The only sensible thing to do is play less football, unless you happen to own a football team.
The NFL and the union representing the league’s players appear to be nearing the end of negotiations — players will vote on the deal soon — for a new collective bargaining agreement that will determine how the business of the NFL is run for the foreseeable future.
As with most CBA negotiations — or anything complicated, really — you’ve probably tried to pick up just enough information to have a take on the matter. This is natural of course: a CBA negotiation of this sort is insanely complicated, and unfolds over the course of many years. To truly understand it you’d need to have some legal background and be a part of the process.
So we’re all sort of left grasping for “takeaways.” To know “what it all means.” Thankfully NFL owners made it easy this time around: Their primary goal was to add games — and therefore revenue — while conceding very little to the players who would have to play those games.
And frankly, the NFLPA should have never let it get this far. Adding games to the NFL schedule — the proposal agreed upon by the league and player reps, but not by the full body of around 2,000 players, adds a regular-season game and two additional playoff teams — is the wrong thing to do. It’s the wrong thing to do for current players who will be asked to absorb more hits, and it’s the wrong thing to do for the sport of football moving forward.
Of course the idea of more games is great. Football is great! It allows for many different kinds of athletes — huge and powerful, small and slivery, pocket QBs and darting QBs (who can still throw it, like Lamar) — to come together to play at once our most complex and brutal sport.
But it is truly brutal. There are dozens upon dozens of families that have been torn apart by a former football player’s crippled memory, debilitating headaches and violent outbursts — all likely caused or exacerbated by brain injuries incurred while playing and practicing football.
The science surrounding CTE remains young. Perhaps someday we’ll have answers for why Aaron Hernandez’s 27-year-old brain was riddled with the degenerative disease when some former players show no signs of it. But we’re not there yet.
The sensible thing to do, then, is to safeguard the game by creating an environment where players take fewer brain-jarring hits. And to the NFL’s credit, it has taken steps in that direction. The game is less violent than it once was. New rules make off-season workouts and pre-season practices safer for players — and the proposed CBA would improve those conditions.
Those changes didn’t buy extra games, though. That should have been just the start; the NFL, if it really cared as much as it says it does about player safety, would be eliminating more pre-season games (the current proposals drops that number from 4 to 3) and adding bye weeks (the proposal adds none). It would be encouraging the banning of tackle football prior to the age of 14. It would be acknowledging that what we know about both the short- and long-term damage caused by football now is incongruent with the idea that it’s healthy or normal for the human body to be used to play football for even 16 weeks (plus camp and playoffs) a year (a lesson Andrew Luck and Luke Kuechly pointedly taught us recently.)
Adding games is the worst possible message … and it was also inevitable. NFL owners, under the leadership of Roger Goodell, have turned every part of the league into a money-making venture (admit it, you’re watching dudes run around in spandex as you read this.) Games, through television and stadium revenue, drive the most profits. So here we are.
Adam Schefter, an NFL-friendly reporter working for one of the league’s television partners, tried to frame the proposed CBA as a win by comparing it to deals in the country’s three other major pro leagues. His math and logic were both highly questionable, but also miss the broader point: football isn’t like those games. The rosters are much larger, meaning less per player, and the churn of bodies through the league creates a distinct caste system: there’s the few hundred players most fans know, who get to sign those big second contracts. And then there’s the majority of the league, guys who will be lucky to play three years and walk away with a few hundred thousand in the bank.
This deal is designed specifically to appeal to those players, who hold a majority of the vote. From the incomparable Jenny Vrentas of Sports Illustrated:
NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told the media “an important goal for this CBA was to better serve the 60% of players who are employed on minimum-salary contracts. This deal would increase minimum salaries $100,000 in the first year, and NFL Network reported that they would rise past $1 million for all players by 2029.”
The NFL is betting here that it will continue to have a supply of young players willing to put their bodies on the line (17 games, sure!) to fill out rosters without any guarantee of a second contract, and that’s a rock-solid bet. The league is also gambling that most of its marquee players — many of whom (including Aaron Rodgers, JJ Watt and Richard Sherman) are against the deal — will ultimately give up the fight and focus on preparing for another season. Also a safe bet.
We won’t ever be able to pinpoint what the impact of adding games is on players. It’s not like we can look at Junior Seau’s or Dave Duerson’s or Andre Waters’ careers and identify when they’d had too much. There’s no table to tell us when they started the slide from high-functioning athletes toward disabled men so lost and angry and depressed that they would opt to take their own lives.
Revenue, though, is easy for an owner to calculate out, and it is there to be earned right now, and so it will be.
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