Very good cap article

[la73hof]

Hope its not a repost...

Philly Daily News:P. Domowitch:Turn out the lights, the parity's over...

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Posted on Wed, Dec. 28, 2005
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/sp...paul_domowitch/


Paul Domowitch | Turn out the lights, the parity's over...
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD COULD BE AMONG CASUALTIES IF SALARY CAP VANISHES IN '07



WHAT WOULD happen if football became baseball? If you took a match to the NFL salary cap and allowed teams to spend as much - or as little - as they wanted on their player payroll?

Would Jerry Jones become George Steinbrenner? Would Jeff Lurie morph into David Montgomery? Would small-market teams such as Jacksonville, New Orleans and Kansas City become little more than cannon

fodder for the big-spending franchises? Would the league's "on any given Sunday" motto give way to "never in a million years"?

We might soon find out. After 12 years of warm and fuzzy labor peace, the league and the NFL Players Association are at an

impasse in their negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement. While the current CBA doesn't expire until after the 2007 season, the final year of the deal will be uncapped if the two sides can't get an extension done by the end of the 2006 calendar year.

Technically, that still gives them 12 months to work things out. But the union has indicated that if there isn't a deal in place by March, its inclination will be to walk away from the bargaining table and let the clock run out on the cap.

"I've been to 32 teams, and all the players understand where we are. They're saying, 'Bring on the uncapped year,' " NFLPA

executive director Gene Upshaw told the Washington Post last month.

Upshaw long has warned that once the uncapped year kicks in, there is little chance of the union's agreeing to resurrect it.

"We'll never get the cap back once it goes away," he says.

Considering the level of prosperity that both the league and its players have achieved under the current capped system, it's difficult to believe either side is all that eager to find out what life might be like without a cap.

"Nobody wants to kill this golden goose," agent Leigh Steinberg says. "I don't like the salary-cap system. There's nothing I like about it except that it's a system that both sides have been able to agree upon. But that has meant that football's been able to concentrate its energies and efforts at the union and management level on developing new revenue sources and promoting the brand with the general public."

Says Chiefs president Carl Peterson: "We have such a good system that has worked well for both sides. Certainly it's not

perfect. Both sides would like to tweak some things. But hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. There's so much on the table for both sides that it would be folly to throw that away."

Even with a cap, many teams feel the NFL already is becoming a league of haves and have-nots, with a handful of teams, including the Eagles, able to squeeze tens of millions of dollars more a year in unshared revenue from their stadiums than other teams. If the cap goes bye-bye, teams such as Peterson's Chiefs, who play in an older stadium in a smaller market, would be at a decided disadvantage against the league's high-revenue clubs.

"The whole premise of the National Football League has been sharing revenues so that small markets like the Green Bays and the Kansas Citys and the Jacksonvilles can be competitive with the New Yorks and the Chicagos and San Franciscos," Peterson says.

"I only need to look across our parking lot to our local baseball team [the Royals] to see what can happen [to a small-market team in an uncapped system]. They obviously have a tough situation, because their $45 million payroll is supposed to compete with the $200 million payrolls of the Yankees and the Red Sox. That's very, very hard to do."

While it's hard to fathom any NFL team ever becoming quite as destitute as the Royals or some of baseball's other small-market baseball clubs, there's little doubt that the elimination of the salary cap almost certainly would affect the league's equilibrium.

"You can't compete when one team has an open wallet and another team has both hands covering it up," says NFLPA president Troy Vincent, the former Eagle who now is a Buffalo safety. "It really can create disparity, not just at a club level, but at a player level as well."

Vincent pointed out that the current salary-cap system includes both maximum and minimum payroll levels. An uncapped system would include neither.

"With a cap, we can control the minimums," he says. "Wihout a cap, we can't control the minimums. Some [players] will be greatly rewarded. Many others will be surprised."

Says agent Brad Blank: "Everybody's brandishing their swords right now. The union says it will be a Shangri-La and the wages will go way up, which I tend to agree with. But then I've also heard certain owners say this will be good because they could spend as little as they want.

"Ultimately, without a cap, [the NFL] would resemble baseball, where some owners will spend whatever it takes to sign the players they want, and others won't. You'll have your haves and your have-nots. It will become a two-tiered system, just like baseball."

If 2007 becomes an uncapped year, the free-agency rules would change slightly. Players would need 6 years of accrued NFL

service to become unrestricted free agents rather than the current 4.

"It's in both sides' interest to try to get this thing resolved before we get [to the uncapped year]," agent Jerrold Colton says. "Both sides stand to lose something significant. From the players' standpoint, a lot of them will say that [without a cap], there will be no limit on salaries. But with it taking 2 more years to qualify for free agency, it's going to thwart a lot of players' ability to get the big money.

"If there is no cap in '07, it's going to be uncharted territory.

I don't think either side really knows for sure what kind of world we'd be getting into."

Blank agrees.

"It won't be good for anybody," he says. "And I include the players in that. Even though salaries might go up, who wants to play for a team that never wins? And that will be the fate of a lot of players. Or will all the good players gravitate to one or two teams, like baseball? It'll be good for some of them, but not all of them."

One group that clearly would benefit from the absence of a

salary cap in '07 would be the rookies. Without a cap, there

also would be no rookie pool, which has managed to keep

rookie contracts from spiraling out of control as they did in the pre-cap days, when it wasn't

unusual to see first-round deals increase 30 to 35 percent from

one year to the next.

"The rookie would be free to negotiate contracts without

reference to the salary cap," Steinberg says. "They'd be able to command much larger compensation packages structured in different ways than currently

occurs. More up-front money. Straight salaries. Fewer option

clauses."

Steinberg sees two major benefits to an NFL without a salary cap. Theoretically, teams would be able to hold on to their own veteran players since they wouldn't have to worry about staying under the cap. But there's nothing to prevent

another team from making that veteran a better offer.

Steinberg also says teams would be able to create the kind of roster depth that has been lacking in the league since the

advent of the cap. They'd be able to keep more experienced veteran backups, rather than cheaper rookie and first-year labor because of cap considerations.

"Today, you've got Grade-A linemen backed up by Grade-C people," Steinberg says. "Teams could move back to an era where Joe Montana was backed up by Steve Young who was backed up by Steve Bono. The better clubs with better management would once again be able to hang on to more talent."

The possibility of an uncapped year in '07 is expected to affect what happens during the upcoming free-agency signing period. Some free agents-to-be who will have enough accrued service to qualify for free agency in '07, such as Colts wide receiver

Reggie Wayne, might opt to sign 1-year deals in the hope of hitting the mother lode as a free agent again in uncapped '07.

Some teams also might get a little more reckless in their free-agent spending in '06 if they think there won't be a cap in '07.

"If you're a team and you think there is going to be an uncapped year in '07, you can really blow your load right now and make up for it in the uncapped year," Blank says. "That could blow up in your face, though, if there ends up being an agreement next year and '07 is capped."

Blank also isn't as convinced as Upshaw claims he is that the cap will never return if it goes away in 2007.

"It's not as unlikely as he makes it sound," he says. "I

understand that he has to say that right now as part of his

bargaining position. You have to make [the owners] think that if you let the genie out of the bottle, you can never get it back in.

"If he lets them think it's

negotiable, then the owners might say, 'Well, let's try it for a year [without a cap] and see how it goes. We can always go back.' You don't want them to have that flexibility in their minds."

Vincent remains hopeful the owners and players can hammer out a new labor pact in the next few months and avoid an uncapped year in '07.

"I'm a player, and every player would love to make as much money as possible," he says. "But I look at the game and the profession and the popularity of our game and everything that revolves around it. We've learned valuable lessons from baseball, basketball and hockey about the roads we don't want to go down if we can avoid them."