NFL players have real chance at changing the salary cap in 2019

Players are becoming more vocal when it comes to how they feel about contracts. Recently Russel Okung also made his feelings made about player contracts and the salary cap. 

Twitter is a fascinating place. Anyone is able to jump on and tell his or her friends and family about their daily lives. Not only that, but it has become one of the best best news sources for sports these days. In that same vein, it has also been used by players to either promote their brands, yell at Ian Rapport for leaking their contract or voice their opinion on issues going on in the league.

We recently saw the latter of these things happen when Russell Okung took to Twitter to express his feelings about the current state of the NFL salary cap and players not receiving guaranteed contracts.

Here’s what Okung wrote. (Okung’s Twitter discussion is rather lengthy but is well worth the read.)

Okung makes multiple good points, mainly pointing out that billionaire league owners make more than 50% of the league revenue. Even with this fact, there are fans who believe that players are greedy for wanting more money in a highly physical sport where the average career for a player in the league is just over three years.

Now, I understand its hard to feel sympathy for a player that has made millions of dollars to play a game. Okung himself has made $69,987,588 million per Spotrac over his last eight seasons in the league.  We as fans have to realize that they get paid as much as they do because of how much we love the sport. Everyone wants to make more money at his or her jobs. Whether you are making minimum wage or billions of dollars, people always want to make more money in their respective career.

Another good point made is the fact that even with all of the talk about league ratings falling over the past couple of years, major networks are still paying hand over fist for the rights to air the games. The rights to Thursday Night Football were recently up for grabs due to the expiration of the contract between the NFL, CBS, and NBC. FOX was able to snatch up those right for an outrageous $3 billion dollars over a five-year contract. To put this in perspective, FOX paid for the rights to air 55 games over the deal. That averages out to a mind-blowing $54.5+ million for a single game—just for Thursday nights. This doesn’t include any of the other 245 games that the league airs throughout a single season.

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During Okung’s Twitter thread, he also posted that salary caps are not suitable for players. He would be right in thinking this. Having a cap on how much teams can spend is naturally going to make them penny pinch when it comes to paying players. The only position that this does not seem to happen to is quarterback. If the league were to start handing out guaranteed contracts to all players, the most likely reaction from owners would be to pay players less. Even if the Collective Bargaining Agreement undergoes drastic changes, the salary cap isn’t going anywhere.

With guaranteed contracts counting directly against the cap it would restrict teams ability to finagle things so they could get all their players under the cap. Having 53 man rosters just makes the prospect of doing this difficult for teams. The only way we could see this happen is if we saw a drastic jump in the salary cap.

While the salary cap may not be suitable for players, we can see the benefits that it has compared to other leagues. If we look at the NBA, which has a soft cap, we can see that it does not stop teams from building superstar rosters reasonably easily. Of course, all general managers across any sport want to create an organization that dominates. Knowing who is going to win the league championship at the end of free agency is not very entertaining for fans. You could point to the Patriots as a similar team due to their success over the years in the AFC.

The difference is Bill Bellicheck has proven that he can win with anyone. It isn’t the NFL’s fault that Bellicheck was able to install a college-style offensive system in a week and turn around and beat the Houston Texans. The ability to do that without his star quarterback Tom Brady is impressive to no end. The salary cap is an imperfect system no doubt about it, but it is one of the best ways to give smaller market teams, like Kansas City, a chance to win a championship.

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What Okung’s overall message is through his discussion is that there is a need for change in the NFL. The current CBA ends at the end of 2019, giving players a perfect chance to change things in their favor. The issue with this is that it is a lot harder to organize 1,700 players behind a few set causes compared to 32 league owners. There is a change coming to the NFL in the next couple years, and the players have every opportunity to change it in their favor. It is just doubtful that we will see the players band together long enough to get what they will be demanding.