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NFL Players Call For Guaranteed Contracts As Potential Work Stoppage Looms
Vincent Frank , CONTRIBUTORThere's something to be said about how the NFL is constructed in today's sports world. Billionaire owners reaping the benefits of the most-popular sports product in North America. With league-wide revenue having reached $14 billion last season, the NFL outpaces every other major professional sports league in the continent. Even then, players themselves are not being rewarded at a fair clip.
Could a lack of guaranteed contracts lead to an NFL work stoppage? (Photo by Kevin Abele/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
The basics of this are by now well known. Unlike the NBA and MLB, professional football players are not rewarded with fully guaranteed contracts. In fact, the three-year deal Kirk Cousins received from the Minnesota Vikings back in March was the first such fully guaranteed multi-year deal in league history.
Don't think this is lost on NFL players. As the league prepares for a new season, some high-profile veterans are speaking out against the current landscape as it relates to contracts around the NFL.
"I will never understand how billionaire team owners have convinced the public that the players, who put their bodies on the line every week and make less than 50% of league revenue, are the 'ungrateful' ones," Los Angeles Chargers left tackle Russell Okung explained on his Twitter account. "Considering football’s level of brute, immanent physicality, high turnover as well as the short life cycle of its participants, it would seem to me that NFL players are in the most need of fully guaranteed contracts."
This has been an argument used by multiple players in the past. Given that NFLers do boast the shortest shelf lives of the four major sports, one might think that fully guaranteed contracts should have already taken hold.
The share of revenue players have received under the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement has been capped at 48.5 percent with a lower limit of 47 percent, via Pro Player Insiders. On the other hand, the current NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement splits revenue down the middle with owners and players each receiving 50 percent.
"Many argue that trying to compare the league-player dynamic in the NFL with other sports is apples to oranges. Yes and no. League revenues are skyrocketing, a monster media rights deal is on the horizon, the business of football will never be the same," Okung added. "It’s up to us, the players, to decide if we want league ownership to finally respect us as partners. Truth is, there is NOTHING preventing agents from negotiating a fully guaranteed salary for an NFL player (see Kirk Cousins deal)."
That's the crux of the issue. There's nothing in the current CBA that disables a players' ability to receive a fully guaranteed long-term contract. Instead, it's just the current construct of the league. Given that league-wide revenue has increased from $4.28 billion back in 2001 to $14 billion, there's every reason to believe that the players and their union will push back against the narrative that said players shouldn't receive guaranteed deals.
Los Angeles Rams running back and reigning NFL Offensive Player of the Year Todd Gurley agrees. In fact, he takes it one step further than Okung. He just recently told TMZ Sports that players will have to strike in order to get fully guaranteed contracts.
The current CBA runs through the 2020 season, at which point it seems a work stoppage is inevitable. It's in this that a weakened NFLPA head in DeMaurice Smith had previously indicated that a work stoppage is "almost a virtual certainty." This came at about the same time that Richard Sherman noted that players will have to strike to change the dynamics — a statement the NFLPA agreed with.
Back to Okung for a second, because his points raise even more questions.
"Players want guaranteed money? Great! Rewrite the CBA. That’s right, we need an overhaul not a revision or an extension. Why? For starters: the current CBA uses an antiquated revenue accounting method and salary cap rules take up a significant part of our collective bargaining agreement," the former Pro Bowler noted. "One part of ownership’s reluctance to give players guaranteed money is the structure of our cap system, the “cap” consists of an intricate series of accounting rules that does not fully reflect actual transfers to the pockets of players."
In layman's terms, Okung is using the argument that a salary cap negatively impacts the players primarily because owners push back against the idea of guaranteeing deals to players over the long term.
In a violent sport, one that sees serious injuries, we understand where the owners are coming from. But can the NFL itself exist without a salary cap in the modern sports world? The answer to this question is an obvious no. Not all owners are created equal in terms of net worth. The difference between say Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and the York family in San Francisco is vast.
Market size is also a major factor here. As we've seen in Major League Baseball, there's a tremendous discrepancy between the payrolls of teams in huge markets and those who exist in smaller markets. Again, looking at the Bay Area, the Oakland Athletics come to mind. They simply can't compete with the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers of the world from a financial perspective. In an uncapped NFL, the Green Bay Packers and Jacksonville Jaguars of the world would be playing catch-up in a big way. That's not sustainable.
There's no obvious resolution to this issue. Players are not going to agree to an extended CBA unless there's some guarantees included in it. Owners are not going to rework the current CBA to cater to the players. It's in this that a work stoppage does seem imminent.
Whether that happens once the current CBA expires in 2021 or before remains to be seen. But the comments from both Okung and Gurley seem to indicate that we're headed in that direction.
Editor at Large at Sportsnaut. Contributor here at Forbes. Head editor at the start-up SNIPdaily. Seen on Fox Sports and MSN. Heard on ESPN Radio and Fox Sports Radio. Twitter, @VincentFrankNFL
