade. New players often trade away first-round picks for aging veterans because they want to "get better now," but if now is a 5-12 season, getting marginally better does not help.

The fix: Only trade future first-round picks if you are genuinely contending for a championship. If you are rebuilding or below .500, accumulate picks, do not spend them. Your future firsts are the currency of your next competitive window.

7. Ignoring the Salary Cap Until It Is Too Late

New players often do not check their cap situation until they try to make a move and get blocked by insufficient space. By then, the damage is done — they are over the cap with no easy way to create room, and they have to cut good players or make desperate trades to get compliant.

The fix: Check your cap situation at the start of every offseason. Look at current spending, upcoming extensions, and projected needs. If your cap is within 10% of the ceiling, start planning cuts or restructures before free agency opens. Cap management is proactive, not reactive.

8. Starting Over Instead of Rebuilding

When things go wrong, the temptation is to start a brand new league rather than fix the mess you have made. But starting over means you never learn how to manage a difficult situation — which is the most valuable skill in football management.

The fix: When your team is bad, rebuild instead of restarting. Trade veterans for picks, tank for a high draft position, and build back through the draft. Learning how to dig out of a hole teaches you more about the game than a dozen fresh starts ever will.

9. Copying Real NFL Strategy Literally

The real NFL and football management games share principles, but the specific strategies do not always translate. Real NFL teams worry about coaching, practice time, scheme fit, and a hundred variables that do not exist in simulation games. If you try to replicate a specific NFL team's exact strategy, you will miss the things that actually matter in the simulation.

The fix: Use real NFL principles as guidelines, not blueprints. "Build through the draft" is universally true. "Run the same offense as the Kansas City Chiefs" is not useful in a game that does not simulate offensive schemes. Focus on the principles that translate: positional value, cap management, player development, and scouting.

10. Not Having a Multi-Year Plan

The biggest mistake of all is playing season-to-season without a long-term plan. Each decision — every draft pick, every signing, every trade — should serve a multi-year strategy. Are you rebuilding? Then every move should support the rebuild. Are you contending? Then every move should maximize your championship window.

Without a plan, you make contradictory decisions: signing expensive free agents while also tanking for draft picks, trading away young players while trying to rebuild, keeping aging veterans while claiming to think long-term.

The fix: Before every offseason, write down (or at least think through) your plan for the next 2–3 years. Are you rebuilding, emerging, contending, or resetting? What specific actions does that phase require? What benchmarks will tell you when it is time to shift to the next phase? A clear plan prevents the random, contradictory decisions that doom most new players' rosters.

Every expert was once a beginner who made all of these mistakes. The difference is that experts learned from them. Now you know what to watch for. Start a new league in BS Football and see how many of these traps you can avoid on your first run.