Um…look at Vick’s younger brother, who followed in his footsteps at VT. It may be a bit much to say Tech is a program out of control, but clearly Michael could have made it through his VT career without picking up many citizenship skills.
On the internet it’s never too soon.
It depends - shitty for whom? I honestly don’t know where I come down on whether the NFL Players Association has done a good job, but they should certainly get some credit I would imagine for the pretty solid financial position of football, which has translated into pretty good salaries all round. There is a efar of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and the signing bonus seems to have filled the void of the guaranteed contract.
What I don’t know is how it impacts lower level players. The only one I spent any time with (long time back-up center/long snapper) didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but that is hardly evidence.
From what I hear, Blacksburg is VickTown. They do what they want.
and then get arrested, apparently
As spoke noted, he did indeed get that $37 million. Vick signed a 10 year contract with Atlanta in December, 2004. The total value of the contract Vick signed (which he’ll never see and the Falcons will never pay, no matter how things turn out) was $130 million. There was an initial signing bonus of $7.5 million in 2004. In the spring of 2005, Vick was due to receive a $22.5 million roster bonus. To save cap space, that roster bonus was converted to a signing bonus (signing bonuses can be pro-rates over 4-5 years, while roster bonuses must be counted against the salary cap for the year in which they’re issued). In the spring of 2006, they did the same thing - converting a $7 million roster bonus due to Vick into a signing bonus in order to prorate it.
That’s $37 million guaranteed money, in addition to the escalating seasonal salary. None of his regular season pay is guaranteed, but that $37 million is already in Vick’s pocket. The team would be well within their rights to sue to recover it - Atlanta recovering 7/9 of that $37 million would be the same as Detroit recovering 5/7 of Sanders’ bonus.
If Vick doesn’t get to play out the rest of his football career because he has to spend several years in prison, he will be in very bad shape financially. He’ll probably spend an immense amount of money fighting the charges. After that, even if he’s left with millions, the problem a lot of top-athletes have is they have more or less no financial management skills whatsoever. Since most athletes that make millions have been good for a very long time, all through High School, College, et cetera they have never really held down a normal job. They never had to learn to budget, and in general they are lacking serious life skills.
When talking about the guys who are bringing down many millions of dollars per year to play a sport (not bench guys in the MLB who spend their careers as utility guys usually making under $1m/year and sometimes making league minimum, or guys who spend 10 years riding pine in the NFL and et cetera–the real top tier talent who are every day players) a lot of them fall into the trappings of extravagance and live very expensive lifestyles, to the point where they may be making say, $10m/year and their lifestyle costs them $5-7m/year. That still gives them a lot of wiggle room, but the problem tends to be when they stop making that $10m/year and continue living just as they did before, eventually even with investments and everything else, some of them end up completely broke by the time they are in their 50s.
Look at Mike Tyson, that guy made a ridiculous amount of money during his boxing career, enough that any reasonable person who made the same would live very very comfortably til the day they died and still had millions for the grandkids. Even if you know nothing about financial management, when you have Mike Tyson-level money all you need is a competent and honest set of advisers/managers to handle your finances. Mike Tyson lived a disastrous lifestyle and surrounded himself with horrible financial advisers and friends, so he ended up actually being homeless at one point–after squandering over $300m in earnings over his boxing career he had to declare bankruptcy and was at one point in 2004 IIRC reported to be living in homeless shelters.
From the article I’ve read on the front page of ESPN.com this isn’t another “sports celebrity in trouble” type scenario that is just going to go away. These are serious Federal charges and according to ESPN’s reporters a conviction will mean certain time behind bars for Vick. It also appears that the government is going after Vick specifically, and are going to use four of Vick’s accomplices against him as witnesses. I’ve read they are also trying to establish that this was some sort of conspiracy, so that they can link Vick to criminal acts he may not have even been physically present at during their commission.
Expanding on the contract situation: As mentioned, signing bonuses ARE garunteed. Not only that, but the player gets all of that money up front. That’s why guys like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning (who has done this multiple times) don’t mind converting roster bonuses into signing bonuses. The cap hit for the team is spread out evenly per year over the length of the contract, but the player gets it all up front, in the case of those two players, months before they were scheduled to get a roster bonus.
But things get interesting with Vick’s contract if he gets cut. If he gets cut this season (being after June 1st), the Falcons owe him his signing bonus for this season still (~$4m), then next season the rest of the player’s signing bonus ($21m in this case) is accellerated and counts against that year’s cap instead of being spread out over the remainder of years left. That’s about 1/5th of Atlanta’s cap room being used up next season on a player that won’t be there.
Basically, the team is absolutely screwed. If they keep the guy, it will be a PR nightmare and he still very well may not play for them again. If they cut him, they will not be able to afford any (decent) FA’s next season, and may very well have to cut some key players that they could have kept if Vick were still with the team just to get under the cap. They’ll have a good bit of freed space in 09, but by then, it will be hard for them to reverse the downward momentum. I don’t care for the dogfighting at all, but as a Saints fan, the Falcons’ situation pleases me.
Not a lawyer, but if there’s any way on something like this to agree to a deal, and he was offered maybe a year in jail, I would actually accept that, based on what I have read.
I heard on ESPN that if a player refuses or is unable to report – like, say, he’s in jail – the team is able to go after the remaining balance on the signing bonus they’ve already paid. We all know this already from Ricky Williams.
What I’m wondering is if that should happen, are they still on the hook cap-wise? I mean, if they (try to) recover the bonus, it isn’t really paid out anymore, so it may no longer be a cap issue.
I was wondering that myself. I doubt the NFL would go for it, especially in light of their recent attempts to clean up the league’s image. I can imagine Goodell saying essentially, “that’s the cost of doing business with felons.”
I have a pitbull and this kind of crap is what gives these dogs such a bad rep. I hope he gets the max on all counts.
If they have him agree to some deal that doesn’t involve jail time, I’ll be pissed.
From what I remember, it pretty much helps longer term low impact players by setting pretty good minimum rookie and veteran salaries. That’s probably the reason you see so many 10-14 year vets get picked up during Free Angency.
Not really. Minimum salary for an NFL rookie is $285,000. Minimum salary for a ten year veteran is $820,000 (salaries from here - scroll down about halfway). The reason so many vets get picked up in free agency is because they’re much, much better than the rookies who can be signed for the minimum.
If I recall correctly, the average NFL career is around 3 years. A player doesn’t make it far past the average without having some significant skills to offer a team, and nobody makes it 10 years in the league without being a good football player. Maybe not one of the best, but certainly better than somebody who’s never set foot on an NFL field.
ETA: heh. That web page cites Michael Vick as the highest paid NFL player as of the 2005 season.
Quote from the current CBS sportsline article:
“…According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 99 percent of the people indicted by the federal government between 2000 and 2005 were convicted…”
Ha!
Sorry for the multiple posts, but if I heard ESPN correctly just now, the way this whole thing came about was cops were searching the house because a friend (relative?) was arrested on a drug charge and gave that house as his address, and they found the first evidence whilst searching for drugs.
I’m on board with 90% of this thread. If he committed a crime, and if he is convicted, let him pay the penalty.
However, I’m entirely against the stance that in addition to six years in jail, paying back his signing bonus, and being fined, that “he should lose his career.” All too often when someone errs — a police officer shooting someone, a judge who drives drunk, a sports announcer who says the wrong thing, a teacher who looks at a student the wrong way — we demand that person’s head to roll, that their entire life should be ruined for one crime. They should be fired from their jobs, they should pay a lifelong penalty with a permanent black mark on their records.
We have a code of laws for a reason: that we say, “This is the offense, therefore this is the range of punishment available, after which you have paid your debt.” To cry that a man’s entire career and future should be entirely ruined forever is just vengeful.
That said, if he spends six years in jail, I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have the skills or the quickness to play professional football, and probably won’t have a career after that.
Depends on the relationship (if any) between the crime and the job.
If you break the law in the course of your job, you should lose the job and face the legal consequences.
But I don’t see a relationship between dog fighting and NFL football.
Of course — and contractual obligations and employer requirements come into play. But the public’s knee-jerk cry at every crime should not be, “He should be fired!” Else, why have a code of laws?