This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
I follow your logic, but the NFL is like joining a particular organization. It isn't mandatory to take your talents to the NFL, but it is the most lucrative to be sure. For competitive balance the NFL has imposed a draft (just like the NBA, NHL and MLB). To enter into their league you must first make yourself available to a draft (regular or supplemental).Several professions have barriers to entry for different reasons. Lawyers have law school and the bar, doctors have med school, etc. You don't have to become a lawyer or a doctor, but if you want to you have to follow the procedures to become one. I realize the analogy breaks down there as far as what firm or hospital hires you).Consider the military. They don't let you choose your deployment - new cadets or infantry go where the higher ups deem is the proper place to send them for the best interests of the military as a whole. Is that right or fair to new enlistments? Maybe not, but you don't have to join the Navy or Army last I checked.
I'm not going to pretend to be able to speak intelligently on this issue, but just note that of all the issues on the table in the CBA negotiations - including the cap, rookie wage scale, the 18 game season, drug testing, bonus recoupment, retired players, player safety, arbitration rules, and others - I've never heard DeMaurice Smith even mention the draft nor have I ever considered it to be something they want to negotiate away. My take on it is admittedly simplistic, but I guess I am inclined to assume that the players don't view it as a significant problem for them.
Smith represents the established players, not the rookies.Truth be told, the NFLPA couldn't care less about rookies - just like no practicing lawyer cares if they make the bar test harder. They're already in the club, so unless they impact the club members (such as taking too much $$$ as rookies) then they don't care.That's why a rookie cap is a given. No one is representing collegiate players in the CBA.
The free market does decide. The presumptive draftees can go to the NFL and abide by the NFL's rules or head to the UFL or the countless other semi-professional/professional leagues across the country (and world?). Why I never understood the NBA's plight as well. I love what Brandon Jennings did, went to Europe and made money after high school.
The owners drove the price up themselves and they love to pay for the hope that rookies bring each april.
And is short sighted in terms of the players. When a team gets locked in a cycle of defeat like this, it would take a few years but the team would have a much greater probability of going under. Therefore, less jobs. You certainly would not see any expansion teams under this formula. What talented rookie would play for an expansion team? How would that team get good? It would not.I don't see anything un-American about a draft. It is no different in the real world. If you want to work for IBM or Microsoft or Google(similar to the NFL), you can't demand where you want to work also. There are other football leagues. The AFL. The CFL. Also, you can try out for an NHL, NBA or MLB team(there is no inherent right to be able to play professional football). It is all up to you and what you want to do. But once you decide you want to play for a certain company(the NFL), they decide where your job is. I know it is that way for my employment and has been for my entire life.
At least in theory, because they'd be able to offer more money. In this pie-in-the-sky draftless world, there's still a salary cap. Since good players cost more money, good teams should have less cap space available. Thus, the choice for a stud rookie-to-be isn't an all-else-equal choice. In other words, if free agency for veterans hasn't killed parity, why would free agency for rookies kill parity? It's the same thing.If you really wanted to make sure of it, you could just give each team a rookie cap each year and give bad teams more rookie cap space.
This is the greatest sentence I ever read regarding football or the NFL in general.We need more money, we get hurt.
I was just answering the original question posed by Jeff P. So far, the draft is an accepted reality of the NFL enterprise (things change). But that doesn't mean that I can't want view it as an unfair practice and want to see it discontinued.Jason Wood said:
:(Jason Wood said:
that's a great point, and maybe I'm in favor of the draft simply because it's what I've become accustomed to, but could you provide a list of successful teams that have been built through veteran free agency?detroit didn't do so great this year, but the only reason they have the hope they have is because of stafford, johnson, suh, and best.players that probably wouldn't have been too interested in detroit a couple years ago.where would st louis be without bradford?I understand your point about cap space, but under the current system crappy teams have the advantage of locking studs up to multiyear deals at pretty reasonable rates, once you get past the top few.and even the top few will pay off if you get a peyton manning, etc.would these studs really be willing to sign these same deals with these same teams if they had a choice, or would you just see the losers of the league forced to overpay mediocre players to fill their rosters?
The purpose of the draft is to reduce the salary an owner has to pay the best players coming into the labor market not to increase competitive balance. If all the owners had to compete against each other to sign players they'd pay more than they do now. In a free market several teams could bid for the top players. With a draft the teams can tell the player take our offer or go flip burgers.Why do you hate the free market?
The draft currently is legal because it's part of a collective bargaining agreement. If the NFLPA decertifies it's very unlikely the draft could survive an anti-trust suit. Same for the salary cap.
I believe that the restrictions on practicing law or medicine are due to state/federal(?) laws. These types of restrictive laws don't exist for athletes and most other jobs. There's a compelling reason for the state to require that people practicing medicine meet minimal standards of competency. Quacks practicing medicine result in people dying. <rant against lawyers deleted>Now certainly a company can make their own rules about qualifications for jobs that aren't subject to legislative restrictions, but they're not allowed to get together with all of the other companies in the industry to require all companies follow the same standards. They're also not allowed to have a draft for employees or agree to a maximum salary for employees.
The rules that cover people in the military are based on laws so the analogy doesn't apply to athletes.
That's a refreshingly different viewpoint. It seems that most people think that rookies currently make too much money relative to veterans. You seem to be saying that rookies currently make too little money relative to veterans.
I have some sympathy for the idea of eliminating the draft, but not for the reason you find compelling.What is fair? I think it's fair for people to get what they're entitled to, but I don't think that NFL players are inherently entitled to enter the league as free agents. To be sure, when NFL teams make a pact to refrain from signing each other's draft picks, it is a form of collusion. But collusion is generally illegal not because it's unfair (IMO), but because it's inefficient. It prevents employers and employees from being matched with each other as fittingly as they otherwise might be. (In the NFL, the allowance of trades alleviates that problem somewhat, but only somewhat.)
You and I have had this part of the conversation before. I don't think we can tell if rookies are currently under- or overpaid because of the artificial negotiating structure imposed by the draft. IIRC, you were the one who previously suggested that rookies had to have been underpaid because a truly free market for them would result in a more energetic bidding process. OTOH, I think that some rookies are overpaid because of slotting and/or fan pressures.Bottom line, I don't care what rookies are paid in relation to veteran players. I don't care what any player is paid relative to any other player, except to the extent that it affects a team's salary cap and becomes an interesting part of the competition to observe.
We could probably dig up some old threads where I suggested that a televised auction would be way more interesting than the draft is. Unfortunately, there are some inherently negative connotations in a process where a bunch of mostly white men "purchases" other men who mostly aren't. And it still denies the player himself any semblance of a voice in the negotiations. Without a draft, Bill Belichick will still find the Danny Woodheads of the world and Mike Brown will still overpay for the Akili Smiths. The draft isn't serving everyone's precious parity nearly as much as they think. And, like you say, parity may indeed be way overrated.
Yes, forcing people to particiapte in the draft is inherently, oh wait nobody is forcing them. It would be so much more fair if potential new employees who have contributed absolute zero to building and making the NFL the supremely successful business it is got to determine the manner in which they would join the business rather than the business that is hiring them.
I will never understand why the playes didn't toss Gene Upshaw out on his ###. He defended the salaries of rookies all through his tenure. Then Smith came along at at first also defended it. Seems as if the J-Fat Russell debacle finally opened their eyes.“If you have a rookie player who gets $10 million, $20 million, maybe even $30 million in guaranteed money, what do you think that means for a veteran player? That means he can ask for that or more,” Upshaw said.
People "like" dynasties, but they'd WATCH a whole lot less. MEdiocre to weak teams would stop selling out, and TV ratings would drop like a stone. Parity (or the illusion of it...certainly the ability to more quickly reverse fortunes) is the key reason why the NFL grew from what it was in the early 70's to what it is today.
That goes against the empirical evidence according to the analyses I've seen (years ago, so no link). The NBA was more popular during Bulls dynasty years, for example, than it was just afterwards when there was greater parity. Tiger Woods made golf more popular, etc.
If we let rookies enter the league as free agents able to negotiate with any team they want, and if we don't have a separate rookie cap apart from the overall salary cap, I think incoming players as a whole would make more money than they do under the current system. Any given individual player may not, however, in part for the reasons you've identified. (And here's an additional reason: If the Raiders have the #2 pick and they have Player X rated number one overall while [unknown to the Raiders] no other team has him in the top 20, Player X might make more money under the current system. He'd get "what the #2 pick is supposed to get" instead of "the minimum needed to beat the next highest offer," and the first sum may well be greater.)
That's a rather weak argument that gets run out. It had little to do with the Bull's Dynasty and much more to do with MJ. The NBA has always promoted the individual over the team. But I find this whole argument not based in reality. I guess all the new hires that want to work for any myriad of very large/global companies should be able to choose where they will be located before working a day at that company. Yes, you can pick different companies to apply to if you do not like your options. But how the argument that NFL rookies are "unfairly" treated by not picking where they can go ever started is a complete lack of reality in the the rest of the business world. You want to work for the top large companies (NFL) and have the skill to work for them, you will go where they tell you. If not, go work for a lesser/smaller company (UFL, CFL, etc). I wanted to live in a rural-smaller town environment. I purposely did not pick a professional field that would allow this possibility (ie I picked the lower paying Civil Engineering field over the higher paying Chemical or Aeronautics Engineering fields - even though I enjoyed and am good in all three fields) .Maurile Tremblay said:
I understand that agree-to-disagree is the best possible outcome here, but just for the record, I find that argument not based in reality.In the standard "reality" analogy, are the Lions and the Patriots like two branches of the same company? Or are they like two different companies? Obviously, to you they feel more like the former. To me more like the latter (they share no ownership, they compete with each other (literally!)).
you can have two branches of starbucks, or whoever, compete with each other for 'best branch' award, which is all the superbowl is, but how often do you see starbucks and ibm share a single revenue stream equally?it's a little ridiculous to call the different teams different companies while completely disregarding the association of the nfl.
It's somewhere in the middle, IMO.Revenue-sharing means that the teams do effectively own pieces of each other, sort of. And while teams do compete with each other in some ways, they also cooperate with each other in other ways — scheduling games and lots of etc. — that we wouldn't expect to see between PepsiCo and Coke, for example, but that we would expect to see between different branches of the same company.
no.
there is such a thing.there is a defined number of draft picks/rounds.anybody not drafted becomes udfa and is available for signing off the street, which will be at very minimal money.it's not up to the draftee, outside of deliberately making his draft stock drop through some nutty behavior, which would cost him money.you don't have to sign with the team that drafts you, but then you re-enter the draft and lose more money.
There is a surplus of labor and competition for jobs is fierce. As we've seen many times, sometimes opportunity is the only thing keeping an unknown talent from becoming a star. Look what the scholarship limit did to increase parity in college football; NFL rosters are limited to 32 fewer players than Ohio State can have on scholarship (my numbers may not be exact). Stockpiling talent will be brutally difficult.
Of course college recruiting classes are not equal. But the differences in talent levels across the board narrowed considerably when the NCAA imposed the 85 scholarship limit and I'm merely pointing out that that trend (towards equalization) would continue in the pros with even smaller rosters AND a salary cap (including the all-important minimum). The cap would remain the great equalizer. Alabama, Texas and Ohio State are not constrained by one.Except for MT, most everyone opposed to elimination of the draft seems to feel that helping the bad teams catch up is a good thing. I don't think that's necessarily so.
