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Money has spoiled the NFL
Posted: Thursday June 01, 2000 04:59 PM
Got a comment or question for Dr. Z? Click here. I speak with two voices. I speak as an advocate of unionism and the worker's right to choose his place of employment. I speak as a fan who doesn't like to see his team broken up. I used to follow baseball. Free agency ruined it for me. This is an irrational position for one who rooted hard for Curt Flood when he challenged the reserve clause, who saluted Marvin Miller when he firmed up the players union and eventually got the players free agency. But the word fan is short for fanatic, and there's nothing rational about fanaticism. I was a Boston Red Sox fan. When Pudge Fisk, the heart and soul of the Red Sox, free-agented to Chicago, that did it for me. It firmly closed the book on a love affair with the game that was starting to wilt anyway. Oh, I'll watch the playoffs and the Series. I'll watch any sport when the stakes are high. But the old feeling, the day-to-day agonizing, just isn't there. The continuity is gone. Too many players shifting teams, which, of course, I'm all for -- in theory. It's like rooting for a minor league club and constantly watching your best players shipped off to the majors. Football is, in a sense, different. I'm not a fan of a particular club. Haven't been for years, at least since my team, the 49ers, got good and arrogance replaced humility. I'm an analyst; I make my living at analyzing games. I'm intrigued by the game itself, solving the many puzzles that present themselves over a three-hour period each Sunday. Or as one gentleman in England, a rare fan of American football, so aptly put it some years ago: "A chessboard constantly coming to life." I love the ebb and flow of strategy and counter-strategy, defense trying to catch up with offense and then vice versa, the trends of the game, the techniques, all played out in an arena of intelligence and pain, courage and high emotion. To me, at least, there is nothing like it. But I don't like what the business of football has become -- which is why, you've probably noticed, I devote most of my analysis to the game itself, rather than to dollar signs and salary-cap numbers which have turned the sports pages into something resembling the financial section. Ah, yes, as the observer points to his temple and rolls his eyes, the dotty professor sitting in his ivory tower, messing with his game charts, as the true substance of professional football slides by him. Can't help it. It's not that I don't recognize the financial understructure, it's just that after a while these seven- and eight-digit contract and cap figures begin to create a great gray blur -- maybe for the fans, too. But that's what the game has become, and as an original advocate of free agency, I must have, deep down, seen it coming. I was caught up in the philosophy of free agency but was unwilling to recognize its practical application, which was, of course, inevitable. I don't begrudge the players their high salaries. They're in a high-risk business and they earn them. Whenever people start bitching to me about the big money athletes make I remind them that their career can be over in a heartbeat. What I really resent are the no-talent folks, the guys who pull down hefty six figures a year for reporting the weather or the business news on TV. Nobody ever tells them, Sorry, Jack, you're 33 years old now. Time to move on. And they've never had to pick up a blitzing linebacker in their lives. And how about the owner who buys a team for a few hundred million, screws it up for a number of years, and then sells it at twice the price? The pendulum has swung. The players were underpaid for years, with nowhere else to go but Canada, but now the market works in their favor. Fair's fair, but I wish they'd show more joy about their financial bonanza instead of being angry all the time, which, it seems, so many of them are. But that's just a personal thing. Owners are very comfortable with this current free-agency system, simply because it puts some kind of spending limit on the very rich. Just imagine how it would be without a salary cap, if an annoying little rich boy such as the Redskins' Daniel Snyder could buy up everyone on his fantasy football card. Let's see, we'll take Barry Sanders and Carl Pickens and Shannon Sharpe and Robert Porcher -- his contract's up now, isn't it? See what a smart owner I am? Owners grumble about the high salaries and being strapped by the cap and having to cut serviceable veterans, etc. But two years ago, with two years remaining on the collective-bargaining agreement, they extended it for six years. So much for grumbles. The system came about through a remarkably stormy and shortsighted series of negotiations. Remember the strike of 1982, when Ed Garvey and the Players Association didn't demand free agency at all, just 55% of the gross revenues (a number long since surpassed) and a surprisingly management-friendly proposal of a wage scale for all players? The owners, practicing a negotiating tactic known in labor-management circles as "Boulwareism" (just say no, no, no to any proposal) turned it down, and seven games were canceled. They didn't, of course, realize what a windfall could have been theirs for the taking. Then there was the strike of '87, and the heavies of the Management Council, notably the Cowboys' Tex Schramm, giving it the shoe-on-the-table treatment: "Free agency? Never!" And all the while, the owners' legal team, with current commissioner Paul Tagliabue as the front man, wrongly assured them that the current system could stand up to any proposed antitrust litigation. And, of course, it was the players' legal victories, or impending victories, that brought about today's system. Which, of course, could have been achieved without all the bloodshed and expense. But the owners and their Management Council never have been accused of being intelligent or showing foresight. So what does this mean for today's fans? If not the end of dynasties, as they used to exist, then at least considerable difficulty in establishing them. The 49ers were geniuses at cap-juggling, relying heavily on the friendship of players and their agents, and their willingness to constantly readjust their contracts, and it kept them on top for a while, but then it took on the elements of a great pyramid scheme and the whole edifice toppled. Of course, a series of poor drafts and personnel moves didn't help. The Cowboys stayed on top mainly because of Jimmy Johnson's terrific drafts and trades. The answer to life under the cap, Jerry Jones said, was success in the lower rounds of the draft; in other words, finding quality goods at cheap prices. Of course, drafting well was always a key to prosperity, in any era. Easier said than done. It's not an exact science. Sooner or later everyone has an off year, or series of years. It happened to the Cowboys. It destroyed Bobby Beathard in San Diego. And underpaid draft choices have now developed the habit of making big noise if they feel they've been had. They're not going to swallow it silently, or at least their agents aren't. Beathard always readjusted contracts. If you got a guy who's clearly outperforming his contract, and you hold him to it," Beathard used to say, "all you're doing is creating an unhappy ballplayer." Al Davis used to quietly readjust Raiders contracts -- upward -- in the off-season. You think that didn't inspire loyalty? And the best at that was George Allen when he was with the Redskins. "You'd go in and ask him for $50,000," his old guard, John Wilbur, once said, "and he'd say, 'How about 60?' So for an extra $10,000 he's got you on his side forever." All that seems quaint now. Players negotiating on their own. Five-figure salaries. Oh, yes, and the sanctity of a contract. I stepped back in time a few weeks ago when I went to Houston to interview Titans guard Bruce Matthews. He has been with the same team for 17 years. He did his last contract himself. He admitted that he felt that he'd been underpaid on occasion, but he swallowed it because, "a contract is a contract." Sure, I admired his integrity, but a nasty little voice was whispering to me, "What a sucker." I read this in last week's Sporting News, in the capsule report on St. Louis: "CB Todd Lyght, a transition player, figures to be the only no-show at minicamp." I've read this kind of thing a million times. Ho hum, you don't like the deal, so you stay away. It's accepted. Then things are negotiated. Need I remind Mr. Lyght and others that the transition and franchise-player provisions of the contract were agreed upon in negotiations? No, I need not, since such thinking is hopelessly square. Keyshawn Johnson has outperformed his contract, the Jets chose not to redo it, even though they could fit it in under the cap, so they traded him, thereby crippling their offense. Hey, fans, forget it, and let's get excited about our new draft choices. Oh, yes, your ticket price is going from $40 to $50 this year. The team is ready to crash. Two of their big-bucks free agents last year, Eric Green and Steve Atwater, have tanked. A third, Roman Phifer, probably will be unloaded. Bill Parcells' 1997-'99 drafts, 31 choices total, have produced three and a half starters. I've gotten far afield here. I've gone astray. I love the game of football. The management side of it makes it tough to be a fan. So be it. Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear regularly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z's Mailbag, Click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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