Imagine you're driving home one day in your car
and you decide to turn right on a red light. Next thing you know, you see
police lights in your rear view mirror.
"Something wrong officer?" you ask.
"You turned right on red."
"I'm sorry, is that illegal?"
"Well technically no," he answers.
"But both the police and the neighborhood think it should be, so we are
now ticketing people who do it. Oh, and don't challenge it in court, I'd rather
this just went away. Have a good day."
Does that sound fair to you? Me neither, but it
does to Roger Goodell and 30 other NFL teams. The NFL has taken $36 million
from the Redskins and $10 million from Dallas in cap room over the next two
years and both teams are now challenging this ruling. The issue is over player
contracts given during the 2010 NFL season. The NFL has accused both teams of
"overloading" contracts, meaning the contracts offered a large amount
of money during that specific year in order to entice free agents to sign with
them. Usually the league salary cap prevents these kind of things from
happening, but the 2010 season was uncapped. Essentially the Redskins and
Cowboys found a one year loophole and exploited it which seems to have ticked
the league off.
The Redskins and Dallas are challenging,
however, that according to the rules, they did nothing wrong. The league may
not like it, but there was no rule or salary cap in place to prevent it. What
is especially baffling about the league's decision is the fact that the league
must approve all contracts. So the contracts were seen by the league, approved,
and are now being deemed illegal. If they had a problem with the contracts,
they never should have been approved in the first place.
So why are only the Redskins and Cowboys being
punished for not following a rule that was not in the books? Good question. Somehow
the other 30 teams knew not to overload contracts even though it wasn't against
the rules. So let me get this straight, a bunch of teams decided amongst
themselves that, although there was no salary cap, they were not going to offer
top-heavy contracts...isn't that collusion? How could 30 teams know not to
break an unwritten rule? I have a hard time believing 30 different teams all
individually decided not to take advantage of an uncapped year, and if they all
made an agreement with each other that is a SERIOUS issue. Essentially they all
agreed to keep player salaries low, something the players' association should
be concerned with.
Roger Goodell held a press conference today
during the owner's meetings and talked about the importance of increasing the
league's transparency to fans. When asked about this dispute, however, Goodell
would not comment past an ambiguous statement released earlier. I guess
transparency only applies to teams Goodell likes since everyone in DC is still
waiting for some kind of explanation. As much as he may want the Redskins and
Cowboys to just suck it up and take the penalties, there are too many questions
surrounding this issue for that to happen. Why did the league approve these
supposedly illegal contracts? Why did 30 teams know not to break this unwritten
rule? Why are those teams now so mad? Why did the players' association approve
of these punishments despite the implications of collusion among the other
teams? With arbitration now looming, commissioner Goodell better brace himself
to answer a lot of tough questions he could have avoided had the league treated
the Redskins and Cowboys fairly.
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