|
Big Games | The Envelopes, Please
A Big Contributor |
The End Zone | Milestones
This is the 14th season that I have covered the NFL, and except for the various labor wars between owners and players over the years, this is as close as I've seen the league to being at a crisis point. It would be silly to suggest that the most successful and affluent sports league in the world—boasting a product that causes an entire nation to suspend its activity for six hours each autumn Sunday—is going to keel over. But the NFL is in trouble. It has proved itself leaderless and powerless, with neither the moral influence to prevent franchises from holding cities hostage over stadium deals nor the legal means to prevent teams from moving.
Bills owner Ralph Wilson—the leading critic of recent NFL vagabonds like Art Modell, who moved the Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore—now threatens to take his club out of Buffalo if he doesn't get a sweet stadium lease with revenue guarantees. The 49ers and the Seahawks both talked of leaving their cities before voters approved new arena deals. The Broncos are pushing Colorado voters to pass a stadium bill this fall. Other clubs seeking new deals or new venues include the Colts, the Vikings, the Patriots and the Bears.
The NFL's two intertwined ills are stadium deals and the salary cap. Smaller-market owners like Buffalo's Wilson never planned to spend $15 million to $20 million above the salary cap in a given year on rich signing bonuses, but that's what those teams must do to compete with San Francisco and Dallas, whose owners seem to have bottomless revenue pools. The Cowboys made $41.5 million in stadium revenue in 1996, which is about $40 million more than Minnesota or Indianapolis did.
It's not just the older teams that are struggling with the proliferation of bonuses, which have made what was intended to be a hard cap quite soft. "I want to blow up the labor agreement and start over," says Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver. "It's obviously not working. It's not what we were told it was."
The impending negotiations over a new NFL TV deal—which will add at least a few billion dollars to the pot—may appear to be the NFL business story of the year, but it won't take long before the issue of unstable franchises takes center stage. Watch Wilson, a successful businessman in his other ventures, hold the line in his contract tussle with defensive end Bruce Smith. "I have tried to maintain the competitiveness of the Bills by draining money from all my other companies," Wilson says. "That has to stop. I'm jeopardizing my other companies." Wilson wants to add dozens of luxury boxes to the 88 already in Rich Stadium, but will he be able to fill them? The Bills' season-ticket base has declined by 23,000 since 1992. In the meantime, Buffalo has had to compete on the field and in free agency with teams that are raking in millions more than it is.
The NFL had better act quickly to address the instability. The suggestion from here is for commissioner Paul Tagliabue to call a summit with Jerry Jones, the Cowboys' power-broker owner; money-crunched owners Wilson and Dan Rooney of Pittsburgh; and players' association chief Gene Upshaw. Tagliabue, whose powers of persuasion have been dubious during his eight-year tenure, must somehow forge this group into a team that can achieve two essential but complex goals: instituting a hard cap and making revenues more uniform from team to team. If they cannot do that, and quickly, the NFL will become a dysfunctional league of haves and have-nots.
Big Games | The Envelopes, Please
A Big Contributor |
The End Zone | Milestones
|
