Re: DeMaurice Smith on Mike and Mike
There is no need to roll back the Salary Cap... The Amount of money spent in a year on Player Salaries I guarantee you isn't even 15% of the Profit a Team makes.
The Salary Cap should be defined as a percentage of gross profit from all shared revenue.
For all TV contracts, and other shared revenues, + Ticket sales, and Merchandise that has a players likeness on it ( no general Team gear ) should be also included.
If they make everything as a percentage, then everyone has a vested interested in being successful and making more money.
It would be pretty easy to guarantee you are wrong.
The salary cap is a percentage of gross profit from all shared revenue. Used to be a percentage of designated revenue, some of which wasn't shared, and the TV deals funded the bulk of it. Therein lies the problem. That percentage is currently just under 60% of essentially all gross profit. What the league wants is a reduction that either lowers that percentage or again designates some revenue as exempt. That's because they have a lot more than players to pay, they have off field employees and capital improvements and travel and debt service and the cost of growing the pie to pay for everyone. Owners clearly believe that rookie contracts are clearly at the core of the problem because of the disparity in bang for your buck that it realized on upwards of half of all draft picks. Just redistributing that money alone doesn't accomplish anything for the league when reducing it in a shared split (half back to owners and half back to veteran players) could go a long way towards rebalancing the scales.
De prefers to spew simplistic rhetoric and misrepresent what is being asked for because that's what unions tend to do when facing demands for economic relief from unsustainable terms. That he suddenly wants half of it to go to pre cap retirees his union has essentially ignored for decades is a hoot. The league and the union should share in support of retirees. He wasnts the owners to essentially cover the entire cost thereby netting nothing. In the last couple of years the salary cap floor has exceeded what the salary cap ceiling was less than 5 years ago.
The NBA is gearing up for the same kind of battle. Because they chose the star method as the vehicle around which to grow their game, and they are now in a situation where the tale wags the dog - often with gun in hand. The NFL has always tried to maintain focus on the game rather than the talent as the draw, in large part because the average NFL career even for it's stars is less than half as long for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the physical nature of the game and the fact most players join the league at age 22 or later and are on their way out of it at 30 or earlier.
Part of the enduring charm of this league was another way in which it differered from other sports leagues. Contracts weren't guaranteed. Like most Joe's home watching the game from their couches, football players were expected to play for/earn their pay. Over the last decade that has changed dramatically. First signing bonuses got ever grander and arbitrators ruled that they were earned and unrecoverable under pretty much any circumstance. Enter guaranteed money that could have some recoverability or accountability. But demands for those guarantees have also increased from maybe 20-30% of deal value to in excess of half. At a time when player conduct on and off the field is at an all time low as a generation of entitled talent who believes you have arrived when you're drafted has emerged. Lost in the shuffle as usual are the less hyped and talented and undercompensated for the risks and abuse they endure rank and file players who are the backbone of this league. Those guys and not the over hyped megastars need to be protected lest they end up as merely the next generation of the players this league and this union has left behind in their neverending quest for every last dollar.
It sounds if De can be remotely believed as if owners are basically proposing the givebacks come from the rookie contract cap and in exchange the % of giveback that equates to will be offset by the growth of the regular season to 18 games. I don't particularly like that tradeoff although from a purely financial standpoint it probably makes sense and in the end the union will take any deal that it can spin as growing it's bottom line as well...even if it's via expansion. More games will expand rosters and potentially teams and markets. Meh...all it means for fans is an increasingly expensive and deluted product.
At the end of the day core football fans are the only ones who still care about the game. The majority of owners and players and the NFLPA only truly care about what's in it for each of them financially. Makes it increasingly hard for fans to really have a dog in their fight.
