JDG

Or what about any player that gets injured before reaching free agency at the end of his 4-year or 5-year rookie contract? Its not like these rookies can go out and get money from the highest bidder. The NFL has a draft which says that one team has an exclusive right to negotiate a contract with them. The rookie pool protects rookies from this monopoly power, and also protects them in the event of a career-shortening injury. JDG

Actually, it is not at all that simple. I don't know where this idea is that "holders of capital" in a business take much more risk than "holders of labor" in a business, but it just plain isn't true. Let's face it, if the value of an NFL franchise were, by some act of God, to go south - the owner of that franchise would in all likelihood still be living comfortably. They would have other assets, or other employment opportunities with which to put some very fine bread on the table for their families. Of course, the value of NFL franchises are in fact skyrockets.... to name just one example, Robert Kraft purchased the New England Patriots at the start of the salary cap era around 1994, and since then, the value of the Patriots has *quintupled*!!! The players, on the other hand, are bearing enormous risk. These men are investing countless hours of their life during their prime high school and college years, to train their bodies for a shot at landing a job in an industry where the average career is only about 3 or 4 years, and the maximum career is only about 20 years. All those hours devoted to practice are hours where these men aren't doing science projects, or reading books, or participating in "Junior Achievment", or engaging in other activities that wil develop their skills for another career. For 5-6 months out of the year, this job involves lots of travel away from home. Players can be fired without notice, and if they underperform, they'lll endure public mockery on message boards and radio shows. Most careers will involve several uprootings of the family to different cities in pursuit of a job. All told, they're making huge investments in hopes of a career that might result in a payday, but is far more likely to leave them out on the street, without much in the way of assets, and without the other job skills that people who didn't spend all those hours on football have. So sorry, but the distribution of revenues in the NFL has nothing to do with risk. If it was about risk, then the owners would get about 5% of revenues and the players would get about 95% of revenues (o.k., maybe the owners could get 10% of revenues if they built their own stadiums.) Instead, the distribution of revenues has everything to do with a collusive monopoly whereby the NFL owners decide exactly how many franchises there will be, and how many jobs, but where the players are stuck with far more applicants than player slots. JDG

How much money is the NFL going to earn without any players? JDG

I have Bennie Anderson in the neighborhood of $1.5mil in cap space, with only about $500,000 in savings if he is released. JDG

and.... The NFL needs both labor (players) and capital (teams) to survive. Why should the owners of the capital take home 99% of the proceeds, like you are suggesting? In other words, why shouldn't the NFL Owners just set the salary cap at $10mil per team, pocket the rest, and tell the players to either like it or leave it???? JDG

So, the players should just take whatever amount of money the NFL Owners want to give them - no matter how rich those owners are getting???? JDG

I think this neglects the fact that veterans are cut every year by teams that are over the cap. Additionally, it takes two to tango, and the failure of the owners to agree upon revenue sharing is at least as big an obstacle to an agreement as any position that the players have taken. JDG

Although, actually, they can't..... ....or at least, not very well. JDG

He won't be able to do that until at least 2008 - assuming that a new CBA is approved, without a salary cap, allowing the games to be played. JDG

I doubt there will be a ton of one year contracts. The problem for the players is that they bear huge amounts of injury risk that could affect their future earnings. Thus, a player wants to get as much up-front money as possible - i.e. a big signing bonus, which means signing as long a contract as possible. Moreover, all the rules you are used to in the NFL are now changing. There is no June 1st rule this year, and contracts are a max 4 years instead of 7 years. Moreover, next year, players will need 6 years experience instead of 4 years to be eligible for unrestricted free agency. Additionally, each NFL team will have additional franchise and transition tags to use. In other words, although next year is going to be uncapped, there will be fewer players eligible for free agency, and there will be more tags available to tag the few players that are eligible. 2007 will *not* be a bonanza for the players. Upshaw's calculation appears to be that suffering through two bad years for the players (i.e. this year and the uncapped year of 2007) is a fair price to pay for the long-term goal of getting additional revenue sharing out of the owners, and boosting the players' share of that revenue up to 60%+. JDG

Pretty much. The NFL seasons will be played, as scheduled in 2006 and 2007 at this point, barring a dramatic change. The games will not happen in 2008 without a contract agreement, however. JDG

Its not like Ralph Wilson has unlimted money. And remember, the Bills were in the bottom-half of the League in revenues last season. The Washington Redskins take in about $100 million more money _each year_, *after revenue sharing*, than the Bills. Ralph Wilson won't be able to compete with that year-in and year-out. JDG

Uh, Evans, Clements, and Winfield were all pretty much consensus picks off the top of my head.... JDG

I'll take the under on that.... Whatever AFC Executive said that, was clearly using the cloak of anonymity to pull a credulous journalist's leg. Think for a moment.... that comes out to 6 players per NFL team being cut today. It just ain't gonna happen. A few teams in trouble will make some cuts, but no way is it going to be 6 per team. JDG

As usual, I disagree..... I wonder what League you're watching where 80+ catches constitutes "all but washed up." Anyhow, I think that fans in Philadelphia would be very pumped up to see a player of Moulds' caliber hit the market. JDG

You forgot to add the accelearation of almost $2 mil in unamoritzed signing bonus onto this year's cap by cutting Moulds. JDG

Sorry, but I completely disagree - none of those three players at all distinguished themselves in 2005, and were exactly the sort of dead weight that you trim during the offseason in preparation for building your team as a contender in the next season. JDG

What's not to like? Our defense last year was one of the worst in team history. Instead of "pick your poison" we had the "pick your perfume" defense. If a team wanted to run on us, they never had to pass the ball. If they wanted to pass on us, they never had to worry about being a little down in the 4th Quarter. Quite simply, there's no way that Sam Adams was all that good last season. Pretty much any team that wanted to run the ball down our throat, did so, and our pass rush was hardly fear-inspiring. There's a reason why Sam Adams has had to change his luggage tags every few years. He simply does not have a consistent drive within him to be a successful player. It was definitely time for him to go.... JDG

A major difference could be that because there is no labor deal, all "Not Likely to Be Earned Incentives" are accelerating onto this year's cap. That changes to calculations considerable, and makes incentive-laden contracts far more expensive than they used to be. JDG

Maybe there's nothing in the works, but Marv has just been reading my posts on TBD and now understands why it makes sense to keep him! JDG

There is ZERO chance of Buffalo hosting a Super Bowl, barring a complete change of history. Buffalo isn't even in the same ballpark in regards to having enough hotel rooms to host a Super Bowl. It would take decades of fabulous economic growth and development for enough hotels to enter the Buffalo market to make a Super Bowl a viable possibility, domed stadium or no domed stadium. JDG

I don't see how a Stadium that is used on 8 Sunday afternoons, + 2 preseason games, plus a few other random events is going to spur development downtown. In fact, on most days, its just going to be a gigantic hole in the center of downtown with little activity. JDG

For all the criticisms of Tom Donahoe, almost everyone agreed that he rescued us from "salary cap hell." And yet, even after releasing Mike Williams, ESPN.com reported today that we are just $2mil under the cap. What the heck? Where is all that cap space going? It seems to me that we have only a handfull of high-priced players. Yes, we have to pay Spikes and Fletcher, since we brought them in as free agents, but they are LB's. Vincent is probably also getting decent money, and Schobel has gotten paid - but not exorbitantly so. But many of our top skill position players, Losman, McGahee, Evans, and McGee are still on their rookie contracts - which are relatively cheap. Its not like we have a high-priced TE, and how much can we be paying anyone on our offensive line? Yes, Moulds is taking up a lot of cap space - but how did we let the Moulds situation get into "cap hell" status anyways, where even if we cut him he gobbles up $5.3 mil of space? I only have two possible explanations: 1) The Bills are getting hosed right now on the acceleration of "not-likely-to-be-earned" incentives into the current cap year, due to the labor armageddon. 2) Tom Donahoe didn't even get the cap situation right, in addition to everything else he screwed up. I suspect there is a bit of truth to both. JDG

I don't think anyone truly knows exactly what happened. Mularkey & Co. were abysmally bad managers of players. Maybe Mularkey & Co. accused Moulds of "doggin' it", and Moulds reacted badly? Who knows? Did Moulds make a mistake? Heck yeah. But the guy has been in the League for what, 10 years now, mostly on bad teams, and he has not developed much in the way of a "character issues" reputation until now. To me, one mistake does not a "character issue" make. Getting run out of town by Bill Parcells and Romeo Crennel is in a whole 'nother ball park from a single mistake like that. JDG

This isn't precisely true, as the entirety of the $7mil cap hit would occur in 2006, as the $7 mil is base salary money. Actually, if 2007 is an uncapped year, then cap space in 2007 is worth zero. Moreover, cap space in 2007 is simply worth less if the cap goes up relatively fast. There's a lot of predictions that a new labor deal could add $10+ million to the cap. That makes each dollar of cap space less valuable than when the cap was smaller. Your analysis also seems to presume that the Bills can make a Super Bowl run in 2007, even if they accomplish none of their goals in 2006. Or really, you even seem to suggest that there just plain are no goals in 2006, seeing as winning the Super Bowl isn't one of them. I, however, disagree. I think that Super Bowl Champions, in general, are built - they don't just magically appear. (again, in general.) Thus, I think it is worth assessing whether Eric Moulds can help us achieve our goals for 2006, which I would list as a) breaking our playoff drought, and b) evaluatin JP Losman. Well, its not kosher to compare just Moulds' salary without considering the signing bonus (and subsequent cap hit) we'd have to take from hiring his replacement. Thus, I still believe that you are asking the wrong question. The question is how much does it cost to keep Moulds for 2006? The answer is: a) $5.5 million in additional cap hit b) less the 2006 cap hit of replacing Moulds with another WR c) plus the presented discounted value of the cap hit for cutting Moulds after the 2006 season. Putting some figures into the above equation: a) $5.5mil b) -$3 mil c) $1.9mil * probability of there being a salary cap in 2007 (call it .5) * a discount factor (usually about .93). Thus, the total cost of keeping Moulds this season is about $3.385 million. Is Moulds worth that much more to us in accomplishing our goals in 2006 than a David Givens? I think so. We'll see if Marv agrees.... JDG