I just caught a few minutes of this E:60 program on ESPN highlighting Calvin Johnson. He grew up near Atlanta, GA, and the show said that, despite several college scholarship offers from bigger football schools, he chose Georgia Tech to be close to home. The program then talked about how he was drafted by Detroit and experienced a lot of homesickness his first year.
This got me wondering “Why couldn’t he have played for Atlanta and stayed close to home?” He made a similar choice to stay close to home a few years prior and it worked out OK for him.
So, my question is, what if he had said “F it, I’m staying in Atlanta. I’ll only play for the Falcons.” How plausible would that have been? How much would this have cost him financially? I’m guessing the Falcons would have paid him pretty well, but how would this have been worked out?
I understand that the Eli Manning situation can shed some light, but IIRC, in that situation he (or his dad) didn’t want him playing for 1 particular team, but presumably were OK with any of the other teams. I’m asking a general question about if a player (who is projected to be a top 3 pick, has “f-you skills”) decides that he wants to play for a team that is way down on the draft list. How much say does a college player have in which NFL team he plays for?
Virtually none. He’s free to hold out for a trade as long as he wants, but the team is under no obligation to trade him, and they hold his rights forever. This is different from baseball, where a player can re-enter the draft the next year and try again.
Edit: Whoops, wrong, they hold the rights for a year. But it’s not a wise decision to give up millions of dollars and a year of your playing career just to hope the desired team drafts you the next season.
I really don’t understand the draft. Every player that gets drafted acts as though they are happy to play for that team, but the top level guys seem to all do some negotiating. I don’t get that. It seems like a strange mix of capitalism and a dictatorship/slavery system. “You there, the biggest slave on the stage. You will go work for that plantation owner over there. Now go to him and negotiate your salary.”
I’m NOT trying to make a political point here. I just don’t understand how the draft works, or how much freedom a top-ranked college player has to decide which team he wants to play for. He can negotiate his salary but not who he works for? How can he negotiate a salary when he can’t choose his employer?
Can a player choose which team drafts him? No. Any team can draft him when their turn to pick comes, and they own that players rights for one year. No other NFL team can sign him or negotiate with him during that year.
Can the player refuse to sign and negotiate with the drafting team to trade him? Sure. John Elway and Eli Manning have done this successfully. The drafted player can also sign with a Canadian team, an alternate league, a different sport, or just do something else for a year or with the rest of his life.
As was already said, it’s not a slavery thing since the player doesn’t have to sign with the team that drafted him. On the other hand, it takes a lot of fortitude not to sign with a team that’s offering to pay you multiple millions of dollars to sign (in the case of the higher draft picks).
It’s not a slavery thing because good football player are not required to play football. When you are drafted you get a league, a team, and a union. The union collectively bargains your rights.
If something smells funny it’s probably because older established players don’t really care about a bunch of young scrubs, the majority of whom are going to be washed out within a year. They aren’t going to use the bargaining capitol it would take to change things on a pointless issue. Especially since a rookie can stop crying and suck it up for a few years to solve everything.
Legally speaking, not NFL team can sign a player when another NFL team holds the rights to sign him. And under the draft system, one team holds exclusive signing rights for the player’s first year of eligibility. That team can’t make him sign with them but they can prevent any other team from signing him.
Realistically, if a player is definitely not going to sign, no team is going to bother holding his rights. Another team will make the player an offer he’s happy with and that other team will make a deal with the drafting team to get them to waive their right.
It does put the player at a disadvantage when he can only negotiate with one team. But nobody really complains because of the reality that even a poor deal with an NFL team is still a pretty good deal. The guaranteed minimum a player can be paid is $390,000.
Of course, a draftee also does not have much room for negotiating his salary either. The salary numbers are pretty much set in a range based on where in the draft the are picked. Mostly what you are negotiating is how long of a contract and how much is guaranteed. Going into it you know that if you are picked, say, #6 you will be within about $5 million of a set number based on what last year’s #6 got.
On thinking about this more, if Calvin Johnson made it clear that he wanted to stay in Atlanta, I guess that Detroit would have worked out a trade deal with Atlanta before the draft, or traded their draft slot away, correct?
People have pointed to John Elway as an example of a player who was able to force the team that drafted him (the Baltimore Colts) to a more desirable team (the Denver Broncos).
It’s important to note, however, that Elway had leverage that most other college athletes DON’T have. Elway was a very good baseball player, and had been playing for the Yankees’ minor league team. He could, therefore, tell the Colts, “Trade me or I’ll play baseball instead.” The Colts figured it was better to trade him and get another good player (in this case, All-Pro offense lineman Chris Hinton) than to let him give up football entirely (which would mean the Colts completely wasted the top draft pick).
Not necessarily- if Calvin Johnson was adamant about ONLY playing for the Falcons, the Falcons would have been in the catbird’s seat. They’d have offered the Lions little of value in exchange for him.
They could have done that, or they could have dealt his rights to another team who thought they could convince him to sign, or whatever. A lot is predicated on what (in this case) Atlanta would be willing to give up. The deal wouldn’t happen unless the price was right, and Atlanta might not have had enough to deal with.
Eli Manning isn’t an example of refusing to sign with a team. Before the draft he told the media that he didn’t want to play for the Chargers (the team with the first round pick). But the Chargers drafted him anyway because they had made a deal with the Giants to trade them Manning’s rights before Manning ever had a chance to refuse to sign with them.
Although Jim Everett did the same thing again only a few years later to the Oilers, with much the same result, and I don’t think he had another sport to fall back on.
Elway said the same thing about the Colts before the draft. He was never going to sign with them. You can parse it any way you want, but Elway’s and Manning’s situations were exactly the same.
As others have already noted, there have been a few examples of players who’ve been able to use their leverage to get out of being drafted by a particular team (or, at least, get their rights traded to a more desirable team). Generally speaking, if a player isn’t one of the top talents in that year’s draft, he just won’t have enough leverage to pull something like this off.
The Packers’ first-round pick (fourth overall) in 1980 was a defensive end named Bruce Clark, who did not want to play for Green Bay – the Packers weren’t a good team then, and they had announced their intention to move him to defensive tackle, which he didn’t want to play. He wound up signing with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL, and played there for 2 seasons, before returning to the NFL. By then, the Packers’ exclusive rights to Clark had lapsed, and he was a free agent (he signed with New Orleans). However, this was during an era in which several CFL teams regularly splurged on big contracts for players who weren’t happy with their NFL teams – since then, as I understand it, the CFL has instituted a relatively small salary cap, low enough that a top NFL player makes more than an entire CFL team does in a season. So, opting for the CFL is no longer a real option for such a player.
Sitting out a year, as mentioned earlier, gets you back into the draft pool, but a player has to be willing to pass up a year’s worth of pay to do this. Since he’s already declared for the draft, and has already, in fact, been drafted, his college eligibility (if he had any left) is gone, so he’ll be spending the year not playing. While this would have the effect of saving him from a year of pounding on his body, his “stock” in the next year’s draft will almost undoubtedly go down, and he’ll likely wind up getting drafted later (with a commensurately smaller contract) the following year.
In short – even if a player really wants to play in a particular city, he rarely has the leverage to enforce that wish during the draft, and he’d probably be losing out (or at least delaying) a big payday in the process.
I wasn’t as familiar with the particulars of Elway’s situation. But Manning never refused to sign with the Chargers because he was never offered a contract by the Chargers. IIRC, they held his rights for under an hour.