We’re screwed.

Absolutly HORRIBLE move from the league. Detestable as well. And all in he name of a few greedy owners. Our team just suffered a sever blow folks.

the government is going to take another look at the NFL’s anti-trust exemption because of this and the NFL doesn’t want to lose that.

A phony concession for the owners to make when negotiations heat up. No one actually wants this (except Jerry Jones, maybe).

This is a power move by the owners to put pressure on the players union during CBA negotiations. Jerry Jones may not give a crap either way, but I am sure Goodell does. I will be surprised if this stands long term.

If it’s not relocating after Wilson’s death, it’s the end of revenue sharing. Fate seems to really want to take the Bills away from us. Business sucks, and college football is looking better and better every year.

That’s the sound of the freight-line trucks warming up for their trip to 1BD.

The players union plans to fight the move before a special master because it contends that the collective bargaining agreement gives it the right to approve or challenge any changes to the revenue sharing model.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=514957&f=27

It seems nearly certain that no deal will be reached to avert an uncapped year and a management executive said the supplemental revenue sharing applied only to capped seasons. Management claims that the special rules set out to govern an uncapped season should maintain competitive balance even without the supplemental revenue sharing.

This is going to hurt players more than owner. No minimum salaries for one.

Yes, this is bad for Buffalo and the Jags, Bengals and some others. Before dumping on Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder and other uber rich punching bags consider a few things:

1. There are no poor NFL owners. Some have more than others but every person who owns an NFL franchise is a billionaire or very close to it. Can you think of anything more pathetic than a billionaire crying poverty? Generally the spectacle arises when a really rich owner wants the city/state to pay for a billion dollar stadium for his private enterprise. In this case small market owners—all of them rich men—want a handout from the other teams. It’s hard to get worked up about one rich guy whining that he’s not as well off as some other plutocrat.

2. This only became an issue when the owners agreed—all but Mike Brown and Ralph Wilson—to the current revenue sharing system. It was a terrible deal for the owners as it included things like stadium naming rights in the percentage of money due to players. With carte blanch to rewrite the system from the ground up there is no reason to think that this will continue to be an issue.

3. Each franchise is a business. While the franchises share common advertising, rules, products, etc. at the end of the day each is a stand alone enterprise. For example, a friend of mine owns one of the most successful Quiznos in New Mexico. He’s under no obligation to send any of his profits to less successful Quiznos. Why would he? He’s the one who paid the franchise fee ($25,000 by the way), got the loan to build and open the restaurant, hire and train his crew and so on. Likewise, NFL franchises aren’t obligated to support one another financially.

4. I am not advocating a system in which teams get to spend whatever they want on players. I think that would be a disaster. Instead, I believe the NFL will adopt a system where the players get a greater share of the genuinely shared revenue (TV, endorsements, merchandise, etc) and owners keep 100% of unshared revenue (naming rights, parking fees, concessions, etc). Guys like Snyder can continue to merrily fleece fans in his area while teams like Buffalo will earn less—but everyone will have the same amount available to spend on players….and I wouldn’t be surprised to see players insist on forcing teams to spend every penny they can on players every year.

I wish I specifically knew what forms of revenue this was about. Is it all non shared revenue? I assume that tickets are part of this, but what about playoff tickets? Does a percentage of that go into a shared pool? Merchandise? And merchandise sold in stadium too? I’ll assume that advertisements, local TV deals and naming rights aren’t shared, but I could be way wrong on that.

Does anybody know enough about this to explain it a little more? What I know is that every team doesn’t just throw specific forms of revenue into a pool and then every team splits it up evenly. It’s a luxury tax type system like MLB uses where teams that make a certain amount have to put income into a pool where other teams then get that money. I have no clue how it’s determined which teams get the money.

It’s important to realize that football will never be like baseball and the way that certain teams dominate. The NFL gets ridiculous money from their TV contracts and that money will always be shared. Wikipedia has that total at 20.4 billion dollars over the life of all the current TV deals and the article says that all shared revenue sits at 6.5 bil per year. So this 100 mil pool is really nothing in comparison. The NFL is a 16 game season compared to the 162 games of baseball so the big discrepency in tickets sales in baseball adds up tenfold compared to football teams. Even a league that goes without a cap for 25 years wouldn’t lead to anywhere near the spending differences that happen in the MLB where the Yankees spend 6 or 7 times as much as the lowest payrolls.

I don’t claim any real knowledge of what the nfl revenue sharing provides other than the fact that it’s a $100 mio fund that accounts for about 1.5% of revenue..but isn’t the real problem the uncapped year? You guys are making all kinds of references to baseball —baseball has revenue sharing (they call it luxury tax), but no cap.
If there was no revenue sharing but there was a cap, every team would still have the potential to be competitive, right?

What revenue sharing ensures is that teams that lose money still can turn a profit. This is an absolutely ridiculous situation that helps nobody except bad owners. I mean there’s always the case of the “rebuilding year” where the revenue sharing could act as a loan to help poor teams improve there franchise in a manner so that they can turn a profit on their own —but how long should that take? 4 years? Seems fair to me.

It’s not like these owners don’t have the capital to invest in their franchises. Yea, some owners may have have to actually make a real investment in the team to ensure future profit —but that’s the way all business is. If you’re not confident that you can run a successful business —then maybe you shouldn’t be operating it.

There’s also the case of incentives…there is is still the incentive to go out and try to earn more money —make your franchise more valuable etc…but revenue sharing means that you don’t have to. Getting rid of revenue sharing creates an incentive for all owners to be more competitive.

If the theory is true that winning = profit, then the only thing that this will do is force owners to go out and sign the best players.

The other side is that teams that used to lose out on this deal will be bolstered…but again, if the cap remained in place, this should not matter. There didn’t seem to be any mandate that says a team must spend the money it receives in revenue sharing —other than to meet the salary floor. Seems to me that any team receiving money should be breaking exactly even each year.

we are going to hear a lot of claims, some frightening and some that make us excited for improvements to the league, but in the end we should take it all with a grain of salt. This is going to be a very public negotiation process as both sides are going to be duking this out no holds barred. The NFL is one of the premier industries in the U.S., its going to be messy.

Guys. Seriously. You can get off the ledge. This was 100M dollars spread over 9 teams. That’s only 11.1M dollars for each of those teams, presuming Buffalo was one of them.

There is still over 6 BILLION DOLLARS in revenue sharing going on next year. Billion – with a B. Here’s Peter King’s Twitter Take:

Teams will still share about $6 billion in rev. it’s a shot across the bow to players, who will seek to get NFL’s intentions overturned.