With the deadline for the CBA approaching in a mere 6 hours some exciting news was broken. Apparently the NFL and the NFLPA have agreed to a 24 extension to the CBA to continue negotiations.
I’ve listened to a bunch of talking heads today including a bunch of interviews with people supposedly in the room and in the know and everyone was being extremely pessimistic. People spoke with near certainty that games would be missed next season and that De-certification of the union was a foregone conclusion. One supposedly knowledgeable party on Mike and Mike said that the two sides hadn’t even begun discussion the big issue of the extra $1B off the top.
This extension seems to indicate that real progress is being made, which is unexpected good news. Anyways, let’s hope there’s lots of positive news to break in the next 24 hours.
The average career is 3.3 years. There are 3.7 injured per team, per week. During the season 62 percent of the players are injured. That does not even include concussions which have shown long term serious mental problems.
I believe last year, none of the owners made the IR list.
Maybe so, but Al Davis has been dead for several years now. So there’s that.You don’t see any of the wussy players being made into a reanimated corpse.
I believe that last year not a single one of the hundreds of grown, adult men in question were coerced into playing a game with a well-known potential for lasting injury for money instead of taking a job that would not so dramatically affect their long-term health.
Not a single one of them is crying a river for people who break their ass and sustain the same types of life-affecting permanent, crippling injury while trying to support a family on $20,000 a year. They made a choice, and while they have every right to piss and moan about their plight they don’t have the right to assume that I will find a way to somehow feel sorry for them.
3 years at the league minimum ($285,000 for a rookie) is more than most people will see in a decade of hard work. I’d ride the pine for a year for that. Hell, I’d take a beating for an entire season for that. I do anyway and I made less than a 10th of that last year.
They have the same obligation as the rest of us to make decisions regarding their own health. To not sustain possibly crippling injuries, they need only not play football. It’s a part of the game.
I have heard on radio talk shows and in comments on other pages something to the effect “I don’t know a single business that gives its employees 25%, much less 50%” etc.
Let’s look at some facts.
In the US Wages and salaries compose about 47-48% of GDP. Now this is for all types of business, including labor intensive ones and capital intensive ones. The NFL is undoubtedly a loabor intesive product, so lets boost that number to 55%. Now not every employee is a player, there are coaches, trainers, administrative, etc. But clearly they are paid a lot less, not surprisingly since they are not the product, the players really are.
So to me it seems that 50% for the players is imminently fair.
I suppose again you can not understand it. To some people it is all about money. if you make enough, you should be willing to give up all your rights to being safe.
A huge percentage of football players wind up homeless or bankrupt. They have 3 years to make a lifetime of money. They wind up crippled or demented from concussions. Football platers play football from pre teen to their 20s . That is what they do. In college , many are protected from classes risking their eligibility. Education can not interfere with a lucrative “sport”.
Two more games is a big deal. More injuries ,more concussions and more football players damaged in their senior years. That is important to them’ to you, if they make enough money they should obediently play as many games as the owners want. They have no rights to be active in protecting their health. That is taken away when your salary is big enough.
Have you made a determination at what amount of money is enough to give up your rights? I would like to know what level of pay should disallow your health concerns.
I’m not sure but I think the players are paid during the season. A lockout now would mean the players would not have use of the facilites, coaching staff, trainers, no contracts could be signed, no trades could take place, no health insurance.
They wouldn’t miss their fist paycheck until the first week of what would be the regular season.
In the meantime, they can not access the team’s facilities for workouts. Mike Golic said that during the offseason, the players are paid to show up at the team’s facilities for workouts, so they’re missing out on that money. But it’s not much, basically walking around money for the offseason, as Golic put it.
I think I read on one of the sites that they retain rights to COBRA insurance, and the union has a strike fund that will pay each player about $60K for one year, if necessary. Of course, their COBRA payment is about $3k/month for those with families, and the $60K is before taxes, so if they haven’t been budgeting accordingly, some players are going to be struggling financially if this thing goes on very long.
Normally, I tend to see these things from a pro-management/ownership point of view, but this time…not so much. The owners seem to be asshats in my book. Especially Jerry Jones.
Are any of those people making 20k a year literally one of the best people on the planet at their job?
I call bullshit on that. Everyone says they would go through X, Y, and Z for a lot of money, but the reality is that staying in phenomenal shape, and taking hits and punishment every week is far harder than most people think. Think about how many retired running backs you see with a normal gait who don’t have constant pain. Answer: very few. The point is that that money sounds great, but the sacrifices they make are ones most people would never make, talent aside. More importantly, the players never asked anyone to feel sorry for them. They are not pressing this issue, the owners are.
I understand your argument completely. I do not agree with it.
In my view, it IS all about money. It’s not about health, that’s a red herring. In fact, as I have posted elsewhere, the Players’ Union has been very dismissive about players’ long-term health. Now, should the owners be pushing for two more games? Much as I love football, I say (and have said) no, what they have is what they should keep.
As far as “giving up their rights” goes, they have every right to do something else. They have the right to expect that illegal hits will be penalized severely. They have the right to expect that the game will be played within the boundaries of the rules.
What they do not have the right to expect is that they will not be injured or that there will be no repercussions from playing a game that amounts to unarmed combat. They have been playing the game their entire lives, they know the consequences of their actions, and they choose to play.
Ironically, it’s these same players that complain about injuries and crippled futures that are responsible for said hits. They do not play the game with their own interests in mind. They go out and try to get a big hit to get on SportsCenter, completely disregarding what the effect of that hit will have on their own future or that of the person they hit. That’s on them, not the owners.
Some are, yes. Unfortunately for them, they have chosen to do something that is not as highly valued as football. If you choose to question peoples’ priorities that cause this to be the case, feel free to do so. I also think that athletes are overpaid, in the same way that some of you think that businessmen don’t deserve their high pay while teachers make a comparative pittance.
That’s just because the players have better PR. Every keeps assuming that the owners are making out like bandits but I’m guessing that they are profiting less than we realize. Player salaries have been skyrocketing in recent years and if the owners aren’t careful they will end up in the same position the NBA is in.
Most of these owners are paying for all or part of new stadiums costing $600M+. Some are taxpayer funded some aren’t, but the simple fact is that $4.2B that the owners are getting from the current deal breaks out to $131M per year. A large sum but essentially every single cost of operations has to come from this money while the $4.8B that the players share is entirely theirs and none of it goes back into the business.
$131M per year isn’t a huge sum when you consider the debt service on the stadiums, the construction and maintenance of the practice facilities, all the health care costs, the cost of management, sales, coaches and training staffs, all the equipment and the travel and lodging costs. I’m sure there’s a huge amount of additional stuff that adds up significantly. Now, it’s true that the owners augment this income with ticket revenues, naming rights, concession sales and local TV/radio money and that’s a pretty hefty profit center but for at least some of the teams it’s clearly not the windfall it is for others.
All the talk of player safety and the issues that retired players have in my opinion is a black mark on the union, not the owners. It’s the NFLPA that ought to be responsible for providing ongoing health care for those retired players out of their 60% since they are the ones with a vested interest in making sure that retired players are cared for. The NFLPA has negotiated shortsightedly for their immediate best interests and marginalizes the interests of the retired players.
It seems to me that instead of taking $1B or $2B off the top they should pay ALL the costs, for overhead, travel facilities and player pensions/health care, out of the shared revenues and then negotiate how much of the remaining is split. instead of making the owners bear 100% of that cost and then have to fight when those costs go up or the revenues go down in a slow economy.
This is a complete hijack, but I’m sick and tired of the “teachers are underpaid” meme. They make $50k a year in salary and work shorter days and have summers off. Almost all the teachers in my hometown had second jobs and summer businesses to bolster their income more and their benefits tend to kick the crap out of every other line of work. Teachers have a tough and important job, but they are paid pretty damn well compared to most other careers of similar education. End hijack.
You can’t pay employee’s salaries, interest payments and operating costs from capital gains. Businesses have to be solvent and liquid. NFL teams aren’t public held companies, valuations are suspect and they can’t raise capital by IPO. Billionaires don’t buy sports franchises because they are great investments, their values aren’t generally indicative of their balance sheet.
I haven’t seen any indication in these threads that teams are having trouble making payroll; the strongest claim I’ve seen is that the Green Bay Packers are making less profit than Peyton Manning’s salary. And the appreciation in the value of the team DOES add to the owner’s net worth, whatever the reason for the appreciation.