They aren’t flouting the salary cap becuase I forget exactly how it works but when you cut someone their bonus still counts against the cap. I remember reading an article about the Tennessee Titan’s cap situation and it mentioned that a significant portion of it was taken up by players no longer on the team. Specifics are hard to come by in regards to the NFL cap becuase it ungodly complicated.
I don’t believe this is accurate becuase it gives teams no incentive to cut players for cap purposes. I am pretty sure its just the bonus that counts and I believe the remaining balance on the bonus is used for that years cap. In other words if I recieved a 10 million dollar bonus on a 5 year contract and was cut after year 3. My cap number for the team would be 4 million dollars i.e. the last two years of the pro-rated bonus.
Take this all with a grain of salt becuase I don’t know exactly how the cap works and not many people do.
They didn’t. Holdouts aren’t allowed, which is why players get fined by their team for missing training camp (the offseason minicamps are optional). It’s also why players get reporting bonuses just for showing up at camp.
A player will hold out because he’s betting that he’s so valuable to his team that they’ll deal with him. Often they’re right, and the team gives them a new deal; sometimes they’re wrong and the team will release or trade him (Keenan McCardell), or else just tell him they will not renegotiate, and the player will sheepishly come back (Duce Staley).
In any case, it’s very much like a movie star stopping halfway through shooting and refusing to leave her trailer until she gets more more money (perhaps because her last movie has now been released and is a big hit, and her market value is higher). You’ve already shot half the film, and you can’t very well force someone to act. So you probably deal with them.
It’s the same as the NFL; when a player holds out in training camp, it’s because he’s betting that the team will conclude releasing or trading him is a worse option than giving him more money.
If a player wanted to make sure he got full market value every year, there’s an easy way: once a free agent, he could sign one-year contracts every single year.
And treis is correct; only the bonus (which is long gone) continues to count towards the cap.
that’s what I get for posting that late. furt and treis are correct that it’s only the signing bonus that counts. What I was think of is the cuts after June 1st when the bonus is prorated against the cap for two years as opposed to the April cuts which count aganst that years cap.
As long as we agree that the penalties aren’t anything more than trivialities, this isn’t really all that important, but here’s the language from the CBA.
That’s not exactly prohibitive. Holdouts are acceptable practice in the NFL.
Define “acceptable practice.” There are statutes against robbing banks that specify penalties. Does that mean its “acceptable practice?”
I assume you were quoting from this page and not the CBA.
I’d think losing $5,000 a day (probably more now), and game checks and a year’s progress towards free agency is pretty prohibitive.
And to make sure we’re comparing apples and apples: In general, I have far less of a problem with a player without a contract holding out; he has not taken money or signed his name to an agreement. When he takes the money, signs his name, takes his bonus, and then wants to back out, I have a problem.
As far as apples and apples, like I said in my first post, in this particular case I agree with you. Owens is being a cock. He’s not more valuable this offseason than he was last offseason, and he did sign the deal, so I’m not going to have a problem with the Eagles upcoming “shove it up your ass, TO.” I just think it’s ridiculous that any fan would get his or her panties in a bunch about a player going for his. Can you imagine people on message boards getting this souped because Siegried and Roy wanted a bigger cut up front* at Mandalay Bay, or because friggin JK Rowling wanted more of the proceeds from the box office?
*I heard Siegfried loves cut up fronts.
I’m not following you. Yes, the information is in there, but it does not follow that holdouts are “allowed” because they made provision for how to deal with them when they happen anyway. My company has a policy for what happens when I inevitably get caught surfing internet porn; but that don’t mean it’s allowed…
They sure would if it meant they weren’t going to get their next Harry Potter book.
Fans of other teams might not care; and if it was Eli Manning, I’d love it (tried to think of a Cowboys example, but they don’t have any players good enough to be missed). As an Eagles fan, it pisses me off because he’s putting himself above the team, and I saw what his pathology wrought in SF.
No, and the reason is that they’re not flouting the salary cap at all. I think the NFL’s salary cap is beautifully structured, as will become apparent.
One thing that I should make clear that’s only been mentioned in passing to this point: a player’s signing bonus is prorated over the length of his contract (for the purposes of the salary cap, that is), but when that player is cut or traded, the remaining bonus money that has yet to be counted against any year’s salary cap is accelerated into the current year. So take the contract example I used before: $5M bonus, base salaries of $1.2M, $1.6M, $3M, $6M, and $7M. The cap hit from the bonus is spread evenly throughout the deal, so the charges against the cap are $2.2M, $2.6M, and $4M in the first three years. If the team cuts the player after the third year, though, they’re off the hook for the huge base salaries, but still have to own up to the remaining $2M in bonus money that they already paid the player. So the charge would be $2M in the fourth year for a player no longer with the team: this is called “dead money.” In the fifth year, the charge would be $0.
So. The salary cap says that you can only spend x on your roster in a given year. However, by giving out lots of multi-year deals with huge signing bonuses that will count against the cap only gradually, a team can in reality spend significantly more than x in a given year, or even over a few years. However, all of those signing bonuses eventually have to be accounted for, one way or another. The beauty of the salary cap is that, no matter how they structure it, NFL teams can spend no more than what the salary cap dictates in the long run. That is, for every year that a team actually spends $20M more than the salary cap, they’ll have to actually spend $20M less than the salary cap in upcoming seasons, cumulatively.
This means that a team’s official cap charge might consistently be right at the salary cap, even though in reality its expenditures are fluctuating well above and below the cap each year. Again, using the example contract from above, this is because the team actually spends $6.2M for the player in the first year and $1.6M in the second, while the cap charges are $2.2M and $2.6M.
This is longer than it has to be, but also shorter than it could be. I’m leaving out complications that arise from roster bonuses, likely-to-be-earned incentives, unlikely-to-be-earned incentives, and various other whosawhatsits.
No, Jerry Rice would’ve been off of SF’s books after the season following his release.
Actually, only players with three are fewer years of experience become restricted free agents once their contract expires. Players with four or more years become unrestricted free agents once they’re no longer under contract, which means that their old teams have no hold on them whatsoever.
It’s not that much like movie star’s holding out (not that that ever seems to happen), and the reason is simple: the actor’s contract is guaranteed, the player’s contract is not. Ethically speaking, I think there’s a big difference between renegging on a contract that’s mutually binding and renegging on one that’s much more binding on you than the other guys.
But why? He stops showing up, the team stops paying him – seems fair. Meanwhile, the team can say “take a pay cut or we’ll fire you” whenever they wish (and it happens dozens, if not hundreds, of times a year). I think it’s very good for football that, unlike MLB and the NBA, players’ contracts are not guaranteed (long discussion), but why should one side have all the leverage?
But that’s obviously disadvantageous to the player. Since they run the risk of career-ending injury on any given play, “full market value” for NFL players means getting big signing bonuses: i.e., getting several years worth of salary up front, so that the player and his family are taken care of even if he suffers a catastrophic injury next season.
What ticks me off about this is not that T.O. is causing a rift in the team for his own selfish ends, but that he’s doing it when there’s so little prospect of success. The Eagles might make some superficial changes to his contract so he can save face, but there’s no way that they’re going to give T.O. a meaningful raise.