NFL Absurdities and Compensation in the Playoffs
NFL Football is a Strange Operation from the git-go. It’s a monopoly of course, and a strange monopoly at that. Each team is owned by a very wealthy person who may or may not know very much about the game. They simply inherited wealth or they earned it legitimately or the Trump way—aka or similar—stiffing investors and those who built his luxury Towers, then declaring bankruptcy which via legal loopholes enabled him to acquire billions with every bankruptcy and excuse him from paying federal taxes.
The only ones bound by a NFL football contract are the players, not the owners. The owners can promise the sky 5 years down the road and break the contract at the end of any year. Thus, they give out bonuses up front as sort of a consolation prize for the deception likely to follow. What other business gets away with such contracts?
Then there are the strange contract talks between the owners and the players—a contract deliberation with no bottom line. The only negotiation is how much of the money pot goes to the owners and how much to the players.The fans and taxpayers pay for whatever level of greed at the moment. The contract negotiations are as phony as the player contracts. The cities and fans have no say about anything. Roughly half of the money which comes in goes to the owners and the other half to the players. There are 32 teams and 32 owners. But each team has close to 60 players. So if the inflow of cash is $64 million, half of it, $32 million, goes to the owners and the owners would get I million each. Each player would get around $16,000. Of course much more money flows in than $64 million. The average team is worth $2.3 billion on the open market. Hard to figure how much each owner pockets each year. They can hide that pretty well.
The minimum rookie salary is $450,000. The minimum veteran salary with 3 years experience is $675,000. There is a wide discrepancy in salaries among those on the team. The NFL’s elite players earned more than those in any other sport with the 15 highest-paid players making $535 million in salary, bonuses and endorsements during the past year. The half-billion haul is up 37% over last year. That comes out to 35 million per elite player. These salaries go up big time every year while the salaries of the other players stay relatively stagnant. Let’s just say the wealthy owners make billions while the players make a minuscule comparable amount and take all the injury and health risk and hard physical work. Who the hell set up this system? I don’t know who set it up, but Congress regulates monopolies (if you can pardon the exaggeration), so Congress is responsible for all the excesses gobbled up by the owners and top players.
What is common to all the players is the risk of serious injuries—serious in the short term and serious in the long term. The risk for serious injury is substantial. Of the 2,600 players that are in the NFL, roughly 400 of them are injured every year. That number includes rookies and veterans from each team and counts both minor and extreme injuries. A Washington Post survey of retired NFL players found that nearly nine in 10 report suffering from aches and pains on a daily basis, and they overwhelmingly – 91 percent – connect nearly all their pains to football. Some players are beginning to retire early to reduce the chances of medical problems down the road.
This brings us to another absurdity associated with the NFL; Those players who play in playoff games get paid pittance to what they usually get paid. If a top star gets $35 million dollars per year and there are 16 regular games then the pay per game is a little over $2 million /game. Here is what the players get for playing in the playoff games:
Divisional Round:
$27,000 per player
Conference Championship Game:
$49,000 per player
Super Bowl:
$107,000 (players on the winning team)
$53,000 (players on the losing team)
From a purely medical/salary risk a player would be better to skip any play off games since the chance of injury could either terminate their career or run the real risk of future medical problems. I mean does Aaron Rodgers really care if he gets another $27,000 to play in a playoff game? Is there any player who would really run the risk for a mere $27,000? Playing four more playoff games extends their season by 25% and definitely puts their future salary and playing time in question. For fans, the most important thing is that their team win. For the players most probably for them the most important thing to them is that they can play well and be spared injury. For players on teams which did not make the playoffs, if they are still intact and healthy, their worries for this season are over. Not so for those players who have to play more games.
Let’s keep in mind that the playoffs do not usually determine who the best team was for that year.There are so many variables beyond control including injury. inopportune drops, failed tackles, field conditions, and so on that can happen on any given day, and the teams are all good teams, so any team has a reasonable chance of beating any other team in the playoffs on a given day. There can be no best out of 7 in football.
Let’s just pretend I was good enough to play a position in the NFL and was offered to replace a player (except the kicker) in the playoffs for $27,000. Would I take it? No.
I was thinking, towards the end of the losing game for the Giant players, just how many are probably relieved they don’t have to play three more games at the risk of injury which may prevent them from getting a high salary in the future. Of course most football players don’t really use much rationality for their life risks. 80% of retired NFL players are broke, and as pointed out before, many of them are physically damaged and will die on the average, much younger than the norm.
Young men are lured into football for the social image and the chance to make a lot of money. 1.6% of College football players end up in the pros and even when they make it the average stay in the pros is 3 years. The other 98.4% who don’t make it to the playoffs may suffer varying degrees of physical damage later in life.
So here is the reality. The only ones who will benefit across the board and benefit by far the most are the wealthy owners who get to run a kind of plantation as an exciting and amusing play toy with no risk of injury or threat of any salary loss. Everyone else—the players, the cities in which they play, and the fans, will get stiffed in various ways. The romanticism associated with professional football is fading away, too slowly to predict any imminent decline. I watch football because it is entertaining to watch and proceeds at about the right pace, and is complicated enough to stimulate interest and endless debate. In other words it is good theatre to watch, but not a good thing for most of the participants in the long run. With athletes as big, strong, and fast as the modern day athletes, there is no way football can be played with adequate safe guards. I think if some huge lineman just happened to crash into me once I would probably be rushed to the emergency room after they dug me out of the turf.
There is a lot wrong with Professional Sports and these sports are under the control of Congress.Therein lies the problem. Congress does precious little these days but dance to the tune of the wealthy who have gained control of Congress, the Presidency, and the Courts. This is a global problem, not just one here in America. Because everything is global now, the implosion will be global. Little to be optimistic about, and the wealthy, blinded by their compulsive obsession for more and more wealth, will go down with everyone else. Greed and compulsive obsessions are the Achilles Heel of the human species. Enough is rarely enough.
