What a Capless, Guaranteed Contract Would Look Like in Today's NFL

The key to understanding the NFL's salary cap and contract structure is to understand that it is, primarily, a marketing campaign. 

Logic does not have to thrive in marketing. Human beings do not drink Coke because it tastes the best of all possible soft drinks. In fact, in most studies done in the '80s and '90s, it fell behind New Coke, which bombed in the market and is now an afterthought in history. An NFL world with a guaranteed and simple contract structure, much like the one enjoyed in the MLB and the NBA, is one that doesn't exist because it provides no benefit to those in power. Logic doesn't win out because logic isn't the prime aim of the system. 

The big change in imagining a new NFL world with guaranteed contracts is, thus, a sequence of unraveling the reason the current system is in place. A lot of businessmen who don't spend all day working out and training their bodies to win football games are necessary parasites to keep the NFL functioning. Much like the absence of zinc in the firing pin of a gun in The Simpsons, losing the current structure means that the status quo will need some changes. That, or we're going to be reduced to throwing the gun instead of shooting it. 

How your sausage is made

Let's take a look at Jordan Cameron's new "two-year, $15 million deal" with the Dolphins. 

Year	Base Salary	Guaranteed Money	Signing Bonus	Game-day Roster Bonus
2015	$1 million	$5 million	$2 million	$2.5 million
2016	$7.5 million	$0	$2 million	$0

That sure sounds like a lot of money to you or me. I'd like Bleacher Report to give me $15 million to write pieces like this.

In reality, Cameron is guaranteed only $4 million. Cameron suffered from post-concussion symptoms for an awful lot of last season, so the Dolphins rolled $2.5 million of that contract into game-day roster bonuses. If Cameron continues to not play—due to a condition he suffered while playing football—he will not make any money. 

Meanwhile, Cameron's contract contains a $7.5 million base salary that, barring his return to a Pro Bowl player that most of the NFL sees as unlikely, will probably never be seen. It's phantom accounting.

But it's phantom accounting that helps market the deal as a good one for the player and, most importantly, for the agent. Because when news of a signing breaks, we never hear about the guaranteed amount unless the agent think it's necessary. ESPN's Adam Schefter is our nation's preeminent source of football news, but his reliance on those sources to feed him means he doesn't do much actual questioning of them. The incentives align on both sides.

It's also good news for the owners, who get many benefits from the way this is structured. The most obvious is that if a player gets hurt or becomes a media pariah, they don't have to pay him. But it's also in their best interests to make fans and onlookers believe they paid a lot for these players. It shows their commitment to winning. It makes players more susceptible to being shamed for underperforming an arbitrary dollar amount that they'll probably never see. It makes the debits of the owners seem much more onerous than they really are, which is a nice concept to have in your bag when you're debating city councils for stadiums and dodging congressional hearings about your tax-exempt status. 

The only losers in this deal are the players, and as we promote the "next man up" mentality, very few of the men playing this sport make waves. For every Russell Wilson there are 20 Brooks Bollingers. By limiting the number of men who can live the dream, and making many of those who can extraneous parts, we fuel this ethos of the little engine who could, ignoring the broken-down engine newly left behind. 

A pyrrhic victory

The interesting thing about the hypothetical jump where we remove bonus money and the salary cap is that, with one exception, it probably wouldn't change much for the NFL's rank-and-file players.

Instead, it's the big-name players, even with the franchise tag artificially depressing the market, that would see the biggest upturn in salaries. If you compare the top average salaries in MLB to what we currently have in the NFL, you'll quickly notice that the distribution is much more uneven in favor of the big names in baseball. 

MLB Player	Average (Total)	NFL Player	Guaranteed Average (Total)
Miguel Cabrera	$31 million ($248 million)	Ndamukong Suh	$9.9 million ($59.95 million)
Clayton Kershaw	$30.7 million ($215 million)	Aaron Rodgers	$10.8 million ($54 million)
Max Scherzer	$30 million ($210 million)	Sam Bradford	$8.3 million ($50 million)
Alex Rodriguez	$27.5 million ($275 million)	Calvin Johnson	$6.9 million ($48.75 million)
Giancarlo Stanton	$25 million ($325 million)	Matt Stafford	$13.8 million ($41.5 million)

Basketball gets around this by putting a cap on each individual contract, meaning LeBron James makes roughly as much as a player who barely qualified for "max" status, like Nets guard Joe Johnson. 

Without subsequent moves to raise the minimum salary or an attempt to recoup the big salaries at the top of the draft, the end result of this would be that a vast majority of the available money would head to the top 20 percent of players in the NFL, with a few outliers because of the extra attrition and the lack of those players that actually hit the free market. In other words: quarterback salaries are going up, top edge-rusher salaries are going up, keep-up-with-the-joneses contract prices are going up, and roughly everything else is staying the same. 

I would argue that, without a little jurisprudence, this actually isn't the optimal outcome for NFL players. NFL rosters are enormous compared to MLB and NBA rosters. Football is a more physical game that leads to more injuries that tests those extra players. 

Instead, I think the NFLPA would be better served letting a cap stand. Sports ownership has gotten insulated and self-serving enough to unofficially collude on payroll limits extremely well over the past 20 years. Outside of the Hank Steinbrenner Yankees, I can't think of a team that was head and shoulders above everyone else on spending. In the NFL, Washington and Dallas were penalized by the commissioner's office for going above a salary cap that didn't even exist. Instead, the NFLPA should be chasing quicker benefits, higher minimum salaries and an expansion of the Proven Performance Escalator system.

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The PPE is earned by meeting certain playtime thresholds. Any player who plays in either 35% of his teams snaps over a three year period or has two individual seasons with at least 35% playtime will earn the escalator. For the 2015 season the player’s salary will equal the salary of the lowest Restricted Free Agent tender. For this year that number will be somewhere between $1,503,000 and $1,574,000. 

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If a union is only as strong as its weakest members, there is no weaker sports union than the NFLPA, which asks its lowest-tier players to take enormous health risks and consistently worry about their job being lost in the churn if they can't play through injury. 

Improving things for those players would do a lot more for the health of the union than making sure Tom Brady makes more money than Alex Rodriguez.

The floor is the ceiling

However, there is some potential for wackiness with the removal of a salary cap with the NFL as it stands, and that wackiness would be owned almost entirely by teams that have been perpetually skimming the salary floor. Teams must spend 89 percent of their total salary cap space from 2013-16 or face a wrist slap penalty, which means they've also been allowed to kick the extra cap space around into years that benefit them. 

Patient zero is Marcedes Lewis. Coming off the franchise tag in 2011, Lewis signed a five-year, $34 million contract. Here are his contributions to the Jaguars over the timespan of his contract:

AV	PFF Rating	Total Snaps	Salary
11	+24.9	2,698	$26.75 million

On any contending team with ambitions of improving in the short term, Lewis would have been jettisoned years ago. The Jaguars haven't released him yet, and have no reason to. They need to hit that 89 percent floor figure. Lewis is the NFL's version of the NBA's "expiring contract player," except in the NFL's case, Lewis' value is that he helps contribute to that 89 percent. This has been a common practice in Jacksonville and Oakland over the past couple of seasons, and it's hard to blame them for it considering most star NFL players won't head to wasteland teams over an extra $5 million to 10 million. 

Of course, the penalty for not making that 89 percent figure is a complete cop-out, as the CBA states: 

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Any shortfall in the Minimum Team Cash Spending at the end of a League Year in which it is applicable (i.e., the 2016 and 2020 League Years) shall be paid,on or before the next September 15, by the Team having such shortfall, directly to the players who were on such a Team's roster at any time during the applicable seasons, pursuant to the reasonable allocation instructions of the NFLPA.

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Regardless, I think there's reason to believe that this would create a small side market for mistake contracts or unlikely bounce-back seasons. A contract like Brandon Marshall's, which got shipped to the Jets this offseason for a mid-round pick, could have value to teams looking to avoid stepping on the toes of the agreement. 

Ultimately, this is just a thought exercise. The NFLPA is in such dire straits that they can barely find a leader without controversy. Thinking that we'll have guaranteed contracts one day is sheer lunacy.

Still, it's interesting how different an optimal market for the NFL is from the other major sports leagues. Roster size and attrition really make a big difference. I think you could even argue that, based on the demands of the position, running backs may need their own union. All but the ones headed to the Hall of Fame have been sucked dry by the time their rookie contracts come up. 

But that is a challenge that will continue to exist only in thought experiments. The marketing plan has worked. The current NFL salary structure benefits too many people to ever change.