Giants Ice Packers in Overtime

Just a note to tell you guys that you're having a great discussion, and each making excellent points.

I don't know the exact years of the change, but until the AFL created a competitive market, the NFL had lifetime control over a player, and effectively kept salaries down. Of course, there was far less money to go around, also. I remember Bill Glass, an all-pro defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, lived a couple of blocks from us in a very middle class neighborhood, and Jerry Kramer talked about making $20,000 as an all pro for the Packers. The WFL started in hopes of doing the same thing as the AFL (forcing a merger), and broke up a lot of teams by stealing away players. Calvin Hill stated that his signing bonus with the WFL was several times bigger than his entire contract with the Cowboys. Each of these leagues gave players options.

Revenue sharing helped smaller market teams stay viable, but ticket prices and stadium differences and market size still gave an advantage to large market teams and teams like the Packers, Cowboys and Steelers that had a national following. If market size alone dictated anything though, there would be a team in Los Angeles.

The salary cap has affected teams, and Bill Belechick has given everyone else the blueprint for winning in a market era.

First, you need to be able to evaluate talent. You can't afford to have cap space tied up in non-productive players. Second, you can't fixate on any one player. Jerry Jones has gotten burned several times by fixating on a player, Mike Ditka did the same thing with Ricky Williams, and I suspect the Raiders are going to regret the day they signed Russell. You guys have already mentioned Vick.

Second, you can sign a player to big bucks, but he'd better be somebody who won't get slowed down by a fat wallet. Tom Brady is a perfect example of a guy who wants to win, and didn't drop his level of play when he got a big contract. Roy Williams of the Cowboys dropped his level of play the day he signed his big contract, and now the Cowboys are stuck with him. Can't cut him because of the cap hit, can't trade him for the same reason.

Third, darned few players are worth franchise tags. The Patriots have let a lot of people go because they wanted bigger contracts, but keep finding people with smaller names of similar abilities.

All of that goes back to one thing: Belichik can evaluate talent and not overpay for it.

There's one other thing that's happened. There's a lot more overall talent out there. I photograph high school and college ball, and the high school kids out there are getting better coaching and conditioning across the board. This shows up in college ball, where an Appalachian State can play against a Michigan. I photographed games with Texas State and the University of Texas this year, and yeah, UT still has better talent, but it's not THAT much better. High school kids are running sophisticated spread offenses and playing 3-4s with defensive ends dropping into coverage on linebacker blitzes. You just didn't see that level of sophistication at the high school level even 15 years ago.

Alberta’s Child and I go around on this every couple of years. I have a lot of respect for his sports knowledge across the board, but consider this issue a blind spot of his.

The cap isn’t perfect of course. IMHO the cap should have a discount for single team veterans, any guy that was drafted by your team and has been there 10 years should have a percentage of his salary not count on the cap. I do prefer sports with less player movement, and it is sad to see guys leave their true team for cap reasons. Although we should keep in mind that even before the cap good GMs tended to show very little nostalgia when it came to aging players with large contractual desires, so that’s not 100% a cap caused problem.

But I do like the any given Sunday league. I like a league that starts every season with a good 15 to 20 teams able to make legitimate claims to being contenders, I think it’s a damn sight more entertaining than the late 80s and early 90s when there weren’t even enough legitimate contenders to fill the playoff spots.

And definitely “market size” is a very fluid concept. Thanks to memorabilia sales (some of which is shared some isn’t) there are small market teams with big market revenue. Though they do still tend to take a hit in the stands, you can generally charge more in a bigger city and still sell out (assuming you have the local fanbase) , and home teams still get the majority of the gate.

Well I gotta run again. Mom’s hitting one of the big numbers and it’s time to take her out... to dinner of course.

Thanks, both of you!

Discostu and I have had this discussion a number of times in the past, and he may think it's a "blind spot" for me but I think my points are valid.

I should be clear that I have no problem with the salary cap in concept . . . I think it is the best mechanism for addressing the key economic issue in sports -- i.e., how to enable all teams in a nation-wide (or continent-wide) sports league to be profitable while at the same time they can remain competitive on the field under business climates and markets that vary widely.

My problem is with the way the cap is implemented -- first in the NFL, and later in the National Hockey League. The NFL model is ridiculous because the combination of a salary cap and non-guaranteed contracts results in the massive movement of players between teams every year. I stopped following my favorite NFL team (the New York Giants) closely about 8-10 years ago when it reached the point of stupidity -- when the team had to cut good, solid players for salary cap reasons, and when I didn't even recognize half the names on the opening day roster. That kind of enviornment is not conducive to fan loyalty at all, which is one reason why many long-time fans like me have lost interest even as the NFL has grown in popularity among casual fans.

I have long said that any salary cap MUST include a provision under which teams are given a financial mechanism to re-sign players instead of losing them to other teams. The most obvious plan would be a "cap increase" or "salary reduction" factor under which any player drafted by a team would only have some percentage of his salary (maybe 80%, or 50%, or something in between) counted against the cap. This would mean (using the 50% scenario) that a team with $1 million of cap space that is faced with a situation with a good middle linebacker (drafted by the organization five years earlier) whose contract has expired can either re-sign that player for up to $2 million or find a free agent from another team for up to $1 million. The linebacker would have a similar incentive to stay with his team, since his "market price" would be higher with the team that originally drafted him than it would be for any other team that would have to count 100% of his salary against their cap.

Another intriguing thought I had was that this "cap increase" or "salary reduction" factor could CHANGE over time . . . meaning (for example) that a player drafted by a team would have 80% of his salary count against the cap for the first three years, then 60% for the next three, 40% for the next three, etc. -- maybe even down to 0% after 10+ years. This would enable teams to keep players who remain healthy for long careers, and would enable fans to see their favorite players on the home field for their entire careers.

I can tell you one thing for sure . . . If the current salary cap rules had been in place 25 years ago I never would have been an NFL fan at all. I grew up watching players like Harry Carson, George Martin, Lawrence Taylor, Phil Simms, Carl Banks, etc. go through a long process of losing, growing as a team, building confidence and chemistry, and then winning championships. If the 1984 season started and I was faced with a National Football League in which Phil Simms was playing on the Cowboys, Lawrence Taylor was on the Dolphins, Harry Carson was retired, etc. -- then even as a young teenager I would have known better than to waste my Sunday afternoons watching that nonsense.

As a Cowboys fan, I know what you mean. It would have been sickening to see Roger Staubach or Bob Lilly in another uniform. Of course, all the players you loved, I hated, but that was part of what made it cool. The rivalry wasn't just one team logo against another. Those guys knew each other. The original L.T. was a nightmare, but if he'd gone to another team, it wouldn't have been the same.

Even before the cap, dealing players was common, though. I remember Giants fans having a conniption when the Giants traded Fran Tarkenton to Minnesota. One of the reasons Bill Walsh quit the 49ers was because he wanted to trade Montana and management wouldn't let him. This was after Montana had won his third Super Bowl. Walsh also traded Ronnie Lott when he had quite a few years left.

BTW, congratulations to the Giants. It's an NFC East thing, but whack those Pats! A lot of Texans are rooting for you guys.

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