Ask Sam Farmer: Answering questions about scripted plays and rookie pay

Have a question about the NFL? Ask Times NFL writer Sam Farmer, and he will answer as many as he can online and in the Sunday editions of the newspaper throughout the season. Email questions to: sam.farmer@latimes.com

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How can a team script out their first 15 plays when they have no idea of the game situation? If any and all options are considered based on the game situation, why script out any plays? Just refer to your play sheet for the situation.

Steve Shaevel

Woodland Hills

Farmer: I posed your question to a couple of coaches who got to Super Bowls and they both agreed with you. Hall of Famer Marv Levy didn’t script plays when he was coaching the Buffalo Bills, and neither did Mike Martz when he was coaching the “Greatest Show on Turf” St. Louis Rams (although Martz did earlier in his career.).

Said Levy: “I agree with Steve 100%. We never scripted out our first plays. We might have had a first play, but that was if we thought there was something where we were trying to find out how they were going to defend against it, or what personnel combinations they’d use. But there are too many adjustments that have to go on during the course of the game. My feeling is, to be a good coach, you’ve got to have three things: You’ve got to be a good teacher, you’ve got to shoot straight with your players and you’ve got to be able to adjust.”

Said Martz: “We were a little unconventional, so we never knew what we were going to see defensively. Had we scripted, had we been a pretty basic offense, you can do that. If you do the same stuff, defenses generally have a thing for you. But we had teams that all of a sudden would be Cover-2 that never played Cover-2. So if you script out your first 15 and try to stay to it, you might be sledding uphill sometimes. I always knew the first series or so what I wanted to run, and then you just had to adjust. All the West Coast disciples from the Bill Walsh era script the plays. Originally, I did. In 1999 I did. But in 2000, because we were moving and shifting and doing so many things, it just wasn’t relevant anymore. We just kind of had to fly by the seat of our pants.”

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Any idea how and if rookies are paid after being drafted, signing a mega-contract, then not making the cut? Is there a guarantee? Do they keep any signing bonus?

Norm Zareski

Duryea, Penn.

Farmer: Although it’s rare for a rookie to sign a mega-contract and then get cut, there are some rules of thumb. First of all, a signing bonus doesn’t get repaid. So the amount of your signing bonus, whether you’re picked No. 1 or No. 256, comes at the time of signing and is guaranteed. Typically, picks 1-20 have all four years of their contracts guaranteed. Picks 21 through the end of the second round usually have guarantees in Year 1 and sometimes Year 2. From the start of the third round on, there are seldom guarantees beyond the signing bonus.

Again, these are rules of thumb and aren’t mandated by the collective bargaining agreement, but that’s usually how it goes.