There's a big difference between "crying" for the players and saying that the owners bear the brunt of the problem, but I guess even that's too subtle for you to grasp. Or maybe you're just being argumentative for that sake.
What problem exactly do the owners have? You're complaining about an employee, who after their rookie contract (barring a franchise tag) willingly enters into a contract that does not explicitly state any sort of team control, and then they want more input into how the business operates simply because they believe their an asset based on their salary. I'm not sure what you do for work, but please, go tell your boss and the ownership group of your company how valuable of an asset you believe you are and that you'd like to have a say in who gets hired/fired.
That's an interesting premise, but at the end of the day if you're going to have a team salary cap you need an individual player cap as well or else it reduces the amount other players can make without any avenue to make it up. It's not as if the rest of the players in the league can simply sign with any other team who will have more money available for them if the majority of the league is "overpaying" QB's. The only way to reasonably offset that is to cap what any single can make within the team cap. I can't wait for that fight to break out between the owners and the players. EDIT -- I take that back, that's a fight between lower and mid-tier players and top earning players, not players vs owners; it doesn't ultimately matter to the owners how the cap gets divided amongst the players if the team cap isn't impacted. and, in the end, there are more lower and mid-tier players to win that demand than high earning players.
What are you saying then? The salary cap should be higher and that would mitigate the issues with quarterbacks eating up all the cap space? And that's because of greedy owners oppressing players? Yeah the quarterbacks would definitely not want more and more money to make up the same percentage of the cap. The issue is not that there's not enough money to go around. And that's what you're making it into.
Explain it without being vague then. It's the greedy owners that dictate the cap (not true, it's negotiated), yes? What's your issue with the cap as it pertains to players versus owners?
I wasn't vague at all, but to try once again, here is what I'm saying: I'm countering the assertion that it's entirely the fault of greedy QBs for the situation that teams claim they can't afford to pay other players. The owners set the cap limit. They could set it higher. Owners also agree to the amount of the contract. They could refuse to pay that amount. I'm also saying that players have some blame in this. QBs that demand too much money without regard to how that impacts the amount left over to pay for other talent are selfish and shortsighted. Players that can't come together in a unified fashion to have a strong union to compel the owners to be more reasonable also have to look in the mirror. And star players (usually QBs) who sign a contract and then try to demand a say when they weren't promised one, or force a renegotiation after the fact, are wrong to do so. I did NOT give the players any kind of "free pass" nor condone failure to honor the terms of a contract they willingly signed. Understand now?
I never said it was the fault of the greedy quarterbacks though so I'm not sure where you're gathering that from. I applaud any man or woman for bargaining their way into the best contract possible. But they sign those deals while full well knowing what the cap is, regardless of whose fault you think that is (and again it's negotiated and generally steadily increases on given terms in normal years). Brady has given every single one of these guys the blueprint towards building a winner and not one has taken advantage of it, especially in their latter years. Rodgers and Wilson are constantly concerned about their legacy. If they cared more about their legacy than their wallets then they would lower their contract numbers so their team could add a couple more players. If not, all good, but they shouldn't complain about wanting the team to do X, Y or Z. They are the reason the team can't and their paid to cover up offensive deficiencies. The Seahawks have given up 28, 31, 36, 24, 38 and 31 points in their last six playoff losses. The Packers - 31, 37, 44, 26, 28, and 23. Not to mention the overwhelming sentiment is that Rodgers wants more receiving help and Wilson wants more offensive line help. Offense and good to great quarterback play gets you far in the regular season. Well rounded teams win in the playoffs and Super Bowls. It's awfully difficult to round the team out with big QB cap numbers.
Well when I said I was trying to balance the laying of blame entirely on "greedy" QBs, I wasn't necessarily saying that YOU said this, but the tone of the conversation seemed to imply this. Anyway, yes, I agree that players need to honor the terms of the contracts they agree to, and have no standing to complain if their sucking up the bulk of the salary pool prevents a better team being built around them. But owners do have a share of the blame in this as I pointed out. As for Brady, none of us know what his full compensation was comprised of. Yes we know he took less straight salary, but what else did he receive? For all we know he might've received a share in the team or some other compensation that made him the "greediest".
When a guy marries the richest supermodel on the planet, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it wasn't for "true love", but who knows.
I've heard some people discuss having the quarterback not count against the cap to make it better for the rest of the players, but that would just drive up their price even further. I would be pissed If I were a guard busting my ass on every offensive play just to get 1/10th of what the qb gets, too.
I'd sit those QB's down and hand them a computer and all the cap information....ask them how they would address it with what they are making. Then maybe they can go tell a teammate that they can't pay them because he's making the bulk of the money.
My late father, who was a huge Yankees fan, used to call Mariano Rivera "Mario." Didn't matter how many times I corrected him.
That's actually a good idea for teams to do when the player asks for "more input" into how the team is run.
JV is right though. If you set the cap higher then QB's will just want an increasing percentage of that higher cap. I do think that players should get a somewhat higher percentage of overall revenues but I don't think that because I think QB's are undercompensated. I think QB's are clearly overcompensated in the current structure. At some point the analytics on the cap structure will meet up with the marketing analytics and we'll see a halt to QB compensation growth as a percentage of the cap and likely a significant reduction in cap dollars spent on QB's. We're not there yet though and it's unclear when the switch begins to happen. The new generation of great QB's are largely players of color and I'm going to guess they're going to bring the house down around QB compensation eventually because of the way our society works.
