Orton's Arm

Nice job Scott!

I made the mistake of seeing the first two Transformers movies. I'd draw a comparison between those movies and the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. They were that bad. It wouldn't have occurred to me to see the third Transformers movie, either with or without Megan Fox. That being said, Spielberg is capable of finding some other actress to serve as eye candy. To address your larger point, I agree that the NFL is a zero-sum game. There will always be a few teams at or near the top of the league, and those teams will always attract large numbers of new fans. There will always be a few teams at the bottom of the league, and those teams will tend to have problems filling their stadiums. The media will always build up the dozen or so best players in the league. In some cases they'll even build up guys into stars before they achieve much, if anything, on the field. Kordell Stewart comes to mind.

I'm relieved to hear that!

I'm sorry, but I really don't see where you're coming from here. I didn't call anyone a Nazi, or liken any specific position to Nazism. I mentioned that the Nazis disliked smoking, which should be as emotion-free a statement as pointing out that the Nazis promoted physical exercise. Thus far, I think that most participants in this thread have done a good job of having an intelligent discussion about a very sensitive issue. Many have expressed passionate opinions, and those opinions seem (for the most part) to be the result of deep reflection, not knee-jerk reactions. People on both sides of this issue seem able to communicate their strong feelings without (usually) resorting to name-calling or personal attacks. So I'm not prepared to simply assume that the people who have had as good a discussion as this will automatically go into emotional hysteria mode simply because the word "Nazi" has been mentioned. Until and unless people acting like hysterical idiots succeed in derailing this conversation, requests for action from the mods are premature at best.

I'm normally an anti-PC guy myself: I strongly feel NYS is overtaxed and over-regulated. I also have little sympathy for the radical leftist agenda which drives much of PC thought. But it's worth noting here that objections to smoking are not a new thing, or something the PC crowd thought up and invented. As I hinted at in an earlier post, whites and Asians were first introduced to the idea of smoking tobacco in the 1500s. As that habit became more common it produced a backlash. In the mid-1600s, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire proclaimed a ban on smoking. The emperor of China also prohibited smoking. The Japanese shogun took a dim view of tobacco plantations. "In 1634 the Patriarch of Moscow forbade the sale of tobacco and sentenced men and women who flouted the ban to have their nostrils slit and their backs whipped until skin came off their backs." Also, "When James I [king] of England, a staunch anti-smoker and the author of a A Counterblaste to Tobacco, tried to curb the new trend by enforcing a 4000% tax increase on tobacco in 1604, it proved a failure, as London had some 7,000 tobacco sellers by the early 17th century. Later, scrupulous rulers would realise the futility of smoking bans and instead turned tobacco trade and cultivation into lucrative government monopolies.[28][29]." Smoking bans failed in large part because of economic reasons. Initial efforts to find gold in Virginia had failed, so the Virginia settlers began turning toward tobacco production in 1612. (Eight years before the Pilgrims landed near Plymouth Rock.) Tobacco quickly became the cash crop of Virginia, and a lot of rich plantation owners had a strong vested interest in keeping it going. Almost 100% of the actual farming work was done by indentured servants and slaves. These plantations were a big reason why both indentured servitude and slavery were far more common in the South than either the North or in England. At the other end, both tobacco sellers and the government of England had a vested economic interest in high tobacco consumption + government monopoly + tax. "In 1929, Fritz Lickint of Dresden, Germany, published a paper containing formal statistical evidence of a lung cancer–tobacco link." That medical evidence helped move the German anti-tobacco movement forward. Also, "Adolf Hitler was a heavy smoker in his early life—he used to smoke 25 to 40 cigarettes daily—but gave up the habit, concluding that it was a waste of money.[10] In later years, Hitler viewed smoking as 'decadent'[14] and 'the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor',[10] lamenting that 'so many excellent men have been lost to tobacco poisoning'.[18] He was unhappy because both Eva Braun and Martin Bormann were smokers." "Research and studies on tobacco's effects on the population's health were more advanced in Germany than in any other nation by the time the Nazis came to power.[6] The link between lung cancer and tobacco was first proven in Nazi Germany . . ." Increased cigarette taxes, restrictions on smoking in public places, and restrictions on cigarette advertising helped curb cigarette smoking in Nazi Germany. But that progress was reversed after WWII. "As part of the Marshall Plan, the United States sent free tobacco to Germany . . . the United States spent $70 million on this scheme, to the delight of cigarette manufacturing companies in the United States, who profited hugely.[50] Per capita yearly cigarette consumption in post-war Germany steadily rose from 460 in 1950 to 1,523 in 1963. At the end of the 20th century, the anti-tobacco campaign in Germany was unable to exceed the seriousness of the Nazi-era climax in the years 1939–41 and German tobacco health research was described by Robert N. Proctor as 'muted'.[13]" Even though the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer had first been shown in the late '20s, many Americans saw cigarettes as beneficial to their health many decades later! In one of the classes I took, we were shown television ads made by cigarette companies. One of those ads--from the late '60s or early '70s--provided a graphic depiction of the health benefits cigarette smoking supposedly created! Even as recently as the '80s, cigarette manufacturers claimed that their own medical research found no deleterious medical effects from cigarette smoking. They were successful in confusing this issue, at least for many people. Back in the '80s people said to me, "Some studies say there are bad health effects from smoking, and some studies say otherwise. Who really knows whether they're bad for you or not?" The medical research necessary to show the bad effects of smoking was started in the '20s, and cemented in the '30s and '40s. But cigarette manufacturers achieved a subsequent, large-scale increase in smoking rates by lying about the long-term effects of the addictive, lethal product they had to sell. It was precisely because of that lying that the lawsuit was brought against them; and that lying is also why they lost that lawsuit. A former U.S. soldier told me that even today, the U.S. military strongly encourages cigarette smoking, on the theory that smoking helps keep you alert. If that's true, then that demonstrates everything that's wrong with the U.S.'s approach to cigarettes throughout most of the 20th century. The fact that cigarette smoking kills smokers, significantly harms the fetuses of pregnant female smokers, and impacts the health of secondhand smokers, is seen as secondary to someone's convenience. It was more convenient for cigarette manufacturers to make lots of money selling their existing product than to switch to some other, less harmful product. It was more convenient for the U.S. military to have slightly more alert sentries and so forth, and never mind the long-term death toll that decision might create! At some point, the convenience of plantation owners, cigarette manufacturers, U.S. military officers, and others who benefit from cigarette consumption needs to be balanced by the realization that smokers' lives matter. Neither the lives of U.S. soldiers nor other potential smokers should be casually shortened to make someone else's life a little more convenient! If the Nazi government cared enough about its soldiers to discourage them from smoking, it is unforgivable for the U.S. government to fail to do the same!

I hear where you're coming from. One of my grandmothers was a longtime smoker. One day she noticed she had trouble breathing. She bought a carbon monoxide detector for her house, thinking that might be the problem. Then doctors told her she had lung cancer. Her ability to breathe slowly diminished. They put her on oxygen. But the lung cancer continued taking away her lungs. Breathing became progressively harder. While there aren't very many great ways to die, the idea of having your ability to breathe taken away from you, little by little, over the course of months, is among the most terrifying. To know that each week it's noticeably harder to breathe than the week before, and that this process will continue to get worse until you're dead. My hope is that the smokers on this board will quit long before such a day comes for them. In the meantime, my concern is that the removal of the designated smoking areas might make smokers feel unwelcome. I don't think that's the message the Bills were intending to send, and I hope that's not how people take it. But I can understand why some might see it in that light.

The tobacco plant is native to the Americas, but not to the Old World. From the Wikipedia article you cited: "Frenchman Jean Nicot (from whose name the word nicotine is derived) introduced tobacco to France in 1560, and tobacco then spread to England. The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol in 1556. . . . Soon after its introduction to the Old World, tobacco came under frequent criticism from state and religious leaders." From the Wikipedia article about cigarettes: "The widespread smoking of cigarettes in the Western world is largely a 20th century phenomenon – at the start of the century the per capita annual consumption in the USA was 54 cigarettes (with less than 0.5% of the population smoking more than 100 cigarettes per year)." Prior to the 20th century, most tobacco consumption took the form of cigars, pipes, and other non-cigarette methods. I think people would be better off if the tobacco plant didn't exist. But since it does, and since there are smokers, I think there should be a reasonable balance between the right to breathe clean air on the one hand and smokers' cravings on the other. In the past that balance was tilted too heavily towards smokers. I ran track back when I was in high school, and I remember several parents would smoke while at track meets. When you're running the mile and the two mile, you get really, really out of breath. To have the air you're breathing mixed with carbon monoxide-laced secondhand smoke makes a big difference, especially when you need every last oxygen molecule you can possibly acquire. I was also displeased by the fact that there were no physical barriers to prevent the smoke from the smoking sections of restaurants from drifting into non-smoking sections. But to eliminate smoking areas from Ralph Wilson Stadium seems to go too far in the other direction. If the problem is smoke drifting from the smoking area into the rest of the stadium, then maybe put the smoking area a little farther away. It saddens me that people such as Bill from NYC will no longer be attending Bills games because of this. He's been a loyal follower of the Bills through the 15+ years of post-Polian ineptitude. He's seen the Bills throw tons of early picks at RBs, only to throw more early picks at the RB position a few years later in an effort to upgrade/replace the early pick in question. He's seen the Bills throw tons of early picks at DBs, only to watch those DBs go first-contract-and-out. Considering he's endured all that, it would be nice to have him there, in person, to see the Bills finally get turned around. I think this most recent draft is a solid step in that direction. I hope this question doesn't seem naive, but is it possible to use a nicotine patch as a sort of temporary substitute? If having frequent cigarette breaks is a 100, and if going for four hours without smoking is a zero, what number would a nicotine patch be?

I agree with your post. A strict rookie wage scale is clearly necessary to prevent future Jamarcus Russell contracts. A higher minimum wage for NFL players would help the little guy (little being strictly figurative in this case). I'd like to see the minimum wage the same for all players, regardless of veteran status, so that you don't see older veterans pushed into retirement just because some rookie will do the same job for less. When thinking of players who are underpaid, Fred Jackson is one of the first guys who comes to mind. He does a lot of things well, doesn't attract negative attention to himself, and gives the game all he has. The fact the Bills didn't have to use a draft pick on him is an added plus. I wish this team had lots more Fred Jacksons.

You make a number of valid points in your post, and it's hard to find very much with which to disagree. I agree that players' compensation is unlikely to change by more than a few percentage points of revenue, regardless of how radically the compensation of the most highly paid players should change. You mentioned CEOs' golden parachutes. A golden parachute is money a CEO will be paid even if he messes up very badly. That's a lot like the $32 million in guaranteed money Jamarcus Russell was paid. I doubt very many CEOs have received equally large golden parachutes. You mentioned that player salaries were considerably higher in MLB and the NBA, even in relative terms, than they are in the NFL. I agree, and I strongly feel that out-of-control salaries in both professional baseball and professional basketball have caused extremely serious problems for both sports. The decline of MLB is due in large part to problems created directly or indirectly by too much player compensation. As others have pointed out, the NBA's recent woes would not have occurred had player salaries not been allowed to skyrocket. As far as the low life expectancy of NFL players--I agree there's a correlation, but that does not prove causation. Whenever you see that A is correlated with B, you should consider four possibilities. 1) A causes B. 2) B causes A. 3) C causes A and B. 4) Coincidence. Consider players like Mike Williams for example. How much will he weigh once he's done with football? How much does Jamarcus Russell weigh? How will those weights affect their life expectancy? Or consider that several former players have been shot and killed when visiting the ghettos where they grew up. Football didn't do that to them. Football gave them the money they needed to escape the ghettos forever. Then there are former players who experience drug additions or alcoholism. One imagines those have a life-shortening effect. Maybe football is partially to blame, in the sense that former players miss the adrenaline of game day, and are searching for a chemical substitute. Former players need to learn to stay away from drugs, and (depending on a player's personality) perhaps alcohol as well. I acknowledge that people who engage in dangerous occupations, such as digging tunnels under cities, or fishing off the coast of Alaska, earn higher-than-normal wages to compensate them for the potential loss of life. But this is not what the NFLPA's demands for a progressively greater share of revenues are about. If the NFLPA's objective was to compensate players for potentially life-shortening effects of football, their primary objective should be a higher minimum salary for NFL players. That objective has been purely secondary or tertiary to the NFLPA's thinking. Instead their primary objective has been to steadily increase the salary cap--an objective which creates large benefits for the Tom Bradys and Drew Breeses of the league, and does precisely nothing for players making the NFL minimum. I would also argue that the NFLPA should be interested in reducing brain trauma via equipment modifications and changes to how practices (and possibly games) are conducted. My understanding is that the NFLPA has taken little or no interest in this issue, except insofar as it can be used to argue for increases in the salary cap.

I disagree. If NFL players (and for that matter, professional sports players) are grossly overpaid by the standards of Fortune 500 CEOs, then they are grossly overpaid by any reasonable standard! If your argument is that professional athletes tend (on a percentage of profits basis) to make more money than CEOs, then all that says to me is that professional athletes' compensation has gotten even more out of hand--by a factor of eight or more--than has CEO compensation. Add to that the fact that a good CEO is much more valuable to a company than any star athlete is to any sports franchise, and it's clear that NFL players' compensation needs to be reined in.

It's true that more is known about Green Bay's financials than those of other small market teams. In some ways, Green Bay's financials are worse than other small market teams, because they donate 60% of their concessions revenues to charity. In other ways their financial situation is better, because they have little or no debt, because they sell out every game, and because so many people volunteer to do tasks that other teams would need to pay money for. My best guess is that Green Bay's financials are roughly comparable to other small market teams which choose to spend up to the cap. You pointed out that, "The top paid CEO btw had a pretty low base salary, and nearly all of his compensation was bonus related, which is not allowed in the NFL generally." 99% of Culp's compensation for 2009 came in the form of stock options or other incentives dependent on his company's stock price. Had Danaher's stock done poorly, Culp's compensation for the year would have been only 1% of what it was. Put another way, Culp's 13% of profits represented an absolute best case scenario for a Fortune-500 CEO, based on the volatility of the stock market and corporate performance all going exactly Culp's way. No other CEO was compensated as much in 2009 as Culp was. Jamarcus Russell's >100% of profits (of a Packers-like team) was purely in the form of guaranteed money--money which Russell did precisely nothing to earn. A "guaranteed no matter how badly you mess up" contract, like the one Russell was given, is better than a "this is the most you can possibly earn if everything goes exactly right," contract like Culp's. The guaranteed nature of Russell's contract was in addition to the fact that Russell's compensation was eight times higher than Culp's, on a percentage of profits basis. "Here is an article by ross tucker explaining how the NFL isnt like your beloved fortune 500 companies." Ross Tucker is one of my favorite sports writers, and the article was a good read. Toward the end, he sums up the piece by describing the NFL as "the last bastion of pure, unadulterated, testosterone-laden barbarism." He's right, but that doesn't answer my question as to why Jamarcus Russell-type athletes should receive eight times more compensation (as a percentage of profits) than the most highly paid CEO in all of 2009. You wrote, "The NFL also isnt like other businesses in that they arent capitalist, they share revenues, expenses profits etc." If a restaurant chain opened 32 locations, I assume there would be at least some sharing of revenues, expenses, and profits between the 32 individual restaurant franchises. "Most of the team owners are independently wealthy - their sole purpose of owning a franchise isnt to earn mega profits like in the private sector. They want to win." Agreed. However, if all 32 NFL owners decided to spend and do whatever it took to win the Super Bowl, there would still only be one Super Bowl winner per year. No matter how focused the NFL owners are on winning, the average team will always have a .500 record. Never more, never less. If all 32 owners became more focused on winning, the result would be a simple wealth transfer from the owners to the players. It's clear such a transfer has already happened, which is why players' salaries are exorbitantly high.

Almost all the players in the NFL were born (or at least raised) in the USA. But America only has about 5% or less of the world's population. Suppose there was an easy way to identify NFL-level talent among the world's other 95%. This hypothetical talent evaluation method would allow the NFL to potentially increase its talent level by a factor of twenty. What effect, if any, would that dramatic increase in player talent have on the NFL's revenues? Of the people you know who don't currently watch football games, how many would start watching them as a result of this dramatic increase in player talent? I suspect that this increase in talent wouldn't cause any increase in Americans' football viewing, and might actually cause a decrease. Part of the appeal of the NFL is when some local talent does well for himself. Most of that local talent would be driven out of the league by players from other countries. At least to me, expanding the league's available talent by a factor of 20 would be a lot like printing more money. Doing so makes the talent/money you already have seem a lot less valuable than it once did. If dramatically increasing the league's level of talent would fail to make it much better, would a noticeable decrease in its level of talent make it significantly worse? On another matter, one or two people have said that professional sports is "different" from other business endeavors. What aspect, specifically, about professional sports makes it necessary for individual athletes to earn over eight times as much (on a percentage of profits basis) as the most highly paid CEO?

My sense is that player salaries are out of control for all four major professional sports, not just football. I certainly see no reason why any pro athlete should earn a higher percentage of profits than the most highly paid CEO.

In 2005, Holcomb averaged 6.6 yards per attempt for the Bills, while throwing behind a joke OL and with an inconsistent running game. This past season, Fitz averaged 6.8 yards per attempt. That's a bit of a step up from Holcomb, but not much of one. With Holcomb, people seem to remember the bad and forget the good. They remember his weak arm strength, while forgetting how accurate he could be with short to intermediate passes. They remember his short pass to Moulds on 4th and 12 against the Patriots, while forgetting that Holcomb had played well enough up to that point for the Bills to have a realistic chance to beat the Patriots well into the fourth quarter. The Patriots needed a little help from the refs to win that game, with a third down completion to Moulds (which should have been for a first down) getting turned into 4th and 12 based on a bogus offensive pass interference penalty on Moulds. The similarities between Fitz and Holcomb are actually pretty strong. Both had been long-term career backups/occasional starters before coming to Buffalo. Both QBs displaced a younger QB while here to take the starting job. Both played behind bad OLs, and both did well at getting rid of the ball quickly to make up for bad pass protection. Both have/had an Achilles heel which prevents them from being the long-term answer. (Arm strength for Holcomb, accuracy for Fitz.) Both seem like overachievers. Both seem to have a good grasp of the game.

In most companies, the most highly paid employee is the CEO. The most highly paid CEO of 2009 made about 13% of corporate profits. In my mind, that 13% of profits should be about the upper limit that any one employee earns. I'm not aware of very many reasonably profitable firms which dramatically exceed that limit. It is true that there are a number of companies in labor-intensive industries in which employees represent the bulk of expenses. In a reasonably large, reasonably profitable labor-intensive company, it is exceedingly rare for any one employee to earn above that 13% limit I mentioned, even if collectively the employees represent the biggest single expense. Jamarcus Russell is not "the employees." He's just one guy. For Jamarcus Russell-style contracts to result in individual players receiving eight times as much, on a percentage of profits basis, as the most highly paid CEO of 2009 demonstrates that something is out of whack.

I agree that unshared revenues are increasing at a much faster pace than shared revenues, and that this creates problems for the league and for parity. On the other hand, if you owned (and had paid for) a 12 unit apartment complex, and someone else had spent 1/3 as much to purchase a 4 unit rental property, you might not be all that eager to engage in 100% revenue sharing with that other person. There are limits to the amount of revenue sharing the owners of large market teams are willing to accept. Thanks for the link to the article about the Packers. It was a good article, and reinforced the idea that more NFL teams should be run on the Packers' model. They almost certainly receive less concessions revenues than most other small market teams. However, those concessions people work on a volunteer basis, as do their snow removal people. More importantly, if some hypothetical group borrowed $800 million to buy the Bills, then even at %5 interest they'd be paying $40 million a year on interest. The Packers don't have that expense. Also, their waiting list for season tickets is a mile long, which isn't something a lot of other small market teams can say. The most highly compensated CEO of 2009 was Lawrence Culp. His total compensation for the year was $141 million, almost all of which came from stock options and vested stock awards. The company he ran--Danaher--made $1.1 billion in 2009, which means Culp's compensation was about 13% of profits. As I'd mentioned previously, Jamarcus Russell was paid $32 million in guaranteed money during his three years with the Raiders, or over $10 million a year in guaranteed money alone. If the Packers were to extend a Jamarcus Russell-type contract to some hypothetical player, that player's compensation would be over 100% of team profits, in guaranteed money alone! On a percentage of profits basis, that player would be receiving nearly eight times as much compensation as the most highly paid CEO of 2009! If the owners aren't bothered by this, they very well should be!!

The problem is that players' percentage of revenues has gone up, especially as a percentage of shared revenues. That's made it progressively more difficult for small market teams to spend up to the salary cap. The Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers made a profit of just $10 million this past season. Jamarcus Russell also received an average of $10 million per year in guaranteed money alone during his three years with the Raiders. There's clearly something wrong with this picture! Players' share of revenues needs to be reduced to help increase parity. Even more importantly, the definition of "revenue" needs to be modified to mean "shared revenue only" and not "revenue that Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder manage to milk from their fans which is unavailable to the Ralph Wilsons of the league."

Agreed. Ted Washington often played at 350 pounds or more, and he was an excellent NT! I'd rather have an NT who was 10 or 20 pounds too heavy than one who was 10 - 20 pounds too light. Based on the picture, Jasper's body fat ratio seems quite reasonable for an NT. In a perfect world, your NT would be 400+ pounds of pure muscle. Jasper looks fairly close to being that! If I was on the Bills staff, I'd have no objection to him remaining at his current weight.

I completely agree that the owners shouldn't have caved into the NFLPA back in 2006! The owners' failure to stand up to the union back then sowed the seeds for the negative things which have happened since. A reduction in players' share of the revenues is in the best long-term interests of the league and of the sport, and it's important for the owners to take a stand now to ensure the players' share is reduced.

I like this thread because its first post has a long quote from the article, plus a link to the article itself. The same can't be said about the other two threads on this. So this one's better!

No argument there! Look at the team Nix inherited. On offense, there was no quarterback, and little on the OL beyond Levitre and Wood. There were a few bright spots at skill positions, however, with guys like Stevie Johnson, Fred Jackson, and an aging Lee Evans from the TD era. That's something, but not enough to compensate for the lack of a QB + OTs. On defense, everyone in the front-7--with only two exceptions--was either a) nearing retirement, b) not particularly good, or c) both. (The two exceptions being Kyle Williams and Poz.) In the defensive secondary, Nix inherited some respectably good safeties, including Byrd, Whitner, Scott, and above all, George Wilson. Good CBs are more valuable, and are harder to find, than good safeties. Despite the fact that Jauron is to the defensive secondary what you are to the offensive line , the cupboard was nearly bare at CB. An aging Terrence McGee was paired with a Leodis McKelvin who seems to lack the instincts necessary to be a good CB. Assuming at least part of Nix's focus is on the long haul, he should be thinking in terms of what I call "building block players." By that I mean players who are young enough to be with you a long time, and are good enough to be part of a long-term answer. The building block players Nix inherited consist of a couple of interior offensive linemen, Stevie Johnson, a DT, an ILB, some safeties, and not much else. That's very few players for Nix to begin with, and none of those players plays a premium, difficult-to-fill position like QB or LT or RDE. Someone's signature--I don't remember whose--quoted Ralph Wilson as saying (with a hearty laugh) that the Bills started the Nix era with no players. While there's some hyperbole to that statement, there isn't very much!

Tgreg, I think that you, syhuang, and I are in agreement on the points syhuang made in the above quoted text. If I was an NFL player making minimum salary, I would conclude that the NFLPA was much more strongly focused on representing the interests of highly paid stars like Drew Brees and Tom Brady than it was on representing my interests! Our main point of difference is that you seem to want players' share of the overall pie to stay the same or increase, whereas I think it's clear that their share needs to be reduced. Let's take a step back and look at the big picture. The NFL extracts money from the fans through various means. Ticket sales, luxury suites, $10 popcorn, high parking fees, an infinite number of television ads for beer, SUVs, and pickup trucks, etc. Some of that revenue generation is reasonable, and some is over the top. I'd have no objection to owners charging a fair price for tickets, concessions, parking, and so forth, and to subjecting fans to a moderate amount of television advertising. (Especially not if at least some effort was made to keep the ads interesting, instead of showing people the same boring SUV or beer ad over and over again.) Clearly the NFL has gone above and beyond what is reasonable, and is taking advantage of the fans. The NFL's revenues are too high, and its methods of revenue generation are damaging to its relationship with the fans. The salary cap is set at 60% of league revenues, and the salary floor is set at 56%. This means that most of the above-described revenue is going to the players. Meanwhile, the owners can use their 40 - 44% share to pay the salaries of coaches, front office personnel, administrative people, grounds crews, stadium-related costs, debt service, etc. This past season the Green Bay Packers had an operating profit of $10 million. Assuming the Packers franchise is worth $1 billion, that $10 million operating profit represents a rate of return of just 1%. I would not be very happy with an investment that yielded a 1% rate of return, and I can't imagine too many NFL owners are jumping for joy either. Jamarcus Russell's contract provided him with $32 million in guaranteed money, and he was with the Raiders for three years before getting cut. During those three years, Russell was generating an annual salary, in guaranteed money alone, equivalent to the operating profit of the entire Packers franchise from this past season! In 2009, the most highly compensated CEO was Lawrence Culp, the CEO of Danaher. He made $141 million that year, which includes about $1 million in base salary, $84 million on exercising vested stock options, and $56 million on vested stock awards. Danaher made $1.1 billion in 2009, which means that Culp's compensation was about 13% of profits. A player receiving Jamarcus Russell-like compensation from the Packers would receive over 100% of profits! If 13% of profits is too much for a CEO to have, then why is it somehow "fair" for a Jamarcus Russell to earn 100% or more of profits? Even granting the possibility that the Raiders may have been more profitable than the Packers, Russell was almost certainly much more richly compensated, on a percentage of profits basis, than the most highly paid CEO of 2009. One difference between Russell and Culp is that Culp almost certainly worked 80+ hours a week to allow Danaher to achieve such high profits; and certainly played a major role in that firm's success. It's . . . less than clear that Russell worked particularly hard for the Raiders, or that he materially contributed to that team's long-term financial well-being. "Danaher Corporation designs, manufactures and markets professional, medical, industrial and consumer products," which means its money comes from doing something useful. Jamarcus Russell's money came from $10 popcorn, PSLs, high ticket prices, and other instances of gouging the fans. Available information suggests Russell squandered the vast sums paid to him, and that he's now in dire financial straits. Nor is he alone in this. A lot of players use their vast paychecks to live flashy lifestyles. In some cases (Travis Henry, Willis McGahee), one of the objectives of the flashy lifestyle seems to be to impregnate as many women as possible. I'll grant that a lot of other players aren't like that. Fred Jackson, for example, seems to have much better character than a lot of former Bills' RBs I could name. As a fan, I feel no sense of cosmic fulfillment when I'm subjected to a million different attempts to fleece me of cash, all so that the owners can pay outrageous sums to players living flashy lifestyles. Fans should have to pay less, should have to see fewer ads, and the salaries of the most highly paid players should be reduced.

I share both your concerns. It's clear that the Bills need to add a starting quarterback and significantly upgrade their offensive line play before the offense is where it needs to be. I largely agree with Bill from NYC's analysis of how the line played this past season, and it's clear we need to do better than that. Also, while Fitz brings a lot to the table, he's clearly not an accurate enough passer to be a long-term solution at quarterback. As others have pointed out in this discussion, Fitz's performance over the last few weeks of the season was especially disappointing. However, I'm not concerned about the fact that Nix failed to significantly address the offense in this past draft. There are several reasons for this. 1) This team had more holes than could be fixed in one draft; and the positions he did address were clearly major needs. 2) There was neither a quarterback nor a LT worthy of going third overall. 3) I don't think we could have found our long-term answer at QB or LT in the second round either. Maybe we could have gotten a good right tackle with that pick, and we definitely need one. But using a second round pick on what is (hopefully) a long-term answer at CB is nothing to complain about either. (Unless, of course, he goes first-contract-and-out! ) There's a chance some of the offense's problems could solve themselves. Players like Bell and Wood were coming off injuries, and may play significantly better in 2011 than they did in 2010. It's also quite possible some no-name player will step up and capably fill the RG spot. But even if all those things happen, the OL at least needs a RT, and may well need more than just that! If 2011 was the defense's draft, I hope and expect 2012 to be the offense's draft. A quarterback in the first round, followed by a RT in the second and a TE in the third, would be an excellent way to go!

During the last CBA negotiation, owners of small market teams wanted a moderate salary cap. The players union wanted a high salary cap. The owners of large market teams sided with the players union, and against the owners of small market teams, in favoring a high salary cap. The thinking was that a high salary cap would result in smaller market teams becoming less competitive than larger market teams, because it would be that much harder to spend up to the cap. Most owners of small market teams went along with this deal, thinking it was better to maintain labor peace than it was to endure a season without football. The owners of large market teams have since realized they made a serious error. A high salary cap is bad for all owners, and for the league as a whole. One of the reasons for the decline of professional baseball is that a team like the Yankees can simply buy itself a championship without having to worry about a salary cap. The most recent CBA was certainly a step in that direction. The owners of large market teams (probably) realize they messed up the last time around. But we're talking about some pretty big egos here. They don't seem to be in a hurry to admit to having been in error. Instead they've talked about "economic hardship," which may either be window dressing, or may be true for a few teams without being true for many others. It's in fans' best interests for the NFL to adopt a low expense/low revenue business model. I can't think of anything the NFL could do to increase revenue which wouldn't hurt fans in some way. More ticket revenue = higher ticket prices. More ad revenue = still more ads for beer, pickup trucks, and SUVs. More concession revenue = making movie theater concessions look like a bargain by comparison. In this case, the owners are trying to reduce an expense (player salaries). That's a good thing from the perspective of fans. If the owners reduce their expenses, and if the fans are more resistant to being taken advantage of in the future than in the past, the NFL will gradually move toward the (optimal) low revenue/low expense model.

I disagree. Suppose (for the sake of argument) that between federal and state taxes, Ralph's effective tax rate is 50%. That would mean that if Ralph donated $100 to charity, he'd save $50 in taxes. Doing that doesn't make him $50 richer than he otherwise would have been--it makes him $50 poorer. If his only goal was to maximize his personal wealth, his optimal strategy would be to contribute nothing to charity. The fact that he's not pursuing that strategy makes it clear he cares about more than just his own personal wealth maximization.