WTF? Are the Redskins secretly competing against Tonya Harding? Why do they keep getting their legs mangled?!
Dan Snyder is the owner so terrible that his own team will kill themselves to avoid playing for him.
That shouldn’t be so plausible.
Foster is injury prone, and it wasn’t a secret when they picked him off the waiver wire. Curses are generally unexpected.
Gisele Bündchen - Net Worth $400 million
Tom Brady - Net Worth $180 million
Neither is anything to sneeze at, and a few million dollars per year on a contract is pretty meaningless at that wealth.
It’s pretty rare for someone to get a season ending injury on the very first series in OTAs. And, that’s after the Skins had to take the publicity hit from picking up Foster. But, oh well, even with Foster, they’re still an 8-8 team.
They have a chance to sign Yoenis Cespedes.
Numbers that I will, in almost all likelihood, never be able to relate to.
Agreed. In my opinion MORE pro team sport athletes should be willing to “spread the wealth” a bit with regards to their team. The fact that so many of them instead greedily go after every single dollar that they can get is something else that I can’t really relate to.
There’s nothing greedy about being a professional wanting to be paid in a manner relative to others at your position. That’s what professionals do at all levels, including me. I’m not a pro football player but if I’m being underpaid at an IT position I look elsewhere.
On the other hand, I think that it might make better financial sense not to demand the biggest contract. I think it depends on the situation.
Let’s say you’re the starting QB for a team that is able to win consistently because you are willing to accept a lesser contract than someone else at your position and with your level of success. You do so because that allows your team to spend more on receivers for you to throw to, offensive linemen to protect you, running backs to hand off to, a defense to keep the other team from scoring, better special teams, etc. As your team gets more wins, you get more fame, and you can get better endorsement deals. The additional money you make from better endorsements could, in theory, net you more money than the contract would have.
Of course the problem with that theory is that I don’t know if there’s an objective way to quantify it. How could you really know how much more money you’re making now compared to if you weren’t winning as much? How do you know for certain that tossing money at players is going to guarantee more wins? (The NFL is full of expensive busts after all.) It’s risky; you’re trading real money for theoretical money.
Anyway, I don’t blame any NFL player for trying to get as much out a contract as possible, especially given that the average career in the NFL is less than 4 years. A smart and responsible person gets as much as he can in that tight window, especially since you have no idea when you might get hurt, get cut, miss a step, etc. Criticizing a person for that is childish.
That’s true at the top level of any profession - but at some point, with far fewer figures than Brady gets, it isn’t about lifestyle or security, but just about keeping score, in a private sport where the “competitors” get bragging rights over each other based on salary, for whatever value they put on bragging rights. The money just loses all other meaning at that level.
Brady is an exception - his psychotically-intense competitiveness focuses on winning more than money, and his example helps set the tone for the entire clubhouse. Compare him to, say, Peyton Manning, who always went for the money at contract time and whose contracts limited the Colts’ ability to surround him with enough talent to win with any consistency. But he made more money than Brady, give him that.
That. {and I don’t appreciate - in the least - being referred to as “childish” for criticizing players for that. I prefer to think of it as having different priorities than simply wanting the most money of anybody around. Which I think is a good thing}
It’s more complicated than that though. If players take less, it relieves pressure on the owners and the collective bargaining agreement to pay more salary overall. While in the short term you may be “spreading the wealth” to your teammates. In the long term you’re allowing the owners to keep a larger slice of the pie. It’s not the players causing the inequity, it’s the system.
I was under the impression that under the current CBA, NFL teams were required to pay a certain percentage (95%?) of the salary cap to players. The “owners slice” is therefore pretty set and if one player takes a smaller percentage of the cap, NFL team owners still have to make up the difference to other players. Not that I dont think there is likely a ton of wiggle room, but my vague recollection is that yes, less money spent on one player means more money to other players from the pool owners are required to pay.
Plus, the salary cap is pretty well set by the league’s TV contracts. There is very little room for the owners or the players to negotiate it.
It’s 89% per team, 95% league wide averaged over a 4 year span.
I was speaking more broadly, to the “in any profession” qualifier, where the CBA is different and where there may be a soft cap or no cap and sometimes no floor. But even in the NFL, that margin is not insignificant. The Patriots have had around $5M in unspent money each of the last 5 years, $11M in 2016.
In a thread about the NFL, quoting a post discussing the NFL, you weren’t speaking about the NFL. Got it.
Somebody piss in your cornflakes?
…at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, located entirely in your kitchen?
He Hate Me, of XFL fame, is missing.
ProFootballTalk: Former Panthers RB Rod Smart missing, police ask for help
You can sleep easy, he was found safe.