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These days are numbered Posted: Wednesday April 03, 2002 5:58 PM
How do we spend our offseason these days? We spend it rolling in numbers. Sure, the draft is a welcome break, but the rest of the time it's center stage for the agents and accountants -- cap specialists as it were -- as players are moved around the board like chessmen. I note all the comings and goings, all the finances, and they fill up a healthy part of the ledgers I've kept every year since the 1960s. I do it because I have to. That's the game these days. But frankly, I'm sick of it. Football writers used to analyze talent. Now they draw up lists of veterans, worthy or otherwise, who must be trimmed to get under the salary cap. Cap room. God, I hate that phrase. Gee, he doesn't like the salary cap, you say. How naïve. How quaint. And there he was in the vanguard, waving the flag for free agency all those years. Poor old guy doesn't quite know what he wants. Sure I'm for free agency. Always was. If you want to holler about all the money the players make, take a look at what the owners rake in. And how some of them earn it. In 1984 H.R. "Bum" Bright bought the Dallas Cowboys from Clint Murchison . Under Bright's five-year stewardship the Cowboys went from a perennial playoff team to a regular loser, the worst franchise in the NFL, at 3-13, in his last year. And then he turned around and sold the team to Jerry Jones for $140 million, $80 million more than what he paid for it. On the record, a real bummer of an owner. I mean, if he were a player, he would have been cut. But he still walked away with 80 million bucks. Players' salaries went kind of wild after that, but they couldn't keep up with the cost of franchises. When Jones bought the Cowboys at what was then the NFL's high-end price, players were averaging around $250,000 a year. That means that the top franchise was worth 560 times more than the average NFL salary. When Daniel Snyder bought the Redskins for top dollar ($800 million) in 1999, the average NFL salary was $800,000. Which lifts the multiplier to 1,000 times. So every time I hear an owner moaning about NFL salaries, I suggest that he look at the history of franchise prices. Which still doesn't make the offseason reading any more palatable. I'm just so sick of seeing agents quoted. And the endless lists of numbers -- seven figures, eight figures -- are numbing. And just when we're in danger of losing all signs of life outside of the dollar or the cap, into the sea of boredom steps Tiki Barber. Barber, a running back, had the nerve to call his Giants teammate, sack-record holder Michael Strahan, greedy. Imagine. Those things simply aren't done in the NFL. There seems to be an unwritten rule: You don't mess with someone else's paycheck, especially at the superstar level. If you didn't know better you might say that greed and pettiness are major detractors to performance on the field, but in most cases it doesn't seem to work that way. Some of the greatest players, whose courage and dedication have never been questioned, have been known to pout about petty little money things. Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice, the greatest runner and receiver of this generation, both got upset when they weren't the highest paid at their positions. Of course, it'll keep happening because the upward spiral will always leapfrog the newest contract to the top. But did this minor griping affect performance? Not at all. And when Strahan refused to accept a prospective $17 million bonus in two years' worth of payments instead of one -- fearing that the Giants might cut him, thereby stiffing him out of payment No. 2 -- was there reason to suspect that his work on the field would suffer? Not at all. I've even seen it written that his greed makes him such a disruptive factor that he should be traded immediately. "Right, like if have problems in December, it's going to be because Michael and I had an issue in March," Barber says. The Giants are a class club. They don't cut people to cheat them out of money. I can hear an agent whispering into Strahan's ear. One of the hipper guys in the Giants' locker room whom I talked to said, discreetly, "I think Michael got some bad advice." But sometimes logic takes a back seat. Criticize a teammate and your credentials are going to get questioned, not the substance of your criticism. Sometimes this gets ugly. "Who's Tiki Barber?" Strahan's defensive teammate, tackle Keith Hamilton, said, proceding to revive the old refrain about how New York's defense always carries the offense. From Washington, ex-Giants linebacker Jessie Armstead added his weight to the defensive side. Here's the truth of it. When the Giants failed down the stretch last year, it was the defense that collapsed. Against the Eagles, in the game that killed New York's playoff chances, the defense gave up 17 points in the fourth quarter to blow it. On that same afternoon Barber caught 10 passes. During December and January he averaged 5.3 yards per carry and led the team in both rushing and pass catching. That's who Tiki Barber is. And yet, in the insulated world of the NFL, players are so sensitive about criticism from their teammates, so touchy about their contracts, that nasty and illogical things are said. Maybe it was the unusual nature of it in the Barber-Strahan-Hamilton situation. The defense has ripped the offense on this club for as long as anyone can remember. The team's major spokesmen have been defensive guys. The idea of an offensive player making his voice heard, even if Barber's comments were very low key -- well, the mere incongruity of it can leave people shocked. "There's nothing wrong with someone trying to make as much money as he can," Barber says. "And one of the quickest ways to gain respect around the league is the size of your salary. Pro Bowl selection, the things that are written about you ... those aren't measurables. The true measurable is your salary. That's the one that people can see. So naturally it's important to players. It's why they want to be the highest paid. I can't say I agree with that, and I know I'll never be in that echelon, but that's what's out there. "People are competitive at the financial level. It's human nature, whether you're working in the NFL or at McDonald's. But if you look back at a player's career, years later, you'll see that the bottom line is not the amount of money he made. It's if he helped his team win championships, if he earned respect on the field, not with his paycheck. Those are the things he'll be remembered for, not his bank account. "I look at some players and I wonder what motivates them. A guy like Randy Moss, for instance. Everyone knows what kind of a player he is, great when he feels like it. "What motivates a Randy Moss? What is he playing for, the money, the fame, the adulation, what?" A few notes: This week Atlanta hired Bobby Beathard as a consultant. Wonder how Dan Reeves really feels about that? Strange word, consultant. Generally it applies to people who have been around for many years, who have paid their dues and are getting a bit tired. Ron Wolf and Bill Walsh come to mind. They still want to be around the game, but they're not up to the hard work that goes with it. With Walsh, it's worked, since his instincts about the quarterback position can't be matched. He's the reason the 49ers have a Pro Bowler in Jeff Garcia. But Atlanta's personnel department is in place. Having an "advisor to the owner" arrive on the scene -- well, the very title of the job draws a smirk. Did anyone catch that TV movie, Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie? Well, I did. I watched it because I thought it was about Jack Molinas, whom I briefly knew at Columbia. It wasn't. An entertaining film, based on a real-life character who's currently doing time, but am I alone in saying that if it's so easy to get things right, why screw them up? Everyone in the film keeps stressing that bookies always make money because "the house always wins," without pointing out why bookies win. Not once do you hear about the vig, the juice, the 10 percent rakeoff the house takes on bets the player loses. Maybe it was because the guys who wrote the screenplay didn't even know about it and figured that bookies win through superior knowledge or something. Then there was the crucial basketball game at the end that had so much action that the spread went from 11 down to four. One oddsmaker said, "We adjusted the line 40 times." Pure nonsense. A game would be taken off the board before the line dropped seven points. Forty adjustments? Uh huh. Tell me another. I'll never forget a conversation I once had with Bill Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among other things. We were talking about the way the facts are messed with and he said, "They wanted to change the ending. They couldn't understand why I had them going down to South America, falling on hard times and getting gunned down in the end. "I told them, 'Because that's what happened.' "They said, 'Yeah, but why don't you have them ending up in good shape with a lot of money? Put a happy ending on it?' "I said, 'Because it didn't happen that way.' "Thank God I had enough clout to get them to do it my way, but these guys just didn't understand that it's not a bad idea to let the facts dictate the story." Someone ought to wise up these people who make genuine, authentic, straight-from-the-shoulder films about which they know nothing. Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z's Mailbag, click here. |
