{image1} The NFL's salary cap has created a league where any team can win on any given Sunday. That kind of football is exciting, keeps every NFL market -- regardless of size -- in the game and creates millions for the league.
But this success comes with a price. The number of players cut by various teams before the March 1 free agent deadline was astounding. It would be one thing if the teams were cutting players they didn't want, weren't performing or meant nothing to the future of the franchise. But that's not the case.
The main thing the cap does is kill teams for signing marginal players to bad contracts. That is how it should be. The best example of this is the Green Bay Packers, who overpaid for Joe Johnson, Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila and Cletidus Hunt and are getting very minimal production. Those three contracts are going to cost the franchise two of the best guards in the league and it ultimately might cost them a Hall of Fame quarterback.
Penalizing a franchise is one thing, but devastating one for years is another. General managers today must be Nobel Prize-winning economists to properly understand the salary cap. And more important than the knowledge of the system, they need the ice-cold blood of a professional poker player. They need the guts to put down cards for the current hand, and they need to be able to predict the future.
As the system stands now, teams are not rewarded for unearthing a talented player. The Packers selected pro-bowl guard Marco Rivera in the sixth round in 1996 and Mike Wahle in the second round of the 1998 supplemental draft. Teams should be rewarded for their shrewdness in finding players to build a team. They should not, in turn, be penalized because these players have become good enough that their market value prices them out of the franchise's plans.
Even then fiscally sound, the three-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots team is coming under the gun. Much has been made at how they have been successful in keeping their prime players (some at a hometown discount). Three years ago they had to cut Lawyer Milloy. This year they cut Ty Law and Troy Brown. Brown was a player that bent over backwards for the franchise by playing on both sides of the ball. Brown was due a 2.5 million roster bonus which forced the Patriots to cut ties.
This cap was not meant to cost players like Grey Ruegamer their jobs. Ruegamer took a pay cut so the Packers could extend Al Harris' contract. In return, Ruegamer had incentives put into his contract then reached when Mike Flanagan had season-ending surgery. The incentives raised his cap number and forced the Packers to cut him. No team can afford a backup center with a cap number over a million.
Admittedly, this may sound like sour grapes since the cap has stung the Pack. Still the NFL needs to make some minor changes.
Curing the Cap
As previously stated, only a handful of people in the world actually understand the inner workings of the NFL salary cap. Generally the cap is a "hard cap," which means that at no time can a team's salaries and bonuses be over a certain amount. What the NFL needs to do is "soften" the cap a bit in the mold of the NBA's salary system.
An NBA team can go over the cap in order to resign one of its own players (commonly known as the Larry Bird Rule). The NBA also has a threshold for organizations already over the cap. Once an organization reaches that threshold, it must pay a 100 percent luxury tax for every dollar spent over the threshold. This keeps large market teams from having too large of an advantage.
The NFL should allow teams to use the Larry Bird Rule on restricted and unrestricted free agents that weren't cut. This would eliminate the balloon bonus payments that teams have been using in order to circumvent the cap (like Wahle). By cutting Wahle, the Packers would relinquish his Bird rights.
The NFL cap is in the neighborhood of $85 million. The hard cap number would stay the same for signing players away from another team. The soft cap would allow organizations another $10 million to resign their own free agents. This would create a new $95 million ceiling -- a concept foreign to the NBA (just ask Isaiah Thomas and the Knicks).
The soft portion of the cap would also make trading players much easier. Each trade would come with a cap exemption as long as the salaries are within 10 percent of each other.
At the end of the day, this would allow teams to keep the players they found and groomed. It should only be fair that they have the opportunity to do so. These minor changes would not give a team a total pass for making mistakes with large contacts, but it does offer them the opportunity to dig out from under them.
This is obviously a very simplistic view of the NFL business systems. There are many other variables to encounter, but first the basic ideas need to be changed.
It is very difficult to criticize a league that is more successful than any other sport in the country. Football has now become America's pastime. As with anything else there is always room for improvement, and the NFL has to look itself in the face and correct some of its current issues.
