What are thoughts on having separate prospect budgets for the draft and internationals?

Its a personal pet peeve of mine that people punt their entire draft to sign one international. Nobody (other than Mike Ditka) would give up an entire draft for 1 player. And even Ditka didn't have to fill an entire roster by missing that draft.. he only came up 6 players short, rather than 24.

Separate budgets would "encourage" teams to sign their draft picks, yet still let them play the International market if they want. The $6M minimum will be kept in place for the draft budget. Obviously no minimum necessary for the International.

I realize that some worlds have caps on prospect budgets. I am not looking to cap it. I just don't want the draft to suffer because of it.

Pick my idea apart. GO.          

It shouldn't take 6m to sign your draft picks.

The draft is really no longer necessary to fill out minor league rosters with the addition of try out camp for position players.

Some owners sign 4-5 Type A and punt the draft anyway. 

I think what smoelheim is trying to do is set up a scenario in which $6m is locked into the draft budget, such that you'll be forced to either spend it there or lose it.  Under the current system, you can blow it all before the draft on IFA's and then punt the draft.  His proposal tried to prevent that by keeping draft and IFA in separate budgets.

The only downside I see to this proposal is that it gives tankers another place to stash away money (i.e. away from player payroll) to sign draft picks and IFAs.  Today, you're limited to $20m in prospect/IFA bonus money.  Anything beyond that has to pay the 50% transfer fee.  With this, you can have a minimum of $26m (max of $20m IFA and at least $6m draft) of pre-transfer money to play with.  If you're hoarding draft picks, you can go up to $40m pre-transfer bonus money to play with.  So you can have your cake (the draft) AND eat it (the IFA market) too.

Tankers are going to tank.  But this could be abused to give them a bigger payoff.

My point was it probably won't take 6m to sign draft picks.   Say you win the WS.   You're picking 32nd at best.  If you sign a Type A, your first pick with be in the 70s.   500k.   You should be able to sign all your picks for somewhere near 2.5m.   Last season in Coop, my first pick was 114.   I spent less than 2m to sign all my picks.

Yeah, that's the part I don't like.  That being said, if there's no minimum on the IFA budget, it wouldn't be much different than it is now on the low end.  On the other end, tec's point is fair.

The only thing I would change is that if you're not going to allow us to transfer budget out of that line to go less than 6 million unless you've signed 15 picks, you shouldn't be able to spend below that 6 million line without signing picks either.  I've never really understood why they made those scenarios different.

So I like a hybrid of the points above.

I will take AlCheez's idea to the next level. You should be required to sign your top 15 players who will sign for slot money before transferring budget out (at a 50% penalty). I wouldn't make them sign a ****** DH who is asking for $3M in the 7th round. But if a guy wants slot $$, you gotta sign him.

To tec's point... make the international budget max out at 14 during budgets. That effectively maintains the current $20M max for prospect signing.

And I'll even satisfy Mike. If you sign ALL of your players (who will sign for slot)... you can transfer your remaining budget at 100%. No transfer penalty.

Everyone wins.