The NFL cuts guys under contract every day. There is no spirit, there’s only the amount you’re guaranteed to be paid and your performance on the field. Everything else is rhetoric.
It used to be a lot more common for players to hold out/demand trades et cetera than it has been since free agency started (Eli Manning is the only recent case I can think of - aside from Elway there was also Jim Everett only a couple years later in addition to the others mentioned in this thread); the incentives have now shifted and players know that if they can get through three-four years they can get out if the team that drafted them is still terrible. At the time Elway did his hold-out, he could have ended up stuck on the Colts for his entire career.
One thing to remember is at the time some high draft choices refused to sign with the NFL and went to the CFL. Tom Cousineau was the first pick in the 1979 draft by the Buffalo Bills. He went to the Montreal Alouettes for double the money. Johnny Rodgers, 1972 Heisman Trophy winner, was the 25th player selected in the 1973 NFL draft. He went to the CFL. With the USFL in play, the Colts really had no choice once Elway firmly established he wasn’t going to play there (although I suppose they could have hired Elway’s father Jack as head coach instead of the martinet Frank Kush).
I suppose nowadays the revenue difference between the NFL and CFL is so huge a top NFL Vpick wouldn’t consider Canada as an option.
There were reports at the time that some baseball scouts weren’t impressed with Elway, describing him as a football player trying to play baseball. But he was the best hitter on the class A Yankee team he was on so perhaps that was leaked disinformation.
In basketball in 1989 Danny Ferry told the LA Clippers not to draft him. They did, so he went to Italy and the Clippers traded his rights to Cleveland.
I’m not sure there is a loophole. When Brett Farve retired from the Packers, then unretired and went to the Jets, the Jets had to negotiate a trade with the Packers.
When he retired again the next year, the Jets cut him so he was free to negotiate with any team.
To the extreme. The CFL (which I suspect didn’t have a salary cap in the late '70s and early '80s) now has a tiny salary cap compared to the NFL. Each CFL team has a salary cap of just over $5 million (Canadian). Meanwhile, the signing bonuses alone of most NFL first round draft choices are bigger than the entire salary of a CFL team.
Since I mentioned the Buffalo-Tom Cousineau situation, the whole chain of those picks is fascinating
with various top picks unhappy about being selected by Buffalo. It started with O J Simpson, a California native who played at USC, who was not pleased with playing in Buffalo. Simpson and other players of the era weren’t happy the AFL-NFL war ended in 1967 and salaries for players out of college dropped about 50% (interesting there was little bidding for established NFL players for the first few years). Simpson signed eventually but always let it be known he wanted a movie career. He held out in 1976 trying to force a trade but eventually re signed with Buffalo. Free agency was pretty restricted by what was called the Rozelle Rule (i.e. compensation with high draft choices). Hell, even teams that didn’t have to compensate sometimes did (Giants giving Miami a third round pick for Larry Csonka). A number of prominent Los Angeles Rams players let it be known they didn’t want to play in Buffalo.
Eventually even Buffalo realized they were getting worse so they traded Simpson to San Francisco for a bunch of draft picks. The 49ers got real bad and one of these picks was the first pick in 1979. Figuring Cousineau was an Ohioan who played at Ohio State and publicly said he wanted to play in the NFL, Buffalo selected him. Cousineau signed with the CFL Montreal and when he decided
to play in the NFL, forced a trade to Cleveland. So Buffalo once again ended up with draft picks.
So in 1983, the same year as Elway-Baltimore fiasco, Buffalo selected Jim Kelly, a western Pennsylvania native who quarterbacked in Miami, FLA because Joe Paterno wanted him play linebacker. Kelly didn’t want to play in a cold-weather city and when Buffalo selected him, he signed with the USFL Houston Gamblers, who played indoors in the Astrodome. Eventually the USFL folded and Kelly signed with Buffalo. One of my sisters was living in western NY at the time. She came home from work, turned on the tv and all 3 Buffalo stations had live coverage of Kelly arriving, signing and say he didn’t want to be here but his agent said he had to.