Presenting Roger Goodell’s biggest nightmare (h/t Chris Brown):
… In the union lawyers’ world, every player would enter the league as an unrestricted free agent, an independent contractor free to sell his services to any team. Every player would again become an unrestricted free agent each time his contract expired.
Yeah, that free market’s a biotch, alright.
That’s the same mentality which prohibits college athletes from pursuing a professional living merely because of when they finished high school.
You want to do something concrete about student-athlete slavery? How ’bout telling Goodall and the NFL owners they’re the problem… Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Get The Picture 
Nobody loves Socialism until they start watching the NFL.
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How is the NFL socialism?
It’s what the players have agreed to through collective bargaining. If they don’t want a draft, they can negotiate that. (and probably end up with no football…)
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It’s as easy as 1-2-3
1. “NFL: Socialism makes everyone rich”
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2010/03/07/nfl_socialism_makes_everyone_rich/
2. “NFL: Socialism At Its Best?”
3. “Maher on NFL Socialism”
http://rackjite.com/archives/6409-Bill-Maher-New-Rules,-NFL-SOCIALISM,-January-28,-2011.html
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I just hope you are being ironic.
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If there was no minimum salary or maximum contract length, you’d have a handful of players who might make good money and a huge number that would get locked into long term contracts for minuscule amounts compared to the minimum salary of over $300K in year 1 (and escalating) that exists today.
It actually might HELP keep kids in school if there wasn’t a guaranteed payday of $750K and a relatively short, 3 years until free agency for being drafted in the 3rd-5th rounds.
Brian Ayrault is an idiot. “Markets should determine the value of all contracts.” Uhh…what markets? Markets that are truly free or a “market” that has been created through collective bargaining and is then turned over to agents so they can negotiate a pretty simple contract for a 3% commission?
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Well hell, sir, the CFL and the AFL are free markets.
Tongue in cheek.
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The draft does serve a real purpose from a timing standpoint though….look at how long it takes teams sometimes to sign all their draft picks…….and that’s only having to negotiate with 8 or so players, who are already largely slotted in a salary range based on when they were drafted. Can you imagine the chaos of all teams negotiating with all players? Obviously, each team would whittle down their list of who they wanted to go after, but they’d still probably have to make offers to 25- 50 players to sign the quantity they needed each year. Then you’d have the agents holding out all their guys, trying to create bidding wars between teams…… You’d be halfway through the season before all that got sorted out. That kind of madness would actually hurt the players in the long run, if you ask me, I’d think the fans would get tired of it all and start to lose interest. And once fan interest goes down, everybody loses.
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Um… what’s the difference between that and free agent signings? The NFL seems to handle those without much trouble.
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That’s a valid point, but I do think it’s a bit of apples & oranges. You don’t see that many big names in free agency each year, because there is a body of work to judge against at the NFL level, and guys that are valuable are usually locked up by their existing teams with extensions. A lot of what you see in free agency are guys who are past their prime, or guys who it’s pretty well known are only going to be role players. Most of the guys in the draft are ultimately role players as well (assuming they stay in the league), but nobody really knows who will be a role player and who will be a star —- it’s much more of a crapshoot than free agency.
For example, are there any free agent QB’s out there this year that would generate anywhere near the interest of Newton, Gabbert, even down to guys like Mallett? I’d say there’s at least 8 QB’s in the draft that would generate more interest than the current free agents at QB. It would take much longer for those guys to go through a free agent process than what we currently see from existing free agents, because the interest in the potential of a new player is so high, and you’d have so many more teams involved. I think that would hold true at a lot of other positions as well, and would make the process of getting all the guys signed much more cumbersome than what we see in free agency now.
Of course, I could just be talking out my arse here, it’s all speculation. 🙂
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What if Posnanski wrote about Goodell’s WSJ column trying to save the Plantation?
“Goodell to the Last Drop”
by Joe Posnanski
from Sports Illustrated
“And based on Goodell’s opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. it looks like the impressive NFL commissioner is completely out of ideas. I wrote on Twitter that the only thing missing from this ludicrous column was exclamation points. You could tell right away that this column was untrustworthy when in the second sentence he wrote, “For six weeks, there has been a work stoppage,” as if that was caused by some sort of natural disaster and was not a result of the owners locking out the players. He then talks about how great the NFL system has been for everyone without even taking one sentence to mention the inconvenient fact that it was the owners, not the players, who wanted to blow up the old system in a bald money grab. He then offers an utterly unrealistic and devious doomsday scenario “if the players win” — a scenario that he knows will never happen and is only in play now because of the owners’ greedy lockout that was slammed down by the courts.
It all screamed of desperation and, frankly, it felt a bit incompetent, too.”
http://www.arrowheadpride.com/2011/4/27/2136668/and-based-on-goodells-opinion-column-in-the-wall-street-journal-on
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likening anything to slavery (other than slavery) ranks only second in intellectual lameness to calling someone a Nazi (other than a Nazi).
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Amen
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To the surprise of no one, Adolph sides with management
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If the NFL becomes pro baseball like then the richest owners would have the best teams ala Boston and New York. The lack of a level playing field will run a lot of clubs out of business and with fewer clubs will come fewer players. This hold thing has that cutting off your nose to spite your face thing going for it.
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Fewer clubs, fewer players, fewer revenue. I really don’t get why this is so confusing.
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This is bullshit. If the spoiled players want to get paid like owners then form a partnership or a syndicate and purchase a team. Until then, they are simply employees like the rest of us.
Or, they can quit football, start a business, grow the business, sell the business, and then purchase the football team. This might be easier than generating the equity through an LLC and leveraging the rest since most player’s credit is too screwed up to qualify for the loan in addition to not having much collateral for said loan, other than depreciable cars and stupid bling.
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Bullshit sir. They can form a union to advocate their wishes. We might be able to field teams but if you think NFL athletes are replaceable, then you sir need a piss test yourself.
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That doesn’t mean I like it, but if I was even a special teams player making the minimum, I would be standing next to Peyton at the bargaining table.
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