Goodell: NFL rookie pay-scale 'ridiculous' Fri Jun 27, 12:37 PM EDT NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said its ``ridiculous'' to reward untested rookies with lucrative contracts and wants the issue addressed in contract talks. ``There's something wrong about the system,'' Goodell said Friday. ``The money should go to people who perform.'' Goodell referred to Michigan tackle Jake Long's five-year, $57.75 million contract - with $30 million guaranteed. Long was the first overall draft pick by the Miami Dolphins in April. ``He doesn't have to play a down in the NFL and he already has his money,'' Goodell said during a question-and-answer period at the end of a weeklong sports symposium at the Chautauqua Institution. ``Now, with the economics where they are, the consequences if you don't evaluate that player, you can lose a significant amount of money. ``And that money is not going to players that are performing. It's going to a player that never makes it in the NFL. And I think that's ridiculous.'' Goodell said he favors lowering salaries offered to rookies, but allowing a provision for those players to renegotiate their deals after proving themselves on the field. His statement was greeted by a long round of applause from the estimated crowd of 2,000 inside the amphitheater. Speaking to reporters before his appearance, Goodell said he plans to open negotiations with the players union on a revamped labor deal this fall. He's listened to concerns from all 32 owners in meetings over the past month. ``We just finished a series of one-on-one meetings with all 32 teams, where I have a better understanding and people have a better understanding of the economics each team is facing,'' Goodell said. ``I think we can identify what it is we need in a negotiation to continue to make the agreement work for the NFL and for the players.'' Goodell said the key need is to have the NFL Players' Association appreciate the financial challenges owners face with rising stadium construction costs and a faltering economy. Those issues were not anticipated in the previous collective bargaining agreement, which provided players a 60 percent share of the league's gross revenues. ``As our costs increase outside of player costs, that other 40 percent ... squeezes the margins and just makes it financially unworkable,'' Goodell said. ``There has to be some more recognition of the costs.'' League owners, last month, voted unanimously to opt out of the CBA that was signed in spring 2006. The decision to opt out maintains labor peace through 2011, but will result in changes regarding the NFL's salary cap and contract signings if a new deal is not signed by March 2009. Goodell referred to next March as a deadline, but ``not the end deadline,'' but hoped a deal could be reached by then. If not, teams will enter the following season without a salary cap. While there are concerns some of the NFL's richer teams would use their vast resources to buy up star players, there's also a drawback for players. Under the new rules, the time for free agency in an uncapped year would rise from four years to six and allow teams to protect one extra player with franchise or transition tags. In addition, the two-year lag would allow many teams to extend the contracts of their most important players, maintaining the continuity that is important to winning teams. Goodell acknowledged the NFL and its owners failed to foresee the economic issues that would face the league when the last CBA was approved. ``There have been some things that none of us could've envisioned,'' Goodell said. ``You have an economy that's weakening. You have aspects of the deal that we didn't realize that we were going to be building billion-dollar stadiums. ... Things happen. I don't look back at it as a mistake. I look back at it as what do we need to do going forward?'' The Associated Press
Both sides do want money shifted from rookies to veterans, but the sticking point in the new CBA will be what percentage of revenues go to players - the owners want that to be reduced - and what revenue streams are included in those percentages.
I think the draft is the problem. Make all players coming out of college free agents and see where the salary scale winds up. It's the artificial pecking order imposed by the draft that causes a few players to make a windfall without having proved anything. Now Jake Long might or might not have gotten 57.7 million dollars including a silly amount guaranteed in the open market, however NFL teams could not claim that whatever he got was unreasonable if half of them had been involved in the bidding. Realistically the best way to keep salaries down is to make EVERYONE a free agent at the end of each season. That way a few players wouldn't strike gold rush contracts each year because there would be a ton of players on the open market to fill their spots and no team could get held over the barrel by a few select players.
They are actually borrowed from Charles Finley and Bill Veeck. Finley said that if free agency was allowed to be a limited resource it would do two things to the economic structure of baseball: First it would make teams lock up resources for as long as they could - to prevent holes from opening for which no easy replacement was available - virtually guaranteeing that there would be a lot of dead money out there as injured and flukey players took money away from the pool each year and cost teams millions that they got no benefit from. Second that it would drive salaries through the roof on the open market as a few top tier players were allowed to conduct a bidding war with the equivalent of nuclear weapons: you want a great pitcher? Well I'm the only one available this year so pony up. He was right on both fronts and baseball's economics have not made sense since limited free agency became a reality. Veeck claimed that the poorer teams would be much worse off in limited free agency because they could never compete with the big money clubs even for a single season. He said that allowing total free agency would not only be fairer to players, since all players would be paid what their services were actually worth on the open market, but would also allow small market teams to pick and choose their forays into the world of competitive play. To some extent the Florida Marlins have managed to do this even with limited free agency over the years but they are the only poor team that has managed to be really competitive from time to time using the strategy. I happen to think Finley was a turd, but he was a very smart turd and he was dead right about what would happen to baseball's economics and parity if limited free agency become the rule. Veeck on the other hand was a great guy and one of baseball's real entrepeneurs. He was driven out of the game by limited free agency after thirty years of making bad teams amusing and occasionally competitive even with the Yankees dynasties. Marvin Miller said that if total free agency had happened in baseball it would have changed the economics of the game very little, although it would have given players more of a choice in where they played their careers. He and the player's union were very careful not to ask for total free agency in the arbitration case, they wanted a very specific ruling on the reserve clause so that they could make scarcity work for them instead of against them as it had for decades.
Baseball is an entirely different animal, and the gap is closing and small market teams can easily succeed if they have decent ownership. Just look at the Twins, A's, Marlins, Diamondbacks, Brewers etc. The emphasis for small market teams is the draft and then locking young talent up long term. In football though there aren't guaranteed contracts, there are more good players available in the draft for fewer positions, and one or two players can't change the team as much as they can in baseball. In football you have to be close to winning for a couple guys to help a lot, in baseball your lineup can suck, but if you have two aces and a solid 3, you're making the playoffs. Besides the fact that players changing teams every year would destroy the league's fan base. Who wants to watch an entirely new team every year?
Anybody who is currently watching a perpetually bad team is my guess. Also the rosters would not change as much as you think they would. Most players would be playing for the team they really wanted to play for in terms of location, pay scale and life style. My guess is the turnover would be like 25-30%, which is not all that different from what happens in this system. Teams and players would have vested interests to maintain a relationship, however younger players would be free to move around until they found their match and teams would be free to fix mistakes right away once they realized they had made them. Another way to look at this is that the employment situation in the NFL would very closely mirror the employment situation in other jobs in the US economy. Young workers would move around looking for their fit and mid-career workers would do what they could to maintain the status quo. A few very high profile players would move each year but they'd move on the open market and a team losing one of them would have many options to replace them, i.e. everybody at that position in the NFL other than the guy they lost.
Goodell couldn't be more right with this statement. The league needs to incorporate some type of rookie pay scale because these contracts that these kids are getting can completely destroy a team for 4-5 years.
Interresting Statement by Ryan. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3470042&univLogin02=stateChanged
I don?t expect much problems signing Keller, he was a late 1st and TE isn?t a position where a lot of money is tied to, so it shouldn?t be that hard to work out a deal. Gholston will probably be more complicated. http://forums.theganggreen.com/showthread.php?t=33506 This might be a first smokescreen in the final negotiation process.
Yeah...I'm mostly worried about VG...there could be some subterfuge in the subject of that article. I'm guessing most likely we'll have to wait for STL, OAK, and KC to get their shit together before negotiations really ramp up. Hopefully not, I want him here at the end of this month
Dont expect one anytime soon. http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2008...roger-goodells-rookie-salary-comments-ridicu/ this is going to be a long drawn out battle. Lets hope we can get it done before there is a lockout.
Let the teams decide for themselves when enough is enough. Sooner or later more teams will realize that paying top dollar for rookies is a waste. Let the free hand reign!
That's pretty much my point of view, although I really think the draft is an abomination. It's entertainment value to the NFL is very high and I don't see why they don't just keep paying through the nose for it if they have to have it. Originally ALL of the professional drafts were designed to bind a player to a team from the beginning of his career into perpetuity. Free agency changed that equation some. It's time for them to change it the rest of the way and free up both players and teams to work for and employ who they want on an at will basis. Just like 99.9% of the rest of us. Employment contracts aren't even completely binding in the normal business world with many interests on both sides having successfully broken those often without a court challenge.
