Judge orders players, owners back to mediation

[Mr. WEO]

Its not nonsense. The total amount the players recieve also includes benefits like retirement, health care, insurance for their families.

 

ITs a total package not strictly limited to salaries.

In the face of a professional accounting of the benefits players received equaling more than you continue to state, you refuse to acknowledge the same.

 

The numbers you eschew cannot be found anywhere but in your simplified math, which is why you cannot show anyone else saying the same. The players received more revenue than you believe. The links I've shown prove that beyond a doubt.

 

If there is something somewhere out the supporting your position that's its closer to 40% I'd like to see it.

If you look at the numbers teams were spending, for some, it was far above the cap, so it can be assumed those were salary plus benefits, i.e. all player costs.

 

I have given you the link for team by team player expenses. It's not hard to do the math. Us a calculator if you need to.

 

Again, the players can only truly receive 59.5% of the total league revenues (minus $1 billion) if every team spends to the cap every year. There is absolutely no other way this can happen. If you don't believe that then you don't believe there was a CBA signed in 2006.

[K Gun Special]

If you look at the numbers teams were spending, for some, it was far above the cap, so it can be assumed those were salary plus benefits, i.e. all player costs.

 

I have given you the link for team by team player expenses. It's not hard to do the math. Us a calculator if you need to.

 

Again, the players can only truly receive 59.5% of the total league revenues (minus $1 billion) if every team spends to the cap every year. There is absolutely no other way this can happen. If you don't believe that then you don't believe there was a CBA signed in 2006.

 

 

WEO, again that only shows salaries. You know teams can exceed the cap one year, ie the 2009 vikings. So no it cannot be assumed spending over the cap necessarily means it was on player salary.

 

Again, professionals with accesss to the data have disputed your contentions. I will take a professional accouting firm "" Data prepared in 2010 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained Monday by the AP show that about $3.8 billion of the $7.2 billion in incremental revenue over those four years - 52.9 percent - went toward players' salaries and benefits""" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/nfl/03/21/revenue.report.ap/index.html

over you and your calculator.

 

A link to a website listing player costs does not support your position. I have shown positively that players received far more than you allege.

 

Again, it is telling you cant provide something to say otherwise.

[ICanSleepWhenI'mDead]

WEO, again that only shows salaries. You know teams can exceed the cap one year, ie the 2009 vikings. So no it cannot be assumed spending over the cap necessarily means it was on player salary.

 

Again, professionals with accesss to the data have disputed your contentions. I will take a professional accouting firm "" Data prepared in 2010 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained Monday by the AP show that about $3.8 billion of the $7.2 billion in incremental revenue over those four years - 52.9 percent - went toward players' salaries and benefits""" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/nfl/03/21/revenue.report.ap/index.html

over you and your calculator.

 

A link to a website listing player costs does not support your position. I have shown positively that players received far more than you allege.

 

Again, it is telling you cant provide something to say otherwise.

This is just my 2 cents - - WEO cna be both stuuborn and abrasive at times (we all have our warts, including me), but he's not totally illogical, and although I haven't tried to verify his math, I'll take his word for it about the calculations he did. There are a lot of links posted in this thread that I admittedly have not read yet (and real life is about to intrude on my Bills' addiction for a few days), so I'm a little hesitant to post.

 

So somebody help me out here - - why does the SI link talk about 52.9 % of "incremental revenue" instead of just "revenue" or "total revenue" or "all revenue?" 52.9% of the DELTA over a four year period could be a far different number than whatever the percentage would be of total revenue in a single year.

 

I/m not saying WEO's right, but the "incremental" adjective in the part of the SI link you quoted leaves me unconvinced that you've proved him wrong. Maybe the remainder of the article does.

 

Again, if the answer is in the previously quoted links my apologies. I just don't have time to read 'em today. I'll check back here in a few days. Thanks in advance for any answers.

[Mr. WEO]

WEO, again that only shows salaries. You know teams can exceed the cap one year, ie the 2009 vikings. So no it cannot be assumed spending over the cap necessarily means it was on player salary.

 

Again, professionals with accesss to the data have disputed your contentions. I will take a professional accouting firm "" Data prepared in 2010 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained Monday by the AP show that about $3.8 billion of the $7.2 billion in incremental revenue over those four years - 52.9 percent - went toward players' salaries and benefits""" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/nfl/03/21/revenue.report.ap/index.html

over you and your calculator.

 

A link to a website listing player costs does not support your position. I have shown positively that players received far more than you allege.

 

Again, it is telling you cant provide something to say otherwise.

Over those 4 years, that review shows that the players got 52.9% of the incremental revenue. This is clearly stated. That is the percent given to the players of the amount of the increase in revenue from '06 to '09. Even so--it's nowhere near the 59.5% agreed upon in the CBA.

 

The site lists team payrolls. The salary cap in '08 was $116 million. 13 teams spent more than that in '08. 5 spend more than 130 million and 2 spent over 145 million.

Edited April 15, 2011 by Mr. WEO

[vincec]

You seem to have an overinflated sense of the importance of owners to the NFL game.

 

Would you really pay any money to see Ralph Wilson and Al Davis don shoulder pads and play the game?

 

Tom Brady, et al and the individual players who have sued the owners are THE GAME.

 

The owners back in the day of George Halas were necessary to the game as the NFL owners back in the day were the only ones willing to risk any capital to fund the league and were real football guys who managed the teams.

 

In today's reality because the early owners took a risk (a risk they have been repaid handsomely for taking actually) and built a product which quite frankly the networks actually provide the capital that drives the game.

 

The NFL owners are simply having trouble dealing with the fact that they are now simply a partner with the players who are actually the GAME and in fact since they gave up the vast majority of the total take to the players in the last CBA in writing they are actually the minority partners in this enterprise.

 

My sense is that the NFLPA is actually quite happy not to kill the owners as minority partners because actually they maker tons of money in this situation and the real game for them is to actually keep the minority partners around but find a way to create a new league with new sources of capital which will allow the NFLPA to represent professional football players in the NFL and what I call the NewFL of a new league which improves the product and the players take by the good old American method of competition.

 

The ultimate answer to me for this is to find replacement owners to compete with the current NFL owners.

While I strongly sympathize with your Marxist sentiments, you still didn't answer my question. What is the basis of the anti-trust violation? There are no games. How can the courts force the NFL to play them?

[Orton's Arm]

While a positive step, i think the best way to resolve this entire situation is to bar the lawyers from the room, and let the players talk to the owners directly. Mental midgets like demaurice smith (who are after their own personal gain, and do not have the NFLPA's best interests in mind) are whats ruining the entire process.

A good post. I fully agree that DeMaurice Smith is part of the problem, not part of the solution. The less involvement he has with the process, the better.

[Orton's Arm]

Really? Did you just try to redefine (or dismiss) the definition of average?

 

"In fact the 'average career' is weighed down by th e (sic) huge number of guys who pass through the league for a season or two" ... uh, that's why it's called an average. In case you wondered, the definition of average is: "an estimation of or approximation to an arithmetic mean". You can't just dismiss the numbers you don't like (or the ones that refute your entire point) when compiling an average.

 

"Very few players, relative to the total, end their careers by injury" This is something you just made up.

While the post quoted above was in response to Mr. WEO, I've decided to add my own two cents to this discussion.

 

Neither you nor Mr. WEO has presented a link to any sort of statistical analysis about how most players' careers end. This is not said as a criticism of either of you: I am not even sure whether such an analysis has been conducted.

 

As has been pointed out earlier in this discussion, the average career of an NFL player is 3.5 years long. There is some disagreement about whether that average includes players in training camp, or is limited to the smaller number of players who successfully made the final roster cut.

 

A career length of 3.5 years means that a standard-issue NFL team should expect to lose about 29% of its roster every year to retirement/exiting the league. That can mean Brad Butler leaving the NFL to pursue a political career, JP Losman leaving the NFL to pursue opportunities with the Las Vegas Locomotives, or Mike Williams leaving the NFL to pursue eating. For the purposes of this analysis, it doesn't matter what a player does after leaving the NFL, so long as his exit is permanent. (Which, I suppose, Losman's and Williams' exits were not.)

 

If the average of 3.5 years was based solely on players who made the final roster, then a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 15 players a year to retirement or otherwise exiting the league. If it's based on the roughly 80 (?) players brought to training camp, the Bills should expect to lose about 23 players per year to retirement/league exit. (Including a lot of guys who failed to make the final roster.) Over the course of a ten-year period, a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 150 or 230 players to retirement/league exit, again depending on how the average is computed. Numbers of that magnitude are large enough for a statistically meaningful sample, at least if you assume that Bills' players are neither significantly more or less likely than average to experience career-ending injuries.

 

Over the most recent ten years, how many current members of the Bills experienced career-ending injuries? Takeo Spikes' career was never the same after his injury, but he nonetheless had a long career in the NFL. Kevin Everett experienced a career-ending injury at a young age. Bryce Paup was never the same after his injury, though that occurred before the ten-year period began. Angelo Crowell experienced a career-shortening injury while a Bill.

 

The above paragraph represents Bills' players who, over the last ten years, saw the duration of their careers significantly impacted by injuries. I'll grant that I might be forgetting some guys here and there. (And I encourage people to add to my list if they can think of anyone.) But if someone wishes to make the argument that most NFL careers end because of injury, then you'd expect a team like the Bills to experience a minimum of 75 or 115 career-ending injuries to its players over a ten-year period. (Depending, again, on how that average is computed.) While I've probably forgotten a few players from the above list, I strongly doubt I've forgotten 75 of them!

 

If the Bills' experience with injuries is at least somewhat similar to the NFL's as a whole--as seems highly likely--then it is absolutely absurd to claim that most players' careers are ended by injury. The numbers needed to support that assertion just aren't there.

[Mr. WEO]

While the post quoted above was in response to Mr. WEO, I've decided to add my own two cents to this discussion.

 

Neither you nor Mr. WEO has presented a link to any sort of statistical analysis about how most players' careers end. This is not said as a criticism of either of you: I am not even sure whether such an analysis has been conducted.

 

As has been pointed out earlier in this discussion, the average career of an NFL player is 3.5 years long. There is some disagreement about whether that average includes players in training camp, or is limited to the smaller number of players who successfully made the final roster cut.

 

A career length of 3.5 years means that a standard-issue NFL team should expect to lose about 29% of its roster every year to retirement/exiting the league. That can mean Brad Butler leaving the NFL to pursue a political career, JP Losman leaving the NFL to pursue opportunities with the Las Vegas Locomotives, or Mike Williams leaving the NFL to pursue eating. For the purposes of this analysis, it doesn't matter what a player does after leaving the NFL, so long as his exit is permanent. (Which, I suppose, Losman's and Williams' exits were not.)

 

If the average of 3.5 years was based solely on players who made the final roster, then a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 15 players a year to retirement or otherwise exiting the league. If it's based on the roughly 80 (?) players brought to training camp, the Bills should expect to lose about 23 players per year to retirement/league exit. (Including a lot of guys who failed to make the final roster.) Over the course of a ten-year period, a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 150 or 230 players to retirement/league exit, again depending on how the average is computed. Numbers of that magnitude are large enough for a statistically meaningful sample, at least if you assume that Bills' players are neither significantly more or less likely than average to experience career-ending injuries.

 

Over the most recent ten years, how many current members of the Bills experienced career-ending injuries? Takeo Spikes' career was never the same after his injury, but he nonetheless had a long career in the NFL. Kevin Everett experienced a career-ending injury at a young age. Bryce Paup was never the same after his injury, though that occurred before the ten-year period began. Angelo Crowell experienced a career-shortening injury while a Bill.

 

The above paragraph represents Bills' players who, over the last ten years, saw the duration of their careers significantly impacted by injuries. I'll grant that I might be forgetting some guys here and there. (And I encourage people to add to my list if they can think of anyone.) But if someone wishes to make the argument that most NFL careers end because of injury, then you'd expect a team like the Bills to experience a minimum of 75 or 115 career-ending injuries to its players over a ten-year period. (Depending, again, on how that average is computed.) While I've probably forgotten a few players from the above list, I strongly doubt I've forgotten 75 of them!

 

If the Bills' experience with injuries is at least somewhat similar to the NFL's as a whole--as seems highly likely--then it is absolutely absurd to claim that most players' careers are ended by injury. The numbers needed to support that assertion just aren't there.

 

The Commish just put this nonsense to rest when he called out the NFLPA on their bogus "3.5 year career" claim.

 

Here's a link with a data table (kindly supplied by the NFLPA itself!) that clearly demonstrates what I and a few others have been saying for quite some time--that a huge number of players (nearly 20%) wash out before they play a year on any team. 35% of all players have a year or less in the league. It's not because of injury.

 

http://blogs.chron.com/texanschick/2011/04/average_length_of_a_nfl_player.html

[Orton's Arm]

The Commish just put this nonsense to rest when he called out the NFLPA on their bogus "3.5 year career" claim.

No claim involving 3.5 can ever be bogus!!

 

Except, it would seem, the claim put forward by the NFLPA. Thanks for providing the link which refutes their bogus claim. The part of the link I found most interesting was the following:

So instead of guessing where the NFLPA got their numbers, I decided to ask them. This is the information they provided me:

 

"The NFLPA ran a report on the average number of accrued seasons (6 games on a roster in a season) for NFL players as of the first game of the 2010 regular season, and the average is 3.54 accrued seasons. Here is the report:

 

Whichever person from the NFLPA put this together is either being deliberately disingenuous, or else does not even begin to understand the basics of math.

 

According to the NFLPA's calculations, the average player on an NFL roster has 3.5 accrued seasons. For the NFLPA to support its claim that an NFL career lasts 3.5 years, they'd also have to prove that almost all players on NFL rosters are at the very ends of their careers. It seems far more likely that the average NFL player is about halfway through his career.

 

This is for the same reason that the average American is about halfway through his or her lifetime. If, for example, the average American was about 40 years old, it would imply that life expectancy for Americans is somewhere in the ballpark of 80 years. Similarly, if the average NFL player currently in the league has 3.5 accrued seasons (as the NFLPA's numbers show), it implies that the average NFL career lasts about seven years.

 

If an average NFL career lasts seven years, (which is also similar to the NFL's numbers), then a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 14% of its roster every year to league exit. That implies about 7 - 8 player retirements per year; or about 76 over a ten year period. If someone wanted to justify the claim that most careers end because of injury, he'd have to show that at least 38 Bills had experienced career-ending injuries over the last ten years. Obviously that can't be done. At least for the Bills, and presumably for the league as a whole, the overwhelming majority of players' careers end for reasons other than injury.

[Mr. WEO]

No claim involving 3.5 can ever be bogus!!

 

Except, it would seem, the claim put forward by the NFLPA. Thanks for providing the link which refutes their bogus claim. The part of the link I found most interesting was the following:

 

Whichever person from the NFLPA put this together is either being deliberately disingenuous, or else does not even begin to understand the basics of math.

 

According to the NFLPA's calculations, the average player on an NFL roster has 3.5 accrued seasons. For the NFLPA to support its claim that an NFL career lasts 3.5 years, they'd also have to prove that almost all players on NFL rosters are at the very ends of their careers. It seems far more likely that the average NFL player is about halfway through his career.

 

This is for the same reason that the average American is about halfway through his or her lifetime. If, for example, the average American was about 40 years old, it would imply that life expectancy for Americans is somewhere in the ballpark of 80 years. Similarly, if the average NFL player currently in the league has 3.5 accrued seasons (as the NFLPA's numbers show), it implies that the average NFL career lasts about seven years.

 

If an average NFL career lasts seven years, (which is also similar to the NFL's numbers), then a team like the Bills should expect to lose about 14% of its roster every year to league exit. That implies about 7 - 8 player retirements per year; or about 76 over a ten year period. If someone wanted to justify the claim that most careers end because of injury, he'd have to show that at least 38 Bills had experienced career-ending injuries over the last ten years. Obviously that can't be done. At least for the Bills, and presumably for the league as a whole, the overwhelming majority of players' careers end for reasons other than injury.

 

The 3.5 year claim was intuitively wrong, yet so many bought into it anyway. It's fascinating, really.

[Orton's Arm]

The 3.5 year claim was intuitively wrong, yet so many bought into it anyway. It's fascinating, really.

I personally had suspected that they arrived at the 3.5 claim by including players who didn't make the final roster cut. I didn't want to come out and say it, however, because I didn't have anything to support that hunch.

 

It turns out that the above hunch would have been mistaken anyway, and that the NFLPA arrived at its conclusion through some incredibly bad/deceptive math. In the future, remind me to never underestimate the NFLPA's ability to put a spin on anything.