Sports Radio Interviews

The NFLPA is Committed to Getting A Deal Done

There has been much talk recently of an uncapped salary for the NFL in the 2010 season and a potential lockout for the 2011 season. This will be an unmitigated disaster for the NFL as it currently is the big elephant in the room when you talk about the most popular American sport now. An uncapped season means that there will be no salary cap, nor a bottom or a ceiling to it. You might think to yourself that the NFLPA would like an uncapped season because they could make a lot of money but they really won’t. The salary cap ensures for competitive balance both on and off the field for each of the 32 teams but there will be no parity if the owners get what they want. The cap also ensures that the more wealthy owners do not go out and buy up all of the talent similar to that of the New York Yankees in Major League Baseball. On the flip side to the ceiling of a salary cap, there will be no bottom to it. That means teams like the Cincinnati Bengals, who are notorious for being cheap, will shell out pennies on the dollar just to save money which will obviously give the other teams a competitive advantage.

If an uncapped year were to happen the NFL will try to put a stop to teams from stockpiling superstar players. This can’t be good for the NFL because teams like the Redskins and Cowboys will get the talent they want in an uncapped season. And the elite NFL free agents will cash in, but at the expense of the middle to lower players that will be making league minimum in many cases. This can’t and will not happen to the NFL. DeMaurice Smith, the Executive Director of the National Football League Players’ Association, has stated that he is committed to getting a deal done by March 1. As an avid NFL fan, I sure hope a deal gets done because I don’t want to watch a bunch of replacement players again.

DeMaurice Smith joined WFAN in New York with Boomer and Carton to talk about the uncapped 2010 year and what that means, where the supplemental dollars come from as of right now, whether the NFLPA is against the uncapped year of 2010, and how the NFLPA feels about a rookie salary cap and extending the season two more games.

On his background and who he is:

“I have been a lawyer for twenty years. A proud ACC guy like Boomer. I went to University of Virginia Law School. Practiced as Assistant US attorney for ten years. I was counseled to then Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder, for two years then I was in private practice firms… A tremendous amount of time representing some of the biggest corporations in America, both in litigation and crisis management up on Capitol Hill.”

On how he ended up as a candidate for the NFLPA and why he chose this path:

“Well I got a call one day sitting at the office saying that a lot of the players are thinking about whether they want a guy who looks a lot like the people representing the National Football League for the past almost twenty years, Paul Tagliabue and others. I was asked whether or not I would be interested putting my name in the hat. After thinking about it for a very long time I made the decision that it was something that I am interested in and started off from a group of about two hundred and ended up as one.”

On the uncapped 2010 year and what that means:

“The only thing that I would add is let’s back up to what has made football great. That means competitive balance on the field among teams. That changes in an uncapped year. You get to the point where there is no ceiling and there is no floor. We also know just recently the owners decided to opt out of a supplemental revenue sharing program which means that he lower market teams that got an additional millions of dollars based on this supplemental revenue sharing will not get that in an uncapped year.”

On where the supplemental dollars come from as of right now:

“Right now it is a part of shared local revenue. So Paul Tagliabue and Gene Upshaw’s vision was that we always need to do something to maintain competitive balance off the field financially so that we have competitive balance on the field. Take a team like Kansas City. That is a team that acquired a big-name, heavy hitter quarterback last year. It is impossible to think that isn’t directly tied to the supplemental revenue sharing that they got the year before… Competitive balance is the core. If you think about the transfer and the transcendence of football from the merger in the ‘60’s until now, the history is really quite clear. When that merger took place no one believed that there would be the wild revenues that we have today. Nobody even thought that they would be a main competitor to a sport named baseball. But in the ‘90’s that philosophy of revenue sharing led to something that you guys talk about everyday: Any given Sunday. No matter where you are you wake up as a fan on Sunday that my team can win.”

Whether the NFLPA is against the uncapped year of 2010:

“I am committed to getting a deal done by March 1 because our players do not want an uncapped year. They do not because they know that the engine that drives the national Football League is competitive balance.”

On the risk people talk about the owners are taking on buying a NFL team and that it is not really a risk at all:

“You (the owners) get half of the money from public financing. The other half of the money comes from a low to free interest loan from everybody else and we know that over the last fifteen years the average team values have increased 530%.”

On why the owners would want to pay 60% of the gross revenue of the NFL:

“Two things… One, our average player plays 3.4 years. There are no guaranteed contracts. It is the roughest most physically demanding sport out there. Second thing, if both of you are right show us your audited financial statements and lets get a deal done.”

On what the NFLPA wants in a new contract:

“We signed a deal in 2006. It was supposed to go until 2012. I don’t think it is absolutely crazy for me to say: How about we stick to the deal that we signed? They walked away. We did not.”

On how the NFLPA feels about a rookie salary cap and extending the season two more games:

“Well let me do the last one first. There has been no formal proposal to us about extending for 18 games. We have talked about it but there is no formal proposal. What interests me in something like that is what is the overall injury data? What is the pay structure going to be for two extra games? You know that it is certainly not the same thing as taking two preseason games off, where most vets don’t play, and adding to end-of-the-season games where every guy does play. The last thing I would say about that is we still have a playoff pays situation where the average player’s salary for a first round playoff game is about $20,000. So if you are an owner you want to talk about risk. You own a team, you have a home playoff game, you didn’t budget for it. It is not in your budget. You get to a home playoff game, gates up, TV’s up, revenues up, concessions up, parking is up, and your salary going to a player is $20,000. The salary goes down but the owner’s revenues up… So one thing I would like to see if we are talking about an eighteen game schedule is let’s break down and find out what the average team makes per game. But you know what? I am still looking for that number.”

DeMaurice Smith of the NFLPA joined Boomer and Carton to discuss some important issues

Tags: DeMaurice Smith, lockout, NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement, NFL owners, NFL Players Association, NFLPA, Roger Goodell, uncapped season