"This will put the team over the salary cap..."

[rookiebatman]

In versions of Madden before 2004 (very old gen), when you're modifying the rosters from the main menu, sometimes you can get this warning message. "This will put the team over the salary cap, turning off the salary cap option which can not be turned back on until reset." This mostly happens when you do stuff like trade players or sign free agents. Now you might be thinking that doesn't sound so bad, all you have to do is not make a change that puts the team over the salary cap. The problem, in my experience, is that the salary cap option has already been turned off at the moment you see the warning message.

For instance, let's say you're doing a thing where you want to have every team with full rosters at the start of the franchise. So you're going through signing all the free agents to each team in turn, mindlessly clicking the X button repetitively, just trying to finish the tedious task as quickly as possible. Then suddenly, this message pops up. "No problem," you think, "when the confirmation window comes up, I'll just say No and not sign the player to prevent the team from going over the salary cap." You'd think that would do it, but no. If you say No in the confirmation window and then go start a new franchise, you'll find that the salary cap option is already set to off with no way to change it back. Even reloading an older version of the rosters doesn't change it. On my emulator, the only thing I could find that changed it was reloading an old save state. If I didn't have a save state, I might have just been stuck with that option being turned off forever, because my recollection of when this happened before is that I tried all the options to shutdown and reload and everything like that, and salary caps were still off when I came back.

In the versions from 2004 on that I've tried, they just don't let you make changes that put the team over the salary cap, even in sandbox roster-edit mode. But if anyone still plays the very early versions and likes to mess around with the rosters, this is a warning to pay close attention to the salary cap, and make a save state before you start changing anything.