NFL could try to cap individual player contracts

Clonamery said:

You've never supplied tangible proof.

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I overnighted you an unused tampon, wtf else do you want?!

I see this as increasing the likelihood of a work stoppage. A lot of superstar players don't really care if rookies get good contracts or players get good pensions or health insurance after they retire. But tell a young superstar who will likely get a new contract in the CBA that they may lose millions with an individual salary caps, then they will care what is in the CBA and what isn't. And they may be more willing to vote for a work stoppage if the league and NFLPA can't get a deal done.

We are a long way away from this. But I think what has led to decades now of no labor stoppages is in part that the best players are not willing to leave millions of dollars on the table to sit out and strike for things that don't really affect them.

RobertWeathers said:

I hear you but there are a 100 ways to Sunday to circumvent that potential regulation.

At the end of the day teams have a hard cap and can spend up to it and on whom (or not) at their choosing.

If the NFL wants to adopt some kind of NBA-ish supermax 5/25% rule or a Bird rule as the article implies, then I get it.

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All this cap talk and limiting contracts while charging me stupid money to chase streaming services is a real turn off. I am going to get to the point that I'm not going to pay. I can see that day coming pretty quickly.

Rob0729 said:

I see this as increasing the likelihood of a work stoppage. A lot of superstar players don't really care if rookies get good contracts or players get good pensions or health insurance after they retire. But tell a young superstar who will likely get a new contract in the CBA that they may lose millions with an individual salary caps, then they will care what is in the CBA and what isn't. And they may be more willing to vote for a work stoppage if the league and NFLPA can't get a deal done.

We are a long way away from this. But I think what has led to decades now of no labor stoppages is in part that the best players are not willing to leave millions of dollars on the table to sit out and strike for things that don't really affect them.

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15 years ago was the last work stoppage. Who could forget this:

fnordcircle said:

I overnighted you an unused tampon, wtf else do you want?!

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That only proves you could be Pam Bondi.

Hasn't the cap floor been keeping up with the overall rise in salary cap? Pretty sure it's been a percentage for a long time now. In order to raise the floor, you'd have to change the percentage.

I think the floor has been just as important to the NFL's growth as the cap itself. It has prevented the NFL from entering the ridiculous disparities of MLB. Currently, the Dodgers are spending around 410 Million, with the Marlins spending 80 Million. Just ridiculous.

Pat the Pats Fan said:

I’m for putting a floor, or minimum salary for all players. As a percent of the total salary cap. That could slow down the ridiculous contracts we see,

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They already have a minimum salary.

Huckleberry1 said:

Lmao. This reminds me of the time when Tom Hicks, the filthy rich owner of the Texas Rangers went on a screed about how irresponsible his fellow owners were in signing players to mega contracts, then signed Alex Rodriquez to a 250 million contract a few days later. The billionaires need someone to be their daddy because they can't control themselves. The players should respond with an offer to limit owner profits and donate the rest to good causes.

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Indeed, NFL shows that salary caps are one of the few ways to keep competitive balance, indeed because rich guys can't control themselves.

In this country we used to have "progressive" personal income tax and corporate "windfall profits" tax to try to have a healthier society, but nope, the wealthy found workarounds for all of the above.

Now we have the gentry vs the peasantry big time.

Like it or not, it's a fact that the concentration of wealth is increasing rather than decreasing.

This isn't political, both major US parties have been supporting policies that favor the wealthy.

Wozzy said:

QB’s need to realize the amount they insist on diminishes the ability of the team to retain great players around them.

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They do realize it, but so many egos are involved. The player, the player's friends and families, the agents, etc. Ego and greed are strong drugs.

RobertWeathers said:

I hear you but there are a 100 ways to Sunday to circumvent that potential regulation.

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Steve Ballmer is on Line 1, sir!

Steve102 said:

All this cap talk and limiting contracts while charging me stupid money to chase streaming services is a real turn off. I am going to get to the point that I'm not going to pay. I can see that day coming pretty quickly.

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I'm already there. I've never explicitly paid for NFL since I dropped cable TV around a decade ago. With CATV I had to pay extra to get sports programming in HD and the only reason I did that was to watch NFL. I do have Amazon Prime but I've had that since it was first offered long before Amazon partnered with NFL. I also have YouTube Premium but again I bought that long before NFL was partnering with Google. Now I either watch games live for free over the air or I watch highlights delayed on YouTube.

XLIX said:

Why is that funny? If they’re in the right on a particular topic then they’re in the right - no matter which side has however much money.

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I'm on the side of the millionaires on this one. They're the ones that are putting their bodies on the line.

1960Pats said:

I'm on the side of the millionaires on this one. They're the ones that are putting their bodies on the line.

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I don't think we even know how each side feels about this one and, respectfully, it is silly to say you're "on the side of the millionaires" because I guarantee you "the millionaires" themselves will have a lot of internal disagreement on this topic.

So are you on the side of the millionaires who want it or the millionaires who don't?

TommyD4207 said:

Billionaires couldn't stay billionaires without their socialism and/or communism.

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Having business partners is not socialism. Get over it, people.

Rob0729 said:

I see this as increasing the likelihood of a work stoppage. A lot of superstar players don't really care if rookies get good contracts or players get good pensions or health insurance after they retire. But tell a young superstar who will likely get a new contract in the CBA that they may lose millions with an individual salary caps, then they will care what is in the CBA and what isn't. And they may be more willing to vote for a work stoppage if the league and NFLPA can't get a deal done.

We are a long way away from this. But I think what has led to decades now of no labor stoppages is in part that the best players are not willing to leave millions of dollars on the table to sit out and strike for things that don't really affect them.

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This issue is a lot like the franchise tag. Players hate having the franchise tag applied to them but it only impacts about a dozen players a year (at most). So the 1600 member Union as a whole isn't going to make a significant sacrifice to get rid of something which only impacts a dozen or so players.

XLIX said:

This issue is a lot like the franchise tag. Players hate having the franchise tag applied to them but it only impacts about a dozen players a year (at most). So the 1600 member Union as a whole isn't going to make a significant sacrifice to get rid of something which only impacts a dozen or so players.

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Maybe. We have no idea what the league has in mind for this. It could affect far more than 12 guys. Usually the guys getting the top contracts these days are not always the top players at their positions. Guys like Trevor Lawrence got record setting deals even though he was and still is far from the top QB in the league despite being the highest paid player in the league when he signed his deal. Today, lower tiered players at marque positions get record setting deals.

And the top 12 players in the league have a lot of power in the NFLPA. Those 12 guys have far more power than the hundreds of bottom of the roster guys. I know it is one player, one vote. But if you don't think a Josh Allen has more power than ten Tommy DeVitos, you are crazy.

Steve102 said:

All this cap talk and limiting contracts while charging me stupid money to chase streaming services is a real turn off. I am going to get to the point that I'm not going to pay. I can see that day coming pretty quickly.

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But it’s a business. It has to find the spot where supply meets demand.
If they can raise prices and keep enough customers that the increase overcomes the run off, that’s what they do.
They don’t exist to serve people who can’t afford their product, or to be concerned with the cost to individuals. If you get 50,000,000 clients at $10 and 40,000,000 at $15 you aren’t worrying about the 10 that left.

If you do, the purpose of being a business is no longer driving your organization, and competition knocks you out.
Now the NFL is somewhat different than most businesses but they still existed the bottom line.

Rob0729 said:

Maybe. We have no idea what the league has in mind for this. It could affect far more than 12 guys.

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If they are modeling it after basketball like the article says they are then it is only going to impact Quarterbacks

Rob0729 said:

And the top 12 players in the league have a lot of power in the NFLPA.

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No they kinda really don't - as proven by the fact that franchise tag is still a thing. When it comes to Union matters, the rank and file do not bow to the superstars like you seem to think they do.

Rob0729 said:

But if you don't think a Josh Allen has more power than ten Tommy DeVitos, you are crazy.

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I don't think you understand the concept of how voting works....

XLIX said:

If they are modeling it after basketball like the article says they are then it is only going to impact Quarterbacks


No they kinda really don't - as proven by the fact that franchise tag is still a thing. When it comes to Union matters, the rank and file do not bow to the superstars like you seem to think they do.

I don't think you understand the concept of how voting works....

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Florio says they are going to use the same formula system as the NBA, but he doesn't say there will be one formula for all players or different formulas for each position. Since they have different franchise tags per position, it seems logical that they will do the latter if they implement max contracts. The NFL tends to look at salaries by position. The NBA doesn't. Star players in the NBA get paid pretty much the same no matter the position. Point guards get max contracts. Small forwards gets max contracts. Centers get max contracts. Any star player in the NBA can get a max contract deal no matter the position.

The point of max contracts would be so that a few players do not account for half or more of a team's salary cap. If you do a max contract that doesn't account for position, it will just mean that the top QBs won't make as much, but it will just go to one or two other star players. On a lot or most teams, the top WRs, DEs, and CBs will just start to make as much as QBs. It won't get shared with other players. It defeats the purpose of max contracts.

And when the franchise tag was a real thing and not pretty irrelevant as it is now, players did fight harder to get better collective bargaining agreements. That is part of the reason there have work stoppages in the past. Now few players get franchised because there is no hard cap and the cap keeps going up. So everyone gets a record setting deal these days who are franchised. Even most of the guys who get franchised end up getting record setting deals eventually.

If they go to max contracts, especially by position, then we go back to the 90s and early 2000s where the top players will care more about the collective bargaining agreement. Now all they care about is the revenue splits between players and the teams. They might care about practice schedules and the amount of contact in practice, but they aren't concerned with things like rookie deals, pensions, healthcare, etc. With max contracts, they suddenly care about the minutia of the details of the CBA.

I know how voting works. I am just not an idiot. I get how star players can influence the vote of large portions of the locker room where lower level players cannot. If Josh Allen says he isn't going to vote for the collective bargaining agreement, there are probably a half dozen to a dozen players on the team who will follow suit. If he and other elite players walk, other players will follow. If practice squad player threatens to walk, most players will probably give them their vocal support while voting to ratify the CBA. The stars players control every sports league. Most players will follow them.

Again, I will have to say this every time. I get that you hate me, but it doesn't mean you have go great lengths to argue with me.

Clonamery said:

I hate these Socialistic fixes because the Owners can't control their budgets so it's up to the Players to do it. These Commie Billionaires always trying to spread the wealth at the expense of the BEST Americans.

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Spreading that wealth right into their own pockets yea....

BTW, I said in my first post, we are a long way from any potential work stoppage. All this provision would do is increase the likelihood of it. Until we even see with what is in the CBA, we can assume it is going from zero percent chance to 1% chance for all we know.

I don't expect to see a strike. There is too much money to be made with the broadcast and streaming deals. But provisions like max contracts would be something that has the potential to chance the likelihood.

Rob0729 said:

I know how voting works. I am just not an idiot. I get how star players can influence the vote of large portions of the locker room where lower level players cannot. If Josh Allen says he isn't going to vote for the collective bargaining agreement, there are probably a half dozen to a dozen players on the team who will follow suit.

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********. If Josh Allen getting less means the rank and file get more, then the rank and file are not going to be intimidated by Josh Allen into voting against something that benefits them.

Teh above is proven by the continued existence of the franchise tag. The superstars would love to get rid of it but there is simply no push whatsoever on the part of the Union to do so.

Rob0729 said:

Again, I will have to say this every time. I get that you hate me, but it doesn't mean you have go great lengths to argue with me.

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When I see a poor argument, I will disagree with it. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.

XLIX said:

********. If Josh Allen getting less means the rank and file get more, then the rank and file are not going to be intimidated by Josh Allen into voting against something that benefits them.

Teh above is proven by the continued existence of the franchise tag. The superstars would love to get rid of it but there is simply no push whatsoever on the part of the Union to do so.

When I see a poor argument, I will disagree with it. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.

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No it doesn't. It probably means James Cook is getting more. If there is just one max contract that only affects QBs, odds are the money saved will go to the top free agents to get them or retain them. So it will just raise the salaries of the top

Players might be happy to see the franchise tag gone, but most don't care about all that much anymore. Name all the players who have been screwed over by the franchise tag in recent years. Most players who get franchised either get paid a top of the market deal with their team or traded to another team where they get a top of the market deal. The days of teams keeping players on a franchise tag for a year or two to keep them from free agency without having to pay them for a long term deal is no longer a thing except in rare cases. So it isn't that big of an issue for the players.

Only three players got franchised and one got transitioned this year and one of them already got an overvalued deal (Daniel Jones). The other three are likely to get deals before the franchise tag deadline is over.

In 2025, only Tee Higgins and Trey Smith were franchised. Higgins got a near top of the market deal for a WR from the Bengals and Smith got a contract as the highest paid guard in the league after they were franchised. Higgins was franchised the year before, but he got paid as a top 5 WR as the Bengals #2 WR for that year. So he didn't mind being franchised even if he preferred to get a long term deal.

In 2024, Josh Allen the DE (ended up getting a 5 year, $150 million contract), Brian Burns (got traded to the Giants and got a five year $140 million contract), Jaylon Johnson (got a 4 year, $76 million contract), Justin Madubuike (four years, 98 million), Michael Pittman (3 years, $70 million), L'Jarius Sneed (traded to the Titans and got a 4 year, $76 million contract), Antoine Winfield Jr (4 year, $84.1 million). Were all franchised and either quickly given contracts within a few weeks or traded and given contracts. All got great deals.

The franchise tag isn't the negative it used to be. It is more of an inconvenience to a player than a real hardship. I don't think star players want to get rid of it nearly as badly as you think. I think they would be happy to see it gone, but it isn't something that they care enough about anymore to risk a work stoppage over.

And you cannot hurt my feelings. I don't care about you. You might want to try to argue with yourself more if you like to argue with bad arguments.