Rookie salaries have gotten way out of proportion with other salaries, but I’m not sure the draft picks are gaming the system. The blame there goes as much to the teams who overreach or draft dicey prospects.
It’s one thing to overreach, but these guys are expecting to get paid a certain amount based entirely on their draft position. Heaven forbid a rookie gets less money than the guy who was drafted in that spot last year, or plays the same position.
So, in other words, the owners are saying “please agree with us to create a rule to stop us voluntarily making stupid business decisions”?
That would be a reason why a given team might fall back towards the pack in a given year, but over time that should average out; Team A’s schedule is just as likely to get easier at the end of the season as it is to get harder (unless the league purposefully schedules more marquee matchups towards the end of the season, which is possible).
I’m waiting for an answer from pro-football-reference.com about old in-season standings, but in the meantime, a question for Omniscient:
Say the league goes to an 18-game schedule. After 16 games in a given year, Team A is 12-4, and Team B is 10-6. Knowing only that, which team is more likely to have the better record over the final two games? If it is Team A, then an 18-game schedule must necessarily mean larger leads and more meaningless games at the ends of seasons. If it is Team B, then you’ll have to come up with a very creative (and nonetheless wrong) reason why that might be so. (Keep in mind, of course, that you can’t say “Team B, because Team A might not be trying to win at the end of the season” – that argument itself would prove my point.)
Sorry, missed this earlier:
I have no problem with any of your solutions; I was responding to your statement that
which seems to say that they should be making more money by virtue of their status as managers. Record executives don’t always earn more than top artists, and movie producers don’t always earn more than top actors. I see no reason to think football executives “should” earn more than their quarterbacks.
If they want more money, they can earn it by growing the pie, or else cut costs. If they want to cut salaries, they have the right; but they’ll get bad PR same as any other company that announces layoffs or salary cuts.
Music artists may earn more than the executives. They sure as hell don’t earn more than the company as a whole, aka ownership. I’m not saying GMs should earn more than players, I’m saying that the owners probably should. That idea holds for every business.
The Jags were blacked out several times in 2009. Their prices were too high. They slashed prices in 2010 and as a result avoided blackouts. I don’t know if their profits went up in 2010 or not but I know their player costs continued to climb. Are you really denying that owners raise their prices in accordance with costs? Yeah, certainly owners would like to maximize profits and set the price at the maximum point that the market will bear but not all owners have the luxury of a big margin to play with. Examples like the Jags and other low revenue teams illustrate the the two opposing pressures, the market and their costs, are crossing a critical point. Hence the lockout.
Denying that costs are a factor in pricing is obstinate.
I think that the fans should quit worrying who is right, the players or the owners, who cares. They all make a lot more money than most of us. What we need to do is start the NFLFA - NFL Fan Association, and let the owners and players know that there will be a very high price to be payed if the football season is disrupted. For example, for each game that is not played on-time or is played without the star players, fans would boycott two weeks of the season once normal play is resumed. I understand that season ticket holders may be reluctant to boycott, because they would lose their seniority, but even if all non-season ticket holders stayed away and nobody watched the games on TV, the message would be sent. It might take a couple of weeks of TV ratings in the toilet to achieve the desired reduction in ad revenue, but that seems like a detail that can be worked out.
I’d say we don’t have any way to tell. Is it a gamblers fallacy? Do past results guarantee future success? Why don’t MLB and NBA teams that start 12-4 commonly finish their seasons at 120-42 and 62-20? I do know that the 10-6 Packers won more games than the 12-4 Steelers. I suspect that with a longer schedule the average winning percentage of NFL playoff teams will be less than it is in a 16 game schedule, in which case the answer is that teams will be grouped closer not further apart. If the season was 32 games long I don’t think you’d ever see teams winning their division with a 28-4 record, I think a 22-10 record would be pretty uncommon.
Sure they do. Lots of companies lose money in any given year. Some do it year after year. The ones that keep doing it with no end in sight, of course, eventually go under; but I’m not aware of any corporation that only pays its employees when there’s a profit.
Why?
Are you using “should” as a moral statement (it’s wrong for workers to make more than bosses) or an economic one (it’s unproductive and the NFL’s business model is unsustainable)?
The latter. If the owners aren’t earning a tidy profit the business is unsustainable. Companies that lose money, especially ones that do it often, tend to be in very volatile businesses with extreme competition. The NFL is neither. Owners losing money, or making comparatively meager profits, isn’t inherently “wrong” it simply indicates that they might have an argument in the labor dispute and they shouldn’t be treated as greed mongers.
The public tends to have a knee jerk response that treats the guy in a suit as evil and wrong. I’m pointing out that there’s more nuance to the argument than that, fighting ignorance and all.
Meh. There’s also a kneejerk “jocks are full of crap, I trust the suits” and a kneejerk “you get a million dollars to play ball, so shut up.”
I’d argue the NFL is in a very volatile businesses with extreme competition. The business is entertainment, and it’s the first thing that people stop buying when they lose their jobs. It’s not at all surprising that they should see profits shrink and/or disappear in a down economy. If it is unsustainable (I’m not saying it is or isn’t), they damn well deserve all sorts of criticism; given a weak and compliant union in 2006, they created this CBA. They could have fought to tie player salaries to net revenue instead of gross then (as they want now), but they didn’t.
Why would you say the union was weak in 2006? If anything the owners were weak as Tagliabue was on his way out and concerned with his legacy above all else. They didn’t foresee the economic downturn, but few businesses did. All in all, I find it hard to argue that when a CBA is signed that is seen as a huge win for labor happened when the union was compliant.
Sorry, I usually hate breaking up posts into a bunch of smaller parts and replying that way, but I’m having trouble coming up with a way to make the points I want to make without doing this. Please don’t feel obligated to respond in a similar manner.
It’s a combination of two things. Yes, as you point out, the very high and low winning percentages in the first weeks of the baseball season depend on the small sample size of games; as the season progresses, those numbers will regress to the mean. However, the point I made in my earlier footnote was that baseball is different from football in *more *ways than just the number of games. They’re also bunched more tightly together in terms of overall quality and likelihood to win. For instance, when the best NFL team plays the worst NFL team, the best team might be a 10-1 favorite. In MLB, however, no team is ever more than a 3-1 favorite or so (IIRC). Or you could look at the baseball standings after 16 games; there’s more variance there than at the end of the baseball season, but *less *variance than at the end of a football season. So, last year, there were 6 MLB teams (out of 30) that won 10 or more of their first 16 games (San Diego won their 16th game, but Oakland needed 17 games to get to 10 wins), and the best record was 12-4, attained by only one team. In the NFL this year, however, 13 teams won at least 10 games, the highest number of wins was 14, and 4 teams won 12 or more games.
Basketball, since you mentioned it, is actually very close to football in terms of the advantage good teams have over bad teams in individual games, and therefore a better illustration of my point. The best NBA teams every year do win 60+ games, which is equivalent to roughly a 12-4 NFL season. Sometimes there are close races for the #1 seed, but usually the top team has it locked up with at least 2 or 3 games to go, and sometimes it’s a blowout. For instance, in the '05-'06 season, the best teams in each conference finished with leads of 9 and 12 games, respectively.
The first part is presumably true, the second part is false. It would only be true if teams that won more games in the first part of the season were, towards the end of the season, less likely to win than teams that had previously won fewer games, on average. Remember, we’re talking about margins in absolute, not proportional, numbers.
This is easily demonstrable, again, by looking at baseball. Winning percentages in MLB are grouped closer together than in the NFL, but, because they play so many more games, they have larger absolute margins of victory, and therefore play more meaningless games every year.
Put another way, yes, an 18-game schedule would presumable lower winning percentages at the top of the league, but not by enough to reduce absolute margins of victory in the Wins column. (See first paragraph in this section for the why.)
Sure we do. We could look at every team that was ever, say, 9-3, and see how what percentage of their final 4 games they won an overage. Then we compare that to the average record in the last 4 games of every team that was ever 7-5.
But we don’t even have to do this as long as we accept point #1 below axiomatically:
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On average, good teams tend to win more games than worse teams.
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Therefore, the teams with the best records at some point in the middle of a season are probably better than the teams with somewhat worse records.
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Therefore, these teams, being probably the better teams [see #2], will tend to win a greater percentage of their games in the latter part of a season than teams with worse records [see #1], assuming that they don’t play any “meaningless” games at the end of the season.
Come on, Omni. This is a small point, and irrefutable – you can afford to concede it.
While the Packers did win the most important game, both teams finished with 14 wins. 
Fine. The NFLPA was exceedingly, blindingly strong in 2006. Doesn’t change the argument. The owners still signed it. If they fooled themselves into thinking there’d never be a down market, they deserve plenty of criticism.
Umm, I assume most people can figure it out from context, but that was supposed to be “on average.” And strike the word “how.” :smack:
I know your playing around, but I think I should clarify that in the context of this argument we’re only interested in the number of wins after the 16th game, not total wins. In that case the Packers won more games, even neglecting the Steelers bye week.
I’m not saying they aren’t culpable. The CBA signed in 2006 was specifically structured to give both sides an out after 4 years because the future was so unpredictable. CBAs are intended to be renegotiated as the climate changes. I’m not sure why you insist on characterizing this as anyone deserving blame. It’s two sides of a negotiation with each side trying to get what they feel is their fair share. There isn’t really a right or a wrong.
Yes! They are essentially a monopoly in the cities they operate in, and monopolies set prices at the point of maximum profit. As I’ve pointed out before, there are a fixed number of tickets each season. In order to maximize profit, the teams set prices at a level that will maximize their revenue. The price that teams set for tickets has nothing to do with their operating cost.
The thought process is, $X per ticket maximizes our revenue (R). The only time that cost (C) comes into play is if R is not greater than C. If C>R, the teams can not just raise prices to compensate. As I said before, they are a monopoly, and raising ticket prices to compensate for increased cost only will decrease your revenue.
If it worked like you suggest, college teams wouldn’t charge the (IIRC) 40 bucks a ticket that they do since their costs are very low.
No it’s not. It’s literally something you learn in Econ 101.
I tend to do that a lot. So it works for me. It only bugs be when people quote individual sentences as an attempt to play “gotcha” by taking things out of context.
I disagree with a couple of your assumptions. First, I think there’s far MORE parity in the NFL than in the MLB. The salary cap and the draft and the luck factor seem to heavily favor the NFL in terms of “any given Sunday” syndrome. Your statement about the best NFL team versus the worst NFL team is completely incorrect. There’s NEVER been a -1100 money line on an NFL game that I’m aware of. When the Browns upset the Patriots earlier this year the money line was
-200 for the Pats, when the Falcons played the Panthers in week 14 the money line was just -320. 10-1 odds is complete fiction. -150 moneylines are common in baseball and football alike.
Why do you insist that absolute numbers are the only relevant ones? I think they are the least instructive in this debate. In the MLB and NBA there are fewer meaningless games at the end of the season relative to the number of meaningful ones. In the NFL, I contend that with a longer schedule there will be a higher percentage of meaningful games to meaningless ones as well. Can teams theoretically win by larger margins, yes, but on average it’ll work out to having more meaningful games.
I’m not saying you have to agree and I’m not saying I can prove it definitively, but I think it’s unreasonable to take it as gospel that an 18 game schedule will lead to more teams tanking games.
Yet proportionally fewer. This I think on balance is a good thing, it would be for fans.
It may not reduce absolute winning margins for the top teams but it’ll reduce the average winning margins amongst all teams. The Patriots of the world might tank 2 games instead of 1, but the other 11 playoff teams are going to have on average fewer meaningless games overall.
There’s too much parity and that’s too big of an assumption. The Bears went 11-5, the Packers went 10-6. I doubt they’d have won more games over the extra two games than the Packers. Even if a 12-4 team continues on that pace that doesn’t mean that there’ll be more meaningless games across the league. One 12-4 team might be going strong, another 12-4 team might be falling apart due to injury. I’m sure it’ll be true in one season and it might not be in other seasons. All that neglects the impact of the wildcard and homefield advantage as well. I need a more rigorous analysis of the data, and I’m not sure how to do it, before I concede that an 18-game schedule will mean more tanked games on the whole.
I’m not contending that an 18 game schedule definitely will reduce the number of meaningless games, but I sure don’t see it as a foregone conclusion either.