I love pro football. I love the big hits, the great catches, the dominant offensive lines, the weekly upsets, the playoffs, and the draft. I love fantasy football to a nearly unhealthy level. I even love the beer commercials.
Amidst all this, it’s easy to forget the way that the NFL is structured on a fundamental level. Every one of the 32 teams is a business entity with employees (players), supervisors (coaches), and consumers (fans). The teams compete against each other, yet they also act in their own collective interests in marketing, bargaining with the players, and negotiating television deals.
Right now, in the offseason, it’s easy to get caught up in the speculation of what will happen when a star quarterback joins a new team (Donovan McNabb), how an extra pass rusher could improve an already stalwart defense (Sergio Kindle), or the impact of a dynamic new wide receiver on a previously average passing attack (Anquan Boldin). However, there are a few issues related to the collective bargaining agreement that always arise this time of year. The way that fans, sportswriters, ESPN talking heads, and even the players themselves react to those issues demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the NFL’s status as a business in a capitalistic society.
Tom’s World Cup analysis has inspired me to contribute my two cents on a few of these issues. The rest of this note is just background for the other three. The first is about voluntary workouts, the second is on holdouts, and the third on how fans should think about a potential 2011 lockout. I wrote it as one document that was way too long for a Facebook note. These are all still pretty long, so no offense taken if you don’t read them.
All three of these issues are fundamentally about NFL labor relations. The National Football League Players Association is easily the weakest of the three major team sports. Baseball’s strength is due to historic reasons (Curt Flood and the damage to MLB after the 1994 strike). The NBA has the second most powerful union due to its reliance on the marketability of star players. The NFLPA’s weakness is largely the result of the allegiance of fans to teams rather than individual players. If Larry Fitzgerald were to leave the Cardinals for some reason, their fans would be bummed, but they’d still be Cardinal fans. Steve Nash, on the other hand, is far more important to the Suns’ profitability.
The collective bargaining agreements in these three sports reflect the strength of their unions. Baseball has no salary cap and no maximum salaries, as the payrolls of the Yankees and Red Sox continue to attest. The NBA has a soft salary cap with maximum salaries and a luxury tax. The NFL is the only one of the three major leagues with a hard salary cap (although the upcoming season is technically an “uncapped year”), a factor that significantly constrains player salaries. The NFLPA’s weakness is even more noteworthy due to the NFL’s current status as the most popular and profitable of the three sports. The larger context of NFL labor relations has a lot to due with the three issues that the other notes are about.
Michael Wilbon said today on “Pardon the Interruption” that OTA’s should be made illegal. He didn’t elaborate, but I share his frustration. These are voluntary workouts, but most coaches act is if they are actually mandatory. Coaches who criticize and demote players for failing to show up are praised for toughness, while players who work out on their own (and spend time with the families they are away from most of the season) rather than showing up are denounced as selfish and lazy.
Why are these OTA’s technically voluntary while training camp in the summer is technically mandatory? It’s because that is the way the collective bargaining agreement is structured. These provisions were negotiated through tough bargaining sessions. Concessions were given in one area at the expense of another, compromises were arrived at, and a deal was struck. Owners could have convinced the NFLPA to make May OTA’s mandatory, but they would have had to give ground in another area such as salaries or pensions. When people treat voluntary workouts as mandatory they are attacking both the rights of the players as employees and the integrity of the bargaining process.
The worst is when the players themselves criticize teammates for not coming to workouts. Phillip Daniels of the Redskins recently made some newsworthy comments about Albert Haynesworth’s absence at Redskins workouts.
http://espn.go.com/blog/nfceast/post/_/id/14008/is-redskins-dt-albert-haynesworth-a-bad-teammate
I’m guessing Daniels never stopped to think about how his comments hurt his union’s bargaining position, and by extension, his own bargaining position. If I were NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, I would immediately have been on the phone giving Daniels an earful about union solidarity. In any normal business interaction, voluntary means voluntary. If players are willing to treat May workouts as mandatory, they need to inform their union representatives that they are willing to make that concession in exchange for gains in other areas.
The issue of OTA’s is closely related to holdouts. Players who hold out for new contracts are often labeled as greedy. Today’s “Around the Horn” included the perpetually ignorant Bill Plaschke going off on Andre and Chris Johnson, saying that players today don’t respect the meaning of signing on the dotted line. As a rule, I never pass up a chance for a good Plaschke-bash.
Players hold out because their collective bargaining agreement allows them to do so. Baseball and basketball players don’t hold out because their CBA’s are structured differently. The trade-off is that while players can hold out when their performance exceeds their salary levels, teams can cut players to avoid paying underperformers. As a result, NFL contracts are often described in terms of how much money is guaranteed rather than total salary. Baseball and basketball players, however, have their entire contracts guaranteed. That’s why David Ortiz is still with the Red Sox and Gilbert Arenas is still with the Wizards.
Not only is the hold out/cut trade-off another collectively bargained issue that gets to the heart of players’ rights and the integrity of the bargaining process, it is a trade-off that actually benefits the owners and reflects the NFLPA’s relative weakness. Given the choice, baseball and basketball owners would surely take the NFL system if they could. The ability to dump bad salaries and tie wages closely to performance is something that business owners in all industries value very highly.
Furthermore, while teams can cut players at will, players who take advantage of their right to hold out are not even in a strong position. Just ask Anquan Boldin. The holdouts face the possibility of losing a year’s worth of income (think about that, how would you like to forgo a year’s worth of your earnings?) in careers that are incredibly short. The teams, on the other hand, have the option of simply replacing the holdout with the next best player at his position on the roster. Of course it looks bad to the average fan when wealthy professional football players refuse to play unless they are paid more. However, if you give it any thought at all (not Bill Plaschke’s strength), it’s apparent that the players are exercising a well-deserved right.
The perception of player salaries is going to have a major impact on the possibility that football fans everywhere are dreading…a 2011 lockout. The effects of the national recession and highly publicized player conduct issues have the owners smelling blood in the water. Public opinion affects professional sports collective bargaining more than perhaps any other industry in the private sector. Fans are apt to blame rich athletes for any work stoppages despite the fact that the other side, the owners, is a collection of multi-millionaires and sometimes billionaires.
First of all, of course it is not morally justifiable that next year Brandon Marshall will make about 200 times as much money than the average teacher or social worker. However, these athletes are paid so handsomely because they collectively generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year. You might not like it, but such are the vagaries of a capitalistic society. Furthermore, if you really want to talk about fairness, professional athletes are far from the most egregious example. Think about the investment bankers who, for purely their own financial gain, utilized questionable tactics that brought our entire economy to the brink of collapse. The vast majority of those people retain highly compensated jobs to this day.
While we’re at it, let’s consider the minimum of three years that football players must spend in college, generating millions for their universities without any pay other than a scholarship for their efforts. When college students in any other industry work in their fields prior to graduation, they have the opportunity to obtain compensation for the fruits of their labor.
Consider as well the chances that professional athletes have taken. They dedicate untold amounts of time, blood, and sweat for the slim chance that they will make it. For every Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, there are literally thousands of athletes who gave it their all but fell short. While the players are working hard for their chance at the big show they are forgoing opportunities to enhance their earning potentials in other more stable fields.
Professional football players are unique among athletes in the physical price that they pay to play the game. Some of the stories about the disabilities and deformities that result from years of gladiator-like combat are jarring, and the long-term health effects are undeniable.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16932731
The NFL owners, to their discredit, have largely ignored the health of retired players. Players receive virtually no support in terms of caring for football-related injuries after the League is finished with them. Mike Ditka has led some excellent advocacy efforts aimed at changing the system but has only obtained vague promises to examine at the issue from the Commissioner. The health risks are one of the reasons that players get paid as much as they do. It’s called a compensating wage differential and we’ve known about it for 234 years.
I previously mentioned the short career length of NFL players. The average career lasts between 2 and 4 years. Therefore, even though these players have devoted their entire lives to playing football and have been lucky enough to make it to the NFL, they will only draw these large salaries for a short amount of time.
So let’s do the math. Would you be willing give herculean efforts throughout your entire youth for a slim chance of making a couple million dollars per year (taxed of course at 35% federally plus any state income taxes) for only a few years, knowing that the rest of your life afterwards may well be filled with significant physical pain? Maybe you would make that choice due to the draw of fame and love of the game. However, the fact that the question can legitimately be asked says something about where public sympathies should lie in labor disputes pitting professional athletes against far richer owners. Hopefully there will be no work stoppage, but keep that in mind if there is.
So that wraps it up. Sorry for the length. Stay tuned for a possible future rant on how we might finally get a college football playoff no matter what the NCAA says. Oh, and for God’s sake can we please get an NFL team in LA?
