Some NFL owners aren’t happy with the free market and are not even happy with how the market is regulated in their own sport. The league instituted the salary cap in 1994 to artificially keep the price of labor down in football.
Some NFL Owners want a “quarterback cap”
As President discussed on GH, Tom Pelissero of the NFL Network told Rich Eisen that certain owners of NFL teams have talked about instituting a “quarterback cap” within the salary cap:
“There certainly has been discussions within the league among certain owners about even the idea of a quarterback cap, that at some point you want quarterback numbers to not go over a certain percentage of your salary cap.
To my knowledge, that hasn’t really gained much traction, in part because so many teams have paid their quarterbacks. If you went to suddenly an NBA model where all of a sudden you have the max and the supermax and there’s really only a couple levels that guys can get paid at, it kind of changes the dynamics in terms of how you set yourself up salary cap-wise.”
The NFLPA wouldn’t like the “quarterback cap”
There are numerous problems with this idea. Mike Florio with NBC Sports wrote that the player’s union would take issue with any “quarterback cap,” and the league’s owners would be forced to establish the cap in secret:
The only way to properly arrange for a league-wide cap on quarterback pay would be to negotiate it with the NFL Players Association. And such efforts would quickly highlight the reality that there should be different bargaining units for each position, like running back. For that reason alone, the union would be inclined not to agree to such an approach.
The problem with the “quarterback cap” is that it would undermine the ostensibly basic intention of the salary cap. The idea of the salary cap was to keep parity between all teams in the league (and keep more money in the owners’ pockets). It’s worked, as elite players hit free agency every season because playoff teams are in the red heading into March.
The “quarterback cap” would do the opposite because it would allow teams that hit the jackpot at the most important position in football to keep costs on such talent down. With the money they save via the “quarterback cap,” a team can sign more quality players at the expense of rosters who need better players at other positions to compensate for not having an elite quarterback.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and other teams would benefit
For example, the Kansas City Chiefs could have reduced Patrick Mahomes’ salary this offseason and used the extra space to keep L’Jarius Sneed. The Cincinnati Bengals could have extended Tee Higgins’ contract if they didn’t have to worry about Joe Burrow’s deal.
One team that would benefit from the “quarterback cap” this year would be the Dallas Cowboys. Jerry Jones wouldn’t have to worry about giving Dak Prescott $60 million. He wouldn’t have had to worry about losing core players like Tony Pollard and Tyron Smith as he juggles the contracts of Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons.
The idea of a “quarterback cap” shows that the league doesn’t care as much about parity as it does about artificially keeping market prices down. Wealthy owners discouraging their most talented and important employees from bargaining for their true market price is eye-opening. It’s a blatant message of anti-capitalism.
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