NO BETTER ACTION IN SPORTS: PLAYERS DUELING OWNERS IN A $3 TRILLION INDUSTRY
Baseball is in trouble next year, as usual, while NFL players detect collusion, the NBA has Draymond Green sounding like a future boss, and Deion ($54 million) Sanders wants a salary cap for colleges
What else would we expect but the ugliest, sickest backlash for Jimmy Haslam? The Cleveland Browns guaranteed $230 million for Deshaun Watson, who exposed massage therapists to sexual harassment and exhibitionism, only leaving themselves brutalized by other NFL owners. Collusion? Call it a convergence of wisdom, a warning that franchises never should be so exceedingly foolish and pay such a windfall for a pervert.
But members of the Players Association didn’t want to hear it. If Watson warranted such a gross bonanza, fatten his wallet and the wallets of other players, right? Realistically, the worst business practices should be called out by the men who run the league. And if union people think owners were violating the collective bargaining agreement with apparent cooperation from their own executive director, think about Watson’s dirty deeds.
And those gym towels.
Common sense beats activism.
Welcome to the latest attempt to claim billionaires are cheating the multi-millionaires. Sometimes, they clearly are in sports, but the Watson case hasn’t stopped Josh Allen — with a $330 million contract — and Dak Prescott from making more guaranteed money. Meanwhile, Joe Burrow, Jordan Love, Trevor Lawrence, Tua Tagovailoa, Jared Goff, Brock Purdy, Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts are averaging more a season in total value. Lamar Jackson received $185 million in guarantees, but he was representing himself. Haslam is a dope, which is why he has 40-year-old Joe Flacco as his starting quarterback and Shedeur Sanders as the fourth-stringer. Should the boss of the Players Association, Lloyd Howell Jr., have raised hell on the collusion train?
Yes, especially if he is a consultant for a private equity firm seeking minority ownership in NFL teams. Do the players trust him? No. Might they need new leadership? Yes. But let’s find a reason beyond Watson. The league has labor peace until the end of the 2030 season, unlike Major League Baseball, which is a season and a half from an impasse that might devastate the game.
As a global industry, sport is worth more than $3 trillion. Unions are lifting heads from the weeds, which explains why Pablo Torre was handed NFL information on his podcast. Football players wonder why basketball players are so damned rich — the Oklahoma City Thunder is paying $822 million for three extensions, while Devin Booker signed a two-year, $145 million maximum with Phoenix — as they risk lives every Sunday. The NBA is in the first year of media deals worth $77 billion. The NFL is in a lull period and will demand more for Arch Manning — a guess — than the $285 million handed to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Howell will not be running the shop then. Find a better man.
What the union needs: DeMaurice Smith returning at the top. He was replaced more than two years ago and is coming out with a book, “Turf Wars.” He describes commissioner Roger Goodell as “a cold, dark void” and says he “was in the employ of madmen … a cabal of greedy billionaires.” He says the former general counsel, Jeff Pash, “was definitely the most unscrupulous. In a corporation filled with ruthless people, Pash has everyone else beat.” He said Jerry Jones, who paid Prescott too much money, might bow his head. “If Jerry saw a dollar bill on the ground, I truly believe he’d stop and pick it up,” Smith said.
The NFL intimidates the union. The players haven’t participated in a strike since 1987, when Sean Payton played quarterback for the Bears as a replacement. Is it time? When massive amounts of fans watch the postseason and the Super Bowl, why not? Who will have the guts to walk? We have six seasons to watch.
Baseball is a sport with a handful of beastly “haves” — the Dodgers and Yankees are soaring in price, past $8 billion — while most other clubs are “have nots.” Mark Walter, who bought the Lakers for $10 billion, has a Dodger Stadium payroll near $500 million this season. The Miami Marlins are spending $86 million. The Baltimore Orioles were sold for just $1.725 million. The owners, of course, are demanding a salary cap to bring competitive balance. Unlike the NFL, the union runs the show.
If the answer is no, once again? Say goodbye to a portion or the entirety of the 2027 season. If baseball goes away, the fans might disappear in many cities. “Where are we? Why are we where we are?” commissioner Rob Manfred told a group in Atlanta. “And what can we do to fix our situation? We don’t have the kind of cost certainty, predictability and competitive balance and mechanisms in our player comp system that the three other major professional sports have. That’s just a fact.”
It’s too late for a “fix.” He was named the big boss in January 2015. He has had more than 10 years with no corrections. His flaws are apparent to Bruce Meyer, deputy director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, who says players are showing “the right amount of skepticism.” Is Manfred already wooing players to accept the cap? Does the World Series even matter at this point?
“It’s a continuation of a pattern which has gone on for decades, which is, the other side tries to go directly to players, tries to create divisions between players,” Meyer said on a TV show. “The league and some of the individual owners have made no secret they would like to see a system that they tried to get for 50 years, which is a salary-cap system.”
I am tempted to relegate wannabes to a lowly league. Manfred might consider it. “The pitch is like, ‘Hey, this is really good for the players,’ ’’ Meyer said of his rival. “One of the things that players immediately seize on is, ‘Well, if this is so good for us, then why are they pushing it so hard? Why do they want it so desperately? Why did the other leagues lock out players to get it?’ ’’
Even Deion Sanders wants a salary cap in college football. “A lot of bulljunk going on. Quite frankly, we’re sick of it. Nobody’s saying it. I’ll say it for everybody,’’ said Sanders, who just received a $54 million contract at Colorado. “I wish there was a cap. The top-of-the-line player makes this, and if you’re not that type of guy, you know you’re not going to make that. That’s what the NFL does. So the problem is, you got a guy that’s not that darn good, but he could go to another school and they give him a half-million dollars and you can’t compete with that. And it don’t make sense.
“All you have to do is look at the playoffs and what those teams spend, and you understand darn near why they’re in the playoffs. It’s kind of hard to compete with somebody who’s giving $25 to $30 million to a freshman class. It’s crazy. The team that pays the most is going to win.”
Someone will. Can we drop “college” from the football?
One would think the NBA gang is pleased, right? Not Draymond Green, who might want to be the union leader and could attack Adam Silver. He thinks the “second apron” above the salary cap is eroding free agency. He will have to wait until 2030 for the CBA to expire, when he can turn the commissioner into Jusuf Nurkic.
“One can only point to the ‘New CBA' and the second apron (hard cap) for absolutely putting an end to Free Agency as we once knew it," Green wrote online. “Sadly, I sit here and watch so many players overplay the market and not understand what they’re up against with the new rules. Which leads me to trying to understand the unstaggering percentage of guys that have no idea of THE BUSINESS they are a part of. And I as a 'VET' in this league, watch players mismanage their careers and before they know it, they look back and DAMN, where to next?”
Where to? The NFL and NBA unions will gripe for years. Let them, even Nikola Jokic, who declined an extension in Denver and might be eyeing … oh, the Lakers. We’ll keep watching the games and wonder what SGA will do with his $285 million.
Baseball is in trouble. A salary cap wouldn’t help.
Retract five teams. That’s where Rob Manfred is.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.