If good young players don’t want to sign with certain teams, I have no problem with that. “Parity” is not something I value very highly. I value players having choices much higher. The good people of Buffalo and Oakland are no more deserving of having competitive teams than is anyone else.
What exactly is “here or there” for you?
The entire post I was responding to (of yours) was about how the salary cap maintains parity (and the draft doesn’t). If you don’t care about parity, fine, but that is unrelated to the argument you were making.
“Here or there” means philosophical considerations aren’t really relevant to this thread, which is really just about how a draft works.
We’ll save it for another time, then. Giving up the draft is a pretty radical concept and it will take some strenuous effort on my part to convince most football fans how right I am.
Hey, now’s as good a time as any. I’m strongly opposed to giving up the draft, but I’m open to being convinced I’m wrong. Give it your best shot.
But here’s the thing: you’ll have to argue on the basis that your solution makes the sport more interesting to watch. Since the players and the owners have both agreed to - and profit very greatly by - the current system, arguments based on abstract ideas of “justice” or “fairness” are not of interest to me.
Right now, the draft promotes parity, which in turn makes the sport more interesting to me as a viewer; watching the same 6-7 teams dominate the league for the rest of my life doesn’t sound particularly fun or interesting. The strategy and theatre that surround the draft itself are also fun to watch and to discuss. My position is that the existence of the draft makes an endeavor that is entirely about entertainment… more entertaining.
Convince me that I’m wrong.
Why would the same 6-7 teams dominate the league without a draft? And why is it important that the owners are profiting greatly under the current system?
Look, I get it that lots of people like watching the draft as a talking point and as sort of an event in which to celebrity-watch. But it doesn’t have very much to do with spreading the talent out fairly. There are only a handful of impact players in any class, and sometimes not even that, and teams are notoriously bad at predicting who will make good NFL players. Lots of teams passed on Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers. Others took Ryan Leaf and Tim Couch really early.
The argument that draft defenders should be making is that, even with a hard salary cap, certain cities will have an inherent advantage over others in attracting talent. The Florida and Texas teams because they have no state sales tax? That’s an interesting argument. It’s not a persuasive one to me but it’s interesting.
Except the 90% of NFL players who aren’t rookies. And to the teams, who don’t have to spend 1/20th of their cap on one crapshoot player who hasn’t taken an NFL stance.
Actually except for anyone who isn’t a rookie or an agent for a rookie.
If it were JUST a crapshoot, then you wouldn’t have teams that have been successful for a long time building through the draft and crap teams like the Browns, Jags, and the rest would somehow be better. Putting the entirety of the luck down to mostly just luck is just silly.
Because it would enable the richest teams to buy all the top prospects. The advantages already conferred on the New York Yankees to buy expensive veterans would extend to being able to buy the best young players as well.
I really don’t understand your claim that this is negated by virtue of the fact that everyone once passed on Tom Brady. Sure, that’s true, but you’re cherry picking an extreme example and not looking at what would actually happen. In point of fact, players drafted in the first round are vastly likelier to be productive players than in the second round, who’re likelier to be good than players in later rounds (there is no later round in the NBA.) You will sometimes get the odd Ryan Leaf who is a first round bust or a Mike Piazza who’s a 62nd round surprise. But if you’re a super rich team like the Cowboys or the Yankees you could in theory buy 10-15 of the players projected to go in the first round, and you’re pretty much guaranteed you’ll get some all-stars.
In the first round of the 2003 MLB First Year Entry Draft - I just picked that draft at random - about three quarters of the players ended up making the big leagues and many of them are all-stars or close to it. In the fifth round only four players were picked who made it, all guys I barely remember. (The sixth round did better; it had 7 big leaguers, including Ryan Braun and Matt Kemp.) The tenth round yielded exactly one big leaguer; only six guys even made it to AAA. And that’s in BASEBALL, which is considered the least predictable of the drafts in major sports.
Giving rich teams the ability to fill up on the top prospects every year would just be an enormous, enormous advantage. It’d turn the league into the English Premier League, where there is incredibly slow turnover in the top teams.
It is just indisputable that the draft HAS enabled bad teams to become good in a way that would not be possible otherwise. There are just too many examples to deny it.
Well, he’s not talking about dumping the salary cap, so MLB is a bad example. But yeah, it makes no sense to think that the draft doesn’t make a difference.
That certainly helps incompetent owners and overpriced veterans. But owners don’t have to spend 1/20th of their cap on a rookie and veterans can play for less if that’s what the market requires.
Of course some teams are better at talent identification than others but a fixed batting order doesn’t change that. That’s something that changes over time, too. The Browns don’t always have to suck at talent procurement; they could hire the right front office people and turn things around. People who could use the flexibilities offered by the open market to build smarter and faster than a draft allows them.
Another thing to consider is that each draft pool is different in the quality it offers, either overall or at certain positions. In some drafts teams are better off getting out of the top of the order, that is if someone else will take the pick off their hands. Smart front offices could factor this into their planning as well. If there aren’t any Andrew Lucks out there, this could be the year to pursue cover corners or even guards.
If there are negatives to abolishing the draft, something of which I’m hardly convinced, they are more than offset by the greater liberties afforded to the talent pool. In light of the fierce competition for jobs, the right to negotiate their first employer seems to me like a modest demand.
If I didn’t make it clear that I consider retaining the salary cap as an integral part of the system, I apologize. In fact, I think it is the salary cap which makes the draft an unnecessary function for a competitive league.
Also a big factor that makes U.S. sports leagues more amenable for the draft is that each sport is controlled at the top by a cartel of 30 or so clubs that will never be relegated and use the lower divisions as training grounds, often outright owning clubs at the lower levels.
Do you see the disconnect between bemoaning ownership and calling veterans “overpriced”?
The rookie cap helps veteran players play longer and for more money. It is certainly at the expense of the highly drafted rookies who were eating up a shitload of the salary cap, but, from my point of view, more veterans making more money is a better outcome than the first 15 rookies drafted making insane amounts of money at everyone else’s expense. YMMV, but even if it does vary, I think calling the rookie cap an “abomination” is severely overstating it and makes your points much harder to swallow.
Which they can do with a draft order also. In fact, teams like the Browns and Rams have been able to take advantage of stupider teams that overpay to trade up for talent (I’m looking at you Atlanta and Washington), which actually helps them in the long run. That benefit would simply disappear under your plan.
Cite?
Which also happens in the draft.
Wouldn’t this “fairness” argument also cover the salary cap? Are you advocating getting rid of that also? Because I think getting rid of the salary cap and the draft would ruin one of the greatest things about NFL football, the parity.
ETA: I see you told RickJay you’d keep the salary cap. How do you square that with your concern for fairness?
I find it ironic that the European distribution of talent is more free market while the American one is more socialist.
I think another area Red Wiggler is missing is recruitment. Players want to play for winners and great coaches. We’ve seen the Seahawks’ powerful defense stripped of much of it’s depth. It would have been much easier for them to reload with a lot of rookies they could have recruited with the mystique they’d established after the SUperbowl win.Instead, we see them limited by their recent success and other teams starting to rise.
Without being limited by the draft, I think the Patriots would have twice as many titles in the past decade as they in fact do. Great for New England fans but everyone else would start petitions to ban hoodies…
I wouldn’t call it free market versus socialist. It’s competitive versus monopolistic. The MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL are cartels in which ~30 clubs are essentially controlled by a group of owners who cooperate to limit competition between themselves.
European clubs compete with each other on the market for players. Each U.S. league controls the entire market for the top players in that sport and limit the players’ opportunity to bargain for the best deal.
I don’t understand the question. Not all veterans are overpriced. But if they require a rookie salary cap to restrict rookie salaries, it’s hard to argue that some aren’t.
Again, owners don’t have to pay massive amounts for players straight out of college. In an open market system, perhaps contracting the services of more reasonably priced – and proven – veterans would be the path to success. It might be smarter in some years not to pursue any rookies.
If it happens with or without the draft, let’s dump the draft and give the players some choice.
I don’t know where to find a cite for something that isn’t allowed to happen.
If it happens with or without the draft, let’s dump the draft and give the players some choice.
How do you equate the two?
I believe a salary cap would limit the effects of teams loading up. Players will pick the best positions for themselves and surely a few will play for less on better teams than they would be able to earn at lesser teams. But some will look at the wickedly short careers typical in pro football and realize that the early years are often the peak earning years. They’ll mostly follow the money.
Even if they don’t, I don’t have a problem with teams competing hard for players’ signatures. Those guys the Seahawks cut may go on to make some other team better while the Hawks break in new kids (some of whom won’t pan out).
Sure there are overpriced veterans. But the lack of a rookie salary cap made sure there were a lot more insanely overpriced rookies than more overpriced veterans. Again, I would rather more veterans making more money over a longer period of time than a few rookies making insane amounts.
The history of the NFL and its owners shows that it is very likely that there will be franchises that are willing to spend enormous amounts of money to get the rookies they want. The NFL is a league of shiny new things getting money at the expense of still productive veterans, and not having a draft and a rookie cap will, to my mind, lead to more money thrown at rookies than that given to veterans. Again, I prefer that the money owners spend be spread more equally to more veterans than thrown at the rookies.
So we agree, your assertion is unproven.
Your argument seems to be that it is much more fair for rookies to be given the choice of where and how much they play for, yet you see no problem setting a cap on how much money the players as a whole can make. To me, the draft, the salary cap, and the rookie cap are all “unfair” ways of limiting the choice of where and for how much players get to play. You seemingly support one, but argue that the other two are unfair to rookies. I think that, if you were consistent, that all three would be deemed unfair and thus should be abolished. I don’t see why you support one unfairness but not the other two.
(shrug) Okay, so let’s look at leagues with a salary cap. The Pittsburgh Penguins might not even exist anymore without the draft that delivered them Sidney Crosby. The Chicago Blackhawks were resurrected by the draft. The Ottawa Senators went from being a team that went 1-40 on the road one year - no, really - to being a contender by drafting well.
There’s no way those stories happen without the amateur draft, and that’s with a salary cap.
Other sports? Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron James. Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. The NY Giants taking Lawrence Taylor #2.
Take away the draft and make no mistake, New York and LA dominate the league. You can argue for an even lower salary cap, but the problem you face is that a salary cap largely affects veterans, not rookies. Youth is cheap and is by far the most cost effective way to develop a winning team, which, as pointed out, is a recruitment tool in itself. If you abandon the draft you get a system whereby the same teams win every year, which in fact is what happened prior to amateur drafts. Yankee domination of the major leagues, the Celtics’ eight straight titles… these things are unthinkable today.
How competitive are European football leagues that DON’T have drafts? They are insanely top loaded; a small number of elite teams wins the great majority of championships. In the last ten years only three clubs have won an English Premier League title, and only four clubs have won it in the last nineteen. In La Liga three clubs have won all the last ten championships. Bayern Munich has won more than half of all Bundesliga championships* in my lifetime*, and I’m 42. Teams lower on the totem pole have simply no chance at all. There is literally no team in a major North American pro sports league that couldn’t win the championship of their league five yeears from now; that is more than enough time for any existing team to develop a winning squad. What are the odds Queens Park will win the Premier League in the next five years? A million to one? What we routinely see in North American sports - the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl, Kansas City fighting for a World Series win - is apparently impossible in those leagues, and the main reason, truth be told, is the draft.
Well, there is the Cubs…
Oakland Raiders.