Originally posted by random49er:
Originally posted by OKC49erFan:
Salaries are a cost of doing business. That cost is passed on to the consumer (fans). Players getting the money (along with other costs) leads to higher ticket prices to help run the teams, stadiums (plush or no), etc.
Players getting (more) money DOES NOT lead to higher ticket prices,...lol.
This is a LIE.
The "big wigs" are maximizing the money. The players simply argue for their piece of the pie. Their percentage of revenue sharing is actually LESS than it was years ago. They used to get a 50% cut. It's been as low as 47% in recent CBAs, and is now 48%.
If the revenue gets cut in half somehow,...the salaries automatically get cut in half as well. That's how revenue sharing works.
The NFL as a corporation are the ones driving the prices higher. The players play.
So the anger is misdirected, and exactly why this is a hard concept to grasp is beyond me.
I had this conversation with Bus Cook once (family friend), he was Brett Farve's agent. He was in that orbit a long time, there is so much in the CBA that is legacy stuff from 50+ years ago that keeps getting renewed because it is in the owners best interest. So there is alot of cost protections that really are not needed in today's NFL. He gave an example of an owner who had to take out a personal loan to pay a signing bonus probably in the 50s or 60s...it was some low loooowww number by today's standards like it might have been a couple hundred thousand...I really do not remember the amount might have been 10s of thousands...just that it was low. I think it was Paul Brown or some old school guy like that. When the owners go into CBA negotiations, they still have the lowest common denominator mindset, and rules and regulations still get repeated based on financial situations that don't really exist with the billionaires that own clubs today. in the 90s the owners were still talking about that loan as a potential what if. That is why there is still shielded money, and unsharable money even in today's NFL. When we get price hikes it is normally on that extra money not shared with other teams, and the players....ie stuff that fans absorb when they visit a stadium.
Cash on hand, and signing bonus or guaranteed money could very well drive cost hikes, all that stuff gets put in escrow...even a billionaire is going to notice a $100m dollars sitting in escrow before it gets sent out to players, and owners that will not operate in the red, would have to change their profit model to keep revenue up to compete with teams and owners that have no issue tossing out large amounts of guaranteed money and recouping it some distant day down the road. So in general ....yeah....I agree...it is an owner thing, but also....they have to compete and they don't all have the same personal revenue pool to pull from....so it might not be greed in every case, they have to put out a consumable product or they can fall behind their competitors.
