Smith contemplating permanent decertification

[Orton's Arm]

Owners love the union, they made the players reform the union as part of the settlement in the anti-trust case they lost. So long as there is a union, players can't avail themselves of the anti-trust statutes. The presence of a union gives the league what congress has not, a blanket exemption from the laws of the United States. A "threat" to reform the union would be met with popping champagne corks in every owner's office in the league.

 

The result of a pure free market system is a bit of a guessing game. Theoretically the teams that are most successful are going to be the teams that win games. A team with a few stars and everyone else getting minimum wage would lose to more balanced teams because no matter how good Peyton Manning or Tom Brady is, they don't block, they don't kick field goals, they don't cover WR's etc, etc. Football is still about those things, blocking and tackling.

 

People are wrongly concluding that the players are hell bent for leather to get rid of the draft and exclusive rights to players that limit their ability to bid out their services. Yes, in the past they sought to remove limits on player movement but that was at a time where there was no such thing as free agency. They won that argument with court victories in the early 1990's and we were then headed towards an open player market. Because the owners were facing that doomsday scenario, they finally buckled. They cut the players in on the take and allowed for a free agency which, though it was limited, was still light years beyond anything that had gone before. The players have shown that they will give away their freedom to work for whoever they want to for the good of the league but only if they are essentially partners in that league.

 

I also think it is more than a bit paternalistic to say that we know what is best for the players as a whole, that really, they are better off without an open market. And if Peyton Manning can command more money in the market place than the 20 to 30 worst players on the team, why is that unfair? Why does Peyton Manning have to sacrifice his earning power?

 

 

 

 

 

The ultimate issue really may be just that, owners who don't want to share with owners who aren't making the same $ for whatever reason, be it small markets or whatever. The have-not's want better revenue sharing. That money can either come from the have's or the players. Increased revenue sharing would be a lot more palatable to owners who are flush if its coming from a bigger pie, made so with money formerly going to the players. Isn't that what they are going to do with the extra billion they said they need for expense? They would split it up with equal shares to each franchise, ie, revenue sharing of different sort. Players

First, I'll address your statement that, "The presence of a union gives the league what congress has not, a blanket exemption from the laws of the United States." Those laws are being applied as though the NFL consisted of 32 separate corporations--corporations which are supposed to be competing against each other. If (for example) the 32 largest airlines got together to negotiate a "salary cap," it would be considered an anti-trust violation. The reason NFL teams are allowed to do this is because a salary cap was part of the agreement with the players union. The problem here is obvious: courts interpret each NFL team as a separate, competing business entity when they should be viewing the NFL as one big entity. The solution is equally obvious: make whichever changes are necessary to persuade the courts that the NFL is, in fact, one corporation (not 32 smaller corporations). That would eliminate the owners' need for a players union, and eliminate the need for Demaurice Smith.

 

You wrote, "A team with a few stars and everyone else getting minimum wage would lose to more balanced teams because no matter how good Peyton Manning or Tom Brady is, they don't block, they don't kick field goals, they don't cover WR's etc, etc." Let me be clear about this: my concern is not that teams like the Colts and the Patriots will try to win games with an elite QB + scrubs at every other position. They or someone else will offer a good salary for starting-caliber offensive linemen and defensive linemen and starting-caliber players at other positions. The problem is that a team only has 22 starters, but 53 men on its roster. What happens to the salaries of those 31 backups once the NFL minimum wage is eliminated? Sure, some of those backups are important role players or are pivotal on special teams. Nickel backs, #3 WRs, rotational defensive linemen, kickers, punters, guys like that. Those guys would probably do okay. But a lot of those other 31 guys are players who don't typically see the field, except on special teams. Those are the guys likely to get hammered by the elimination of the NFL's minimum wage, with the money saved going to players like Peyton Manning. Peyton Manning may indeed be sacrificing a portion of his earning power under the present system, as compared to how much he could earn if the Colts' backups were paid 1/10th the current NFL minimum wage. But IIRC, he currently makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million a year, and I feel no burning desire to see that increased to $15 million a year at other players' expense.

 

"The ultimate issue really may be just that, owners who don't want to share with owners who aren't making the same $ for whatever reason, be it small markets or whatever." It is true this is a serious issue. My sense is that owners are more selfish towards other owners now than they'd been back in the day of Wellington Mara. That's one of several reasons why unshared revenues have increased faster than shared revenues. The other problem is that players have been getting a progressively larger share of the pie. In addition to increasing the players' percentage of revenues, the players union has also arranged things so that if Jerry Jones or some other owner gets his hands on some extra unshared revenue, a very significant portion is (for salary cap purposes) treated as though it had been distributed among all 32 NFL teams. That provision makes it much more financially painful for a team like the Bills to spend up to the salary cap than had been the case back in the late '90s. The salary cap makes up a substantially greater percentage of shared revenues today than had been the case ten years ago. That's something which has to change, and I commend the owners for working to solve that problem.