Adam Shefter is reporting that Carl Nicks goes to the Bucs for 5 year, 47.5 million, 31 million guaranteed. I’d be shocked if it ends up being $31 million guaranteed, but the Bucs are now the “winners” in free agency landing the #1 WR and the #1 G. Lots of money spent though.
True, true, but I guess I was thinking more about discussion here on the SDMB than out there in general. We’re all about the thing being pursuant to the other thing and pointing out that the other guy missed the importance of Sub-Paragraph D and it’s impact on Rule #18.32a as it pertains to the language in the CBA’s training camp lunch-reimbursement provisions. I mean, how many lawyers are there in this thread?
Don’t they need to at least start adding payroll to make the salary floor that’s supposed to kick in? Is that this year or next? Whatever, I do know that the Bucs spend hardly anything, so it’s perhaps no surprise that they’re throwing money around - they theoretically have the money to do so.
ETA: I must confess, my knowledge of the salary floor is weak, so I am looking forward to being corrected if wrong…
Yes, we had to spend at least $28 million on additional salary this season no matter what.
I don’t understand this move at all. We just re-signed Jeremy Zuttah who has been a star interior utilityman, and we have the best right guard in football in Davin Joseph. We cut Jeff Faine, so I guess Zuttah will move to center, but the spot we really needed to upgrade on the line was right tackle. Jeremy Trueblood is a decent run blocker, but he’s flagged for a personal foul at least once every game and is a liability in pass protection.
Don’t get me wrong; I love that the team is finally doing something in free agency. I just find it odd that the team is doing this.
Maybe we’ll draft a tackle if we don’t take Honey Badger.
FWIW, Varlos, I think there was some discussion of the accounting penalties in the Peyton Manning thread. I personally am having a hard time with the idea of the League informally agreeing to fix prices in an uncapped year. It strikes me as “smelling” wrong from an anti-trust perspective. And the NFL’s anti-trust exemption is much less robust than MLB’s. Wasn’t there a lot of talk at the time about how few crazy deals were being inked in a year with no salary cap? To retroactively penalize conduct that occurred before the operative date of your main labor agreement, and therefore, the origin date of the League’s authority to penalize its owners without antitrust implications, really strikes me as rank. IANAL, and certainly not an antitrust or labor or sports attorney, so I am probably missing a lot of pertinent details.
The problem with any anti-trust implications is that I’d think the only entities with a cause of action would be the players, not either Snyder or Jones. (Perhaps Snyder or Jones could have joined the suit?) And if DeMaurice Smith, et al, didn’t hammer this nail more strongly in their suit against the League, who am I to complain? (As an aside, what do we fans feel about how well the players did in their labor dispute? I think the players were bent over a barrel, but I am interested in your insights and opinions.)
I imagine the logic is that any anti-competitive behavior the League engaged in during the period where no CBA was operative, was retroactively immunized by the new CBA. IOW, the time for Snyder and Jones to bitch about the directive not to spend during the uncapped year, or structure their players’ contracts to burden that year, was before the CBA was signed.
Thanks for your informative post, Varlos. I too was wondering what we all thought of the penalties. I also found the discussion at FO to be interesting.
Stepping away from those points, it appears the Texans are going to let their center Chris Myers, and guard, Mike Brisiel, test FA. The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. $18M walks out the door (Mario’s cap number last year) and you are STILL UP AGAINST THE CAP?! Seriously, WTF!? For crying out loud, you aren’t the Steelers or Raiders.
Spotrac is updating, so these are from memory. There’s no excuse for not restructuring/outright cutting before now: Antonio Smith, 2 yrs, 15M remaining; DeMeco Ryans, 4 yrs, ~32M remaining; Jacoby Jones, 2 yrs, 7M remaining. Doubtless there are others.
Finally, off the presses: Megatron signs 7 yr extension for $132M, $60M guaranteed (VarlosZ disclaimer noted)
This is the problem I have with it. According to Redskins GM George Allen’s statement, the league approved all the contracts they executed during the uncapped year. To me, it seems completely out of bounds for the league to go back and penalize teams now for something that they did with the league’s approval. The owners decided to have an uncapped year (remember that it was they who opted out of the previous CBA), which by definition will favor some teams over others… now it seems like they’re trying to penalize those teams for taking advantage of the situation that the league as a whole created.
If I were a fan of one of those teams, I’d be furious; if I were Snyder or Jones, I’d be preparing to file suit.
Damn. I was hoping the Bengals would target this guy. Cincinnati really needs help at both guard spots and I don’t want to plug in rookies in the line.
The agreement (CBA) was between the players union and the NFL. And both the players union and the NFL are on board with the penalty. This was an internal NFL thing, which, from my albeit limited understanding, means there is no issue with anti-trust laws. It’s kinda difficult to scream collusion when you’re part of the body that is doing the colluding.
Mark Cuban and Jerry Jones agreed to be in the NFL. They get all the benefits that entitles (which are massive), but that also means they have to play by the rules. And the rules were made very clear to them about what would happen in an uncapped year. They simply chose to ignore the rules and deal with the consequences. They are both free to take their teams out of the NFL if they wish, but if they are in the NFL, they gotta play by the rules.
Well, at the time the league wasn’t going to veto any proposed deal because they were under threat from the NFLPA of a anti-trust/collusion suit. Actively stopping those contracts, cuts and other restructuring gimmicks to keep the uncapped year “capped” would have given the lawyers far too much evidence and leverage. The players can’t really cry foul here, as Florio notes, they used this tacit evidence of collusion as leverage in CBA negotiations to boost the cap over $120M this year. It’s no coincidence that this penalty and the overall cap number came out so late and simultaneously, they are linked to the CBA negotiations and De Smith’s credibility.
I assume you meant “Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones”.
I don’t understand that either. The Texans have never really spent big in free agency, as far as I can recall; hell, they let Dunta Robinson walk. Who is taking up all that cap space?
In somewhat trivial news, the Bears signed a couple of special teamers in Brian Costanzo, a backup LB and tackling ace from San Fran, and Eric Weems a KR/PR/WR/Gunner from the Falcons. Clearly the Bears intend to let special team standouts Corey Graham and Zach Bowman go. The most interesting fact is that they brought in a returner in Weems. I don’t think Hester is likely to go anywhere, but they at least have a contingency plan if they intend to try and renegotiable his contract to reflect him not being a starting WR. Still, it’s a little bit of a weird signing.
:smack: Yessir. Hard to keep my arrogant billionaires separate.
I’m going to be away from the 'puter for awhile, so can’t address Hamlet’s points, but the biggest cap hits I see from spotrac’s google cache are:
Matt Schaub 7.65M (UFA in 2013, so need to ink an extension to lower this number. Or cut him and try for Manning, LOL.)
Owen Daniels 6.5M (UFA in 2015, no idea if the team wants to fish or cut bait with him and try their luck with Dreesen.)
Johnathan Joseph 9.75M.
Antonio Smith 8M (UFA in 2014, most of his cap is salary, not bonus. Inexplicable to me why they haven’t re-done it to give him more as bonus, and stretch it over the 2 years he has left. This could save ~2M on this year’s number, by my WAG.)
DeMeco Ryans 7.15M (UFA in 2016. 5M left on his bonus if you break him off now. Nice player, but really hasn’t recovered from his Achilles tear, and is no way worth this kind of $$$. Restructure or cut, and this really should have been dealt with way before now.)
Jacoby Jones 4.94M (from 617k last year! UFA in 2014. Spotrac may be on crack, but they list only 300k remaining bonus; the rest is salary?! Finish Him! Restructure if you’re petrified at the idea of life w/o a kick returner/WR3. Again, why the hell wasn’t this done before now?)
Kevin Walter 3.5M (all salary, no bonus other than $5M 1st year roster bonus, which was accounted for in 2010 cap? [isn’t this the same thing that got Washington/Dallas rung up?] spotrac lists 11M guaranteed, but I think he’s already earned it? Nice guy, decent blocker for a WR, but 3.5M? No.)
Those, IIRC, are the biggies. Andre Johnson would’ve been on this list, but he was restructured the other day. No idea how much money was removed from this year’s cap number. There has be some bonuses/incentives that aren’t being accounted for here to explain some of these peculiarities.
No worries. One big response is referring to the late, great Cryptkeeper himself, Al Davis. Back in the day, he successfully sued the NFL under anti-trust laws to move his team to LA over their disapproval. The court ruled for him.
So there is precedent for a possible anti-trust complaint. But I think, in the end, the NFL is guessing that neither Snyder nor Jones are going to sue them over a salary cap hit, especially when they knew the rules going in and without the support of the NFLPA.
From a legal standpoint I have no comment: I doubt we have enough information to say definitively what the deal is, and even if we know everything I doubt I’m competent to produce a sound analysis.
However, as far as what seems legitimate or fair from a less technical point of view, I think the league’s actions are reasonable (see below).
I’m not sure just how much realistic leeway the league had in approving these contracts; it sounds like by blocking them at the time they were made the NFL would have left itself open to a lawsuit, and it might even be that they’re only allowed to block contracts for limited, clearly defined reasons. I also suppose it’s plausible that the league was willing to presume that Dallas and Washington might have made good these suspect cap dispersals by later throwing money forward, and so didn’t care to deal with it right then. (But the first couple possibilities seem a lot more likely.)
Yeah, but the league had a real interest in setting and enforcing this informal rule. Imagine they simply hadn’t cared about what teams did with the uncapped year. There was still a certain amount of uncertainty back then, but by far the most likely outcome of the looming labor dispute was that there would eventually be a new CBA, which would reinstate a salary cap starting the next year. Given this, if the league hadn’t bothered to say anything about this issue then the only logical course of action for teams who could afford it would be to restructure the contracts of all their players who were likely to be around beyond 2010 so that all of their compensation for the next year (or two, or three, depending on their age, likelihood of remaining effective, etc.) gets pushed into 2010.
What would then happen is that the few teams in the top tier of revenue (Cowboys, Redskins, Giants, etc.) would likely do this in almost every case, suffering the loss of some real money (e.g. 2012 salary that they forwarded a player in 2010, but paid to a player who blows out his knee in 2011) so that they can come out of 2010 with HUGE amounts of cap space in the next few years. The teams in the middle would do the same thing but more judiciously, being eager not to blow too many tens of millions of dollars in cash. Finally, the teams at the bottom, with actual cash flow issues, would be able to do this barely at all, and would be at a massive competitive disadvantage starting in 2011.
Assuming the uncapped year was going to be the only one, then, it was in the league’s best interest to find some way to keep teams from taking advantage of it in this way. And if they had to break a few procedural eggs to make this particular sake-of-the-game omelette, well, that’s fine by me.
The Eagles traded Winston Justice and their 6th rd pick (17th in the round) to the Colts for their 6th rd pick (2nd in the round).
Strangely solid move for both teams. The Eagles get to move up a tiny bit in the draft and, more importantly, save about $4 million of the cap without cutting Justice outright. And the Colts get a starting quality tackle for pretty much nothing.
So far the Eagles have spent free agency dealing with their own. They extended Todd Herremans and Trent Cole, and tendered DT Antonio Dixon. Dixon was a terrific run stopper in 2010 for the Eagles and helped turn around their poor run defense. He was really held back in the new scheme in 2011 (without an offseason to learn it) and then missed the final 12 games due to injury. If he can come back to his 2010 form it would go a long way to solidifying the run defense.
A single player behind the front 4 who can tackle would also make a really big difference.
There’d have to be a restraint of trade for there to be an antitrust problem. That’s why the league gave a bit of extra cap space to 28 teams in return for the acquiescence of the union. It nets out to more cap space for the league as a whole.
re-signed Josh McKown to a one year deal to be their third string QB. After last year’s Hanie’s debacle, I expect them to sign another 8 veteran QB’s to be the 4th through 11th string QB’s.
Do the Iggles have somebody to replace Justice? Seems like pass protection was already an issue last year.