The salary cap and contracts

[LT85]

So The G got his contract. Good for him. He deserves it. Kinda... See, I don't think anybody is worth that contract. Not him, not Brady, not Rodgers. Which leads me to something I have long thought about.

Why is there no cap on salaries? It seems irrational that there's a free market mechanism working for salaries, while the context it works in is a capped system. Shouldn't there be a limit to what one player can make?

Thoughts?

 

[sean10mm]

Is there a cap on owner profits? Then why should there be a cap on player profits?

 

[Soliel]

I wouldn’t be opposed to a limit.

Jag making 27 mill a year is stupid

 

[luuked]

So The G got his contract. Good for him. He deserves it. Kinda... See, I don't think anybody is worth that contract. Not him, not Brady, not Rodgers. Which leads me to something I have long thought about.

Why is there no cap on salaries? It seems irrational that there's a free market mechanism working for salaries, while the context it works in is a capped system. Shouldn't there be a limit to what one player can make?

Thoughts?

Because the NFLPA would never agree to it.

 

[VectorPrime]

Max contracts have arguably broken the NBA.

 

[LT85]

All fair points.

Because the NFLPA would never agree to it.

Why wouldn't the NFLPA agree? I mean limiting the amount of the cap that can go to one player you'd assume that there would be a lift in the salaries of the lower levels of players. The players who would max out the limit would still be insanely rich.

Max contracts have arguably broken the NBA.

I don't know anything about the NBA. How has max contracts broken the NBA?

 

[Pape]

Why wouldn't the NFLPA agree? I mean limiting the amount of the cap that can go to one player you'd assume that there would be a lift in the salaries of the lower levels of players. The players who would max out the limit would still be insanely rich.

Because 5 yr/137 million dollar contracts are sexy... and if they cant be made, Dee Smith cant say "Look what I got for you!"

The higher the salaries go, the higher the top ten and five averages go ... the higher the tags go ... a rising tide lifts all ships so to speak

 

[luuked]

Because 5 yr/137 million dollar contracts are sexy... and if they cant be made, Dee Smith cant say "Look what I got for you!"

The higher the salaries go, the higher the top ten and five averages go ... the higher the tags go ... a rising tide lifts all ships so to speak

Well the max contracts and tags would then just be based on the salary cap and not the top 5 highest contracts. That is no reason to say no.

What you said before about the psychology of evergrowing contracts is definitely true though.

 

[Pape]

Well the max contracts and tags would then just be based on the salary cap and not the top 5 highest contracts. That is no reason to say no.

then you are getting into reworking the franchise and transition tags, how the values are determined, and how they can escalate based on multiple tags. If I am understand you, then you omit the highest contracts from that calculation, it seems awfully unfair to those getting tagged.

 

[convertedpatsfan]

I wouldn’t be opposed to a limit.

Jag making 27 mill a year is stupid

Do we really need more rules to protect stupid people from doing stupid things?

 

[Deus Irae]

Why is there no cap on salaries? It seems irrational that there's a free market mechanism working for salaries, while the context it works in is a capped system.

There's not a free market for salaries. There's a limited market in a salary capped system with a whole bunch of rules and boundaries.

Shouldn't there be a limit to what one player can make?

No

 

[Gronk]

On the NFL vs NBA/MLB front, the NFL is been on the “hard” cap side. You can pay anyone whatever you want, but there is a ceiling. In baseball or basketball you can go over that ceiling for an individual, but you pay extra (luxury tax) or there are specific omissions from the cap (Bird rules/max deals). The NFL system is preferable, to me, I terms of overall competitive balance, but it definitely is about at is breaking point, at least in the way in which we have all come to understand it. Part of that is an exploding cap that makes valuation difficult even over the length of a basic (4-5 years) deal for a veteran player; part of it is the shorter average career and larger roster size which means that players who do make it past their rookie contract have larger expectations of the deals they will accept.

You can cap the individual player hard and allow some exceptions to try to ensure competitive balance and consistency for fans (NBA), or you can cap the team hard and let the teams and FA market determine what a player is worth (NFL). I don’t think there’s a world where trying to do both of those things is good for anyone. QB pay is clearly spiking right now, but whether that is a problem is TBD. Foles just won the Super Bowl. Brady, Manning, Manning, Rapist, and Brees won 6 in the past 10 years and were top paid guys. Rodgers, Wilson, and Flacco all won while they were guys who were clearly good but not yet paid as elite. Teams could swing towards cheaper, basic QBs like many have with RBs. Given the rules that favor QBs and passing that seems unwise, but the “next” BB will be looking for market inefficiencies at various positions that they can manipulate to get an edge over many seasons.

Brady and B.B. made each other, but they also found each other at the perfect time. The next guy might have a genius way to spend $30m on 5 or 6 guys at skill positions who can be led by a fairly mediocre QB will a certain skill set the same way Brady has made otherwise pedestrian looking skill guys who are not premier money players into world beaters.

 

[maineman209]

Bless Brady for agreeing to a series of re-structures that have kept his immediate cap-hits low all these years. But still, that's not the only thing that has enabled BB to manage the Pat cap more efficiently than other teams. Pretty much every other team has gone through boom/bust cycles due to having rosters that get top-heavy, cap-wise after 3-4 years via chasing or retaining players at the top market rates for their positions. BB has mostly avoided that trap, leaving him the ability to maintain more balanced and deeper rosters year-after-year.

In effect, BB has been enforcing his own cap on individual player salaries. Advantage: Patriots. Making it a league-wide rule merely allows other, dumber owners and GMs to accomplish the same, taking away a Pats advantage. I'm actually surprised that Goodell and the other owners haven't already figured this out.

So, selfishly, I'd be opposed to caps on individual player pay.

 

[Soliel]

Do we really need more rules to protect stupid people from doing stupid things?

Nah it would get too boaring. I like watching stuff like this. The nfl has proven the ten thousand monkeys typing theory is wrong.
Those monkeys would never write Shakespeare’s plays

 

[Ivan]

There’s a hard cap and a rookie cap, they don’t need anything more than that. If anything needs to be fixed it’s the way guaranteed money works, the players really get screwed in this system. While I don’t think guaranteeing the entire length of contracts can work in football they deserve more security than they get with their deals. They could even adjust it so that it wouldn’t count against the cap and the payments would go into retirement accounts for the players that could be accessed 5 years after they leave the game, or immediately if they retire due to injury.

 

[Nehalem]

So The G got his contract. Good for him. He deserves it. Kinda... See, I don't think anybody is worth that contract. Not him, not Brady, not Rodgers. Which leads me to something I have long thought about.

That is where you are wrong

Why is there no cap on salaries? It seems irrational that there's a free market mechanism working for salaries, while the context it works in is a capped system. Shouldn't there be a limit to what one player can make?

Thoughts?

The point of the salary cap is to divide revenue up. The CBA specifies what percentage of league revenue goes to the players. Then that percentage is divided evenly between the 32 teams. I fail to see how else they could do it; without royally screwing up the league at least.

The overall salary cap act as an effective cap on individual salaries, as obviously you can only play players a percentage of your total cap. Its up to each time however to decided which players they value, and how much.

 

[Hammer of Thor]

Libertarian and free-labor types may abhor the salary cap on principle, and that's fine. But in theory it never truly restricted an individual player's earning potential, it just made teams make tough choices on how to build their team and spend their money.

Once you start limiting what an individual player can make, though, now you're getting into something personal. It does nothing to help parity, it does nothing to reign in spending that a normal salary cap doesn't. Instead it punishes the best players (or the perceived best players).

If the NFPPA was concerned about the salaries of lower paid players, then instead of agreeing to an individual player cap, they would fight to increase the minimum salary. Right now it's ~$1M for veterans and ~$600K for rookies, scaled in between. They could fight to make it $2M across the board regardless of service. You do that, with no change to the overall salary cap, and it still works - certain teams would still choose to pay players like Aaron Rodgers at the same level now, while other teams wouldn't. The better than average but not star players would likely be most affected.

 

[LT85]

A lot of good answers here.

Maybe it's not a good idea with max contracts. Maybe the problem is owners and GMs not having enough ass in their pants to let mediocre to good players go if they ask for more than they're worth. Overpaying mediocre players leads to Overpaying good players.

 

[sean10mm]

Let me come at this from a different angle:

The Pats benefit from being one of the few teams with actual spending discipline and cap management skills. We don't want the rules to be changed to protect other franchises from their own stupidity.

The other guys being morons is, like, half of our success by itself.

 

[Jangles]

Max contracts have arguably broken the NBA.

this

max contracts ruin the idea of free agency