The NFL Hall of Fame Game does not mean much of anything except that it is like when pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training. That event lets you know that “the real thing” – the regular season – is in sight and it is time to start paying closer attention to football matters than you have been for the past several months. Here in Curmudgeon Central, attention is always paid to NFL matters because the NFL is the 800-lb gorilla of US sports. Additionally, the NFL is a game and a league that tends to be well run – - and so it is interesting and challenging to try to come up with ways for the league to improve itself and its game.
This will be fifth installment of some suggestions as to how the NFL can make its product better than it is. These are ideas that come to me as I read about NFL game issues and management issues or as I’m watching various games. There is no priority order to them; there is no pride of authorship; there is no anticipation that the NFL has been waiting for this to hit the streets so that they can put a working group together to see how to implement my ideas.
The first thing the NFL needs to do – and it needs to do this in conjunction with the NFLPA – is to find a way to implement a rookie wage scale. Far too many high draft picks get paid far too much money relative to veteran NFL players. The poster children for this year’s excesses are Matt Ryan (Atlanta) who is already getting money comparable to Tom Brady and Peyton Manning even though he has yet to play a game in the NFL and Jake Long (Miami) who will get twice as much money guaranteed to him in his rookie contract than David Diehl will get from the Giants in Diehl’s new contract. The only thing Diehl has done is to start every game for the Giants since 2003 and be part of a Super Bowl winning team.
But that is not the only inequity in the rookie salary system. Consider the plight of Joe Flabeetz who was drafted in the fifth round out of Northeast Southwest State Teachers College. He had no leverage in his initial dealings with the NFL team that drafted him and the CBA allows the team to sign a rookie for up to 5 years. Therefore, Flabeetz is tied to a team for a series of five one-year contracts at a low value and with next to nothing guaranteed. But Flabeetz has played in the league for two years now and he is an emerging star. No matter; he will make less than a second round draftee this year who has never played a snap AND Flabeetz really can’t do much to get a new deal unless he makes a pain in the a$$ of himself. To some extent, that is the situation Devin Hester found himself in a few weeks ago.
It is not only that top draft picks are generally overpaid; it is that some middle to low round draft picks can become hugely underpaid with no real recourse. And that is why the league and the union need to fix this. By the way, there is an ancillary benefit here too for the both players and the league. If rookie contracts are “slotted” as they are in the NBA, then there is no reason for lengthy holdouts by rookies and that means they get into camp on time and begin to develop their skills for the NFL game. The absences of JaMarcus Russell and Brady Quinn from training camp last year surely did not help those players or their teams.
However, for some reason, Gene Upshaw has said that this is not something the NFLPA will cede any ground on. I do not get that at all. There is a salary cap in the NFL and there is a salary floor too. Therefore, if a team is committed to spending $100M on player salaries in 2008 (just to take a figure from out of the air) and it spends less of that money on its draftees, that means it has to spend more of that money on veteran players. That is a consequence of the Law of Conservation of Matter; those salary dollars have to be spent somewhere. So, it does not seem to be such a critical issue for the NFLPA that it cannot be negotiated to make it better than it is.
Labor peace since the early 1990s has made the NFL the cash cow that it has become. I cannot imagine that this issue will be the one that derails that gravy train…
Perhaps a bargaining chip in the negotiations to establish a rookie wage scale might be related to my second suggestion. The NFL ought to consider expanding its roster size. NFL Europe is no more; the AAFL never got off the drawing boards; there is no pool of football talent out there in “next-to-ready” football condition as there was in the past. Teams now have 53 players on a roster and then have to go looking for guys who are loading boxes at warehouses if something goes wrong. The union ought to be receptive to an offer by the league to increase the roster size from 53 to – say – 56 players.
Oh, and why not have more of them dress for Sunday games? The guys on the practice squad are being paid their salaries anyway; what would be wrong with some of them being on the sidelines or even playing on some special teams if that is their strength. Why not have game day rosters expanded to 50 players and simultaneously do away with the “emergency quarterback” rule?
Since I am on the track of changing things relative to the roster and the game, the NFL has to change the way it handles overtime games. If a Super Bowl is ever decided in overtime by the receiving team taking the ball and squeaking down the field to kick a long field goal without the kicking team ever touching the ball, it will NOT be well received. The solution to this problem is so simple that I am almost embarrassed to write it down:
1. There must be two possessions in any overtime – - one by each team.
2. At the end of the second possession, if one team is ahead, that team is declared the winner.
3. At the end of the second possession, if the score it still tied, the first team to score from that point forward is declared the winner.
The league also needs to work more proactively with the networks to the benefit of their fans. The NFL is on a course to become the Night-time Football League. Look at the scheduling and you will see that fewer and fewer of the good teams or the good match-ups happen at 1:00 PM local time in the home stadium. In this situation, the fans on the West Coast have an advantage since a one-o’clock start for them is a late afternoon game for the East Coast fans. Way too many of the good teams and good games get moved to 4:15 starts (on short notice) or night-time starts on the East Coast. With flex scheduling, some Sunday night games originally showed up as day games when fans bought tickets.
Football is played in cold weather and not every venue is as fan-friendly at night for games as it is when the sun is out. Additionally, a nighttime football game that starts at 8:30 on the East Coast will assure that fans attending that game will not be home much before 1:00 AM if they are lucky. The following days (Fridays, Mondays and Tuesdays) tend to be workdays for most folks and with the price of NFL tickets, you have to assume that many of the fans in the stands have jobs they need to be at the next morning.
The league and the networks – and the union too – need to remember that in the end, it is the fans who pay the freight. If the fans stop going to the hip and opening up the wallet, the party is over for everyone. So, maybe it’s a good idea to figure out ways to minimize the inconvenience shown to fans – - and keeping the late-game/night game scheduling under control might be a good way to do just that.
Here could be a tipping point for the NFL with regard to fan inconvenience. More and more teams are requiring fans to pony up sizeable chunks of change to buy PSLs and then the fans have to pay top-shelf dollars to get their tickets. More than a few season ticket holders sell off tickets they cannot use as a way to recoup some of those expenses. Now if there are too many night games and if it becomes difficult for season ticket holders to “off-load” those tickets, they might not be as willing to cough up the big bucks for PSLs or for game tickets in the high three figures per seat. Everyone needs to pay attention to this kind of thing now before there is a real problem.
Finally, the NBA has come under a cloud with regard to the integrity of its games in the past year. There is no such cloud around the NFL at the moment despite sporadic outcries about “The Tuck Rule” and the “bad calls against the Seahawks in the Super Bowl” and the putative favoritism shown to the Pats/Colts/Cowboys/NY City teams. Nevertheless, the “integrity of the game” goes beyond assuring that the officials on the field – and in the replay booth – are not on the take.
The NFL established a dangerous precedent last year. When the Jets accused the Pats of improperly taping the Jets’ signals during a regular season game, the league found that the Pats violated the rules and punished the team with a fine and a loss of a draft choice. Nonetheless, the league allowed the Pats to retain the victory in the game.
Essentially – in a league where winning is everything – the NFL told teams that you can violate the rules (cheat, if you will) and even if you are caught you will still benefit from that rules violation by keeping your victory. That was a bad move then and it needs to be rectified for the future. The guiding principle should be, if you cheat (and you get caught), you lose.
If the NFL were to come to that sort of posture on minding its rules, then it also needs to pay attention to and enforce the rules against tampering. I am not talking about finding out if Brett Favre and Brad Childress sent text messages to each other. I am talking about the rather obvious and blatant tampering that happens every January and February with players who are signed to one team but who will become free agents on 1 March. Only a fool would believe that these players – via their agents to be sure – have not been in contact with teams other than their own on the subject of signing with some other team.
That is tampering and if the integrity of the game and its rules mean anything then the teams and the players and the agents need to be punished in a way that means they do not prosper from violating those rules. Please note that I am not taking sides here; everyone involved needs to be punished in situations such as this – the teams, the GMs, the coaches, the owners, the players, the agents. If tampering does not matter, then get rid of the rules; if it matters, enforce the rules.
Finally, let me close this offering with an observation from James Carville that I have used before:
“Winning an argument with your wife is like the war in Iraq. Even when you win, you are still in big trouble.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…