football Archives - Page 17 of 43

What's a franchise tag?

Dear Sports Fan,

What’s a franchise tag?

Thanks,
Aaron

Dear Aaron,

A franchise tag is a contractual technicality National Football League (NFL) teams can use in negotiating with one of their players who is going to become an unrestricted free agent. Of all the major American sports leagues, the NFL is the one where the power is most unevenly shifted towards the teams and against the players. The franchise tag, although it does have some benefit for a player who receives one, is an expression of the power teams have, even over star players.

Players in the NFL can sign contracts with teams for one or more than one year. The best players often sign longer contracts than their coworkers. Three or four years is fairly ordinary for these players. At the end of every contract, a player becomes either a restricted or an unrestricted free agent based on the small print in their original contract and league rules. A restricted free agent is allowed to negotiate with other teams, but if they receive an offer from another team, their current team is allowed to match it. If the first team matches the offer of the second, the player stays on his current team. It’s not up to him. If the team chooses not to match the other team’s offer, the player will go play for the new team but his original team receives some compensation for his loss from his new team – usually in the form of a draft pick in an upcoming draft. Unrestricted free agents don’t need to deal with any of this complication. They are free to negotiate with all the NFL teams on the open market. If another team offers them a higher salary or is more attractive for some other reason, they can go play for that team. The choice is 100% the player’s and their original team gets nothing in return.

The easiest way of thinking about the franchise tag is that it’s something each NFL team can do place restrictions on one of their unrestricted free agents each year. This seems unfair, doesn’t it? Well, I suppose it’s not because these rules were collectively bargained for in negotiations between the NFL and the Players Association, but I’m sure it still feels unfair to a player whose free agency is taken away from him in this way. When a player receives a franchise tag (or “is franchised”) he receives a set salary based on the position he plays and the type of franchise tag his team placed on him.

There are three types of franchise tags:

Exclusive – This is the most restrictive form of a franchise tag. When a team uses an exclusive franchise tag on a player, they have effectively resigned him for one year at quite a high salary. An exclusive franchise player gets either the average salary of the top five players at his position or a 20% raise over his salary last season, whichever is bigger.
Non-Exclusive – This is the most common form of franchise tag. A non-exclusive franchise tag restricts a player very much like being a restricted free agent. He is free to sign an offer sheet from another team but if his team does not match the offer, it gets two first round draft picks from the other team. That’s a high price to pay for even a great player. If the player stays on his original team, he gets the same deal as described above in the exclusive section.
Transition – This type of franchising is not really used anymore. It was once a way of restricting a player’s movement without even guaranteeing him a salary but that unfairness has been rectified. It’s still a little cheaper for a team to use a transition tag but if another team signs the player, the first team receives no compensation.

Teams don’t need to use a franchise tag every year. In fact, only a handful of teams use one each year. They are, after all, pretty expensive since the team is then responsible for paying one of their players at a rate commensurate with the top players at his position. Teams can tag a player as a franchise player for a second or even third year but it gets more and more expensive each year. Not only do those 20% raises add up but after the second time, the team is required to provide a 44% raise instead of a 20% one! The one counter-intuitive loophole to this is when a team has the best player at a relatively cheap position, like kicker. In this case, the best player may be able to get a significantly higher salary on the open market than the other top players at his positions. Paying that player the average of his and the next four players at his position might be a lot cheaper than just paying him what he’s worth.

Why do teams use franchise tags? Aside from the rare case when it’s cheaper, primarily, it’s a negotiating tool with a player the team would like to hold on to. If the two sides are having trouble negotiating a long-term deal, the team can use the franchise tag as a way of forcing the player’s hand (see, you’re not going anywhere, now let’s figure out how to make a long-term deal.) That’s the best case scenario. In the most cynical view, it could be used by a team as a way of holding on to an important player without committing to him in the long-term. The risk for a player is that if he gets hurt during a year when he’s on a one-year franchised player deal, he may not be able to command as high a salary in as long-term of a deal as he once was. In a worst-case scenario, a franchised player could suffer a career ending injury and never have a chance to sign the long-term deal they thought they would be able to get.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Errol Morris on electric football

Errol Morris is widely regarded as the premiere documentary filmmaker alive. This week, the sports and culture website Grantland has declared it to be “Errol Morris” week and is celebrating their own invented holiday by releasing a brand new Errol Morris short documentary each day. The first one, It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports: ‘The Subterranean Stadium’, is a 22 minute slice of life focusing on a man whose love for electric football permeates the life of his wife, family, and friends. I plan to watch and review all of the films this week. For full disclosure, I am a big fan of both Grantland and Morris, so I’m likely to enjoy most of them. I loved this one.

The film begins by focusing on the game of electric football. Electric football is a table-top game invented in the late 1940s and still produced today. Although its prominence in the world of football make-believe and simulation has long been superseded by both fantasy football and football video games, electric football continues to have a passionate following and is still sold today. Since its invention, more than 40 million sets have been sold. Players set up miniature football players on an electrified field. When a switch is flipped, the field electrifies, and the players, whose bases serve as conductors (both for electricity and to provide direction for the player), take off. When a defender makes contact with the player with the ball, the play is over and the setup begins again. By now, of course, you might be thinking that you don’t actually feel that interested in the minutiae of an archaic sports simulation. You’re in luck. No matter what the subjects of Morris’ films are, what he cares about is people.

People are the true focus of this film and the results are spectacular. Morris’ films can be separated into two main groups: the ones where he takes a serious topic and dissects it (like wrongful conviction in The Thin Blue Line, the Vietnam war in The Fog of War, or Abu Gharaib in Standard Operating Procedure) and the ones where he takes a frivolous or mundane topic and enlivens it (like small town life in Vernon, Florida or animal lovers in Gates of Heaven). This is definitely an example of the second. Love and humor are present in the thirty year tradition of gathering once a week in John DiCarlo’s basement to play electric football but as the documentary goes on, you begin to understand that there’s real pathos as well. Morris and whoever created the music for the film do a masterful job of allowing some of the tough realities of these people’s lives trickle into the film. You learn that DiCarlo is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from serious health problems due to his exposure to Agent Orange. The scene-stealing star of the film, a hot-blooded hot-dog vendor nicknamed Hotman (real name Peter Dietz) provides laughs and grins for most of the film and then the best line towards the end. When discussing his regret about never having children, he looks at the camera and says, “I had to play the hand I dealt myself.”

“I had to play the hand I dealt myself.” That line perfectly encapsulates this short film. The people who congregate in John DiCarlo’s Subterranean Stadium are realistic about their lives but also unrepentant. They know better than we do that winning an electric football simulation can only momentarily sooth the wounds of the lives they’ve lived, full of war and drugs and hardship and loss, but they’re unrepentant. The awkward beauty of the mangled card metaphor is that, had Dietz thought about it a little longer, he would have found that the perfect metaphor wasn’t playing cards with all its inherent randomness but electric football where you place the players where you want them and then sit back and watch the action unfold.

The best sports stories of the week 2.28.15

No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:

How Madden Ratings Are Made

by Neil Paine for the Five Thirty Eight

Oh no! Not video games AND sports. It’s true, the subject of this article is the attempt to accurately recreate the strengths and weaknesses of real-world football players in the most popular football video game, Madden. One of the most fascinating aspects of this piece is the graphic showing how different strengths are weighted in importance for different positions. You can learn a lot about real football from how the game programmers decided to do this. For instance, look at how the importance of the pass blocking skill varies across the offensive line positions. It’s most important for the left tackle, who protects the blind side of all right-handed quarterbacks. Note that the tight end is the only offensive position where all the skills have some importance to the overall rating — the tight end is a hybrid position that does a little of everything.

There’s no good way to overcome the problem of simulating a quarterback like Manning, whose most important skills — reading defenses, calling audibles, seeing things on the field that no one else can, and making sound decisions — are instantly negated when a gamer picks up the controller.

“Quarterback decision-making is the most difficult thing to simulate,” Moore said. “We’re trying to simulate strengths and weaknesses as best we can within the game, but how you play the game is still you.”

Wasp species named in honor of Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask

by Carolyn Y. Johnson for the Boston Globe

Everything you need to know is contained in the headline of this article… but that doesn’t stop it from being a ludicrously fun short read.

“This species is named after the acrobatic goaltender for the Finnish National ice hockey team and the Boston Bruins, whose glove hand is as tenacious as the raptorial fore tarsus of this dryinid species,” the authors wrote in the paper, which has been accepted and will be published in April.

The name also fit for other reasons. The project that led to the discovery of the species was underwritten by the government of Finland, Rask’s home country. The wasp is yellowish and black, similar to the Bruins’ colors. The grasping front legs of the female have claspers that look vaguely like goalie gloves.

The battle within Larry Sanders

by Kevin Arnovitz for ESPN

Two months ago, Larry Sanders was the promising young starting center for an NBA basketball team. Now he’s unemployed after negotiating a buy-out of his contract. What happened and what does it mean for mental health advocacy in sports?

This presents a stubborn paradox for NBA teams: Mental health treatment for players can’t realize maximum effectiveness until there are first-class services in place. But it’s hard to sell owners, management and players on shelling out for first-class services until they’re proved effective.

All the while, NBA players struggle in the shadows. Virtually everyone in the league can rattle off names of current or former players who needed serious help but never found it. A player who is getting razzed on social media for pouting his way through a season is actually dealing with the sexual assault of a loved one who lives across the country. Another player who seems uncomposed on the floor and confrontational with teammates and coaches suffers from acute anxiety and the prescribed medications are having an adverse effect. Read deeper into any story about fragile team chemistry or “off-court behavior” and there’s likely a component of mental health embedded inside.

How does scoring work across sports?

Understanding how scoring works is one on the fundamental elements of beginning to understand a sport. I’ve written in the past about how scoring works in football and bowling and I will certainly get to other sports in the near future.

For today, I’ve created a simple chart that you can use as a reference as you watch different sports and wonder what types of scores are or aren’t possible.

A few things that may jump out at you as you read the chart.

Football has by far the most varied and complex set of scoring options. It’s also the only sport where a team cannot score a single point. The one point extra point is only possible in conjunction with a six point touchdown.
Hockey and soccer, the two lowest scoring sports, are also the only two where scoring more than a single goal at one time is impossible.
While the mechanism for scoring a point in baseball is solitary (a player runs around the bases and touches home plate without being caught out by the defensive team, it is possible to score one, two, three, or four runs at one time.
Football and basketball both use the term “field goal” but in football it refers to kicking the ball through the uprights while in basketball it’s simply the official phrase for tossing the ball through the basket. It’s possible for both field goals to be worth three points to the team making them but in basketball a two point field goal is also ordinary.
In basketball, a field goal plus a free throw is popularly called an “and one.”

Let me know if this is useful and what other sports you’d like to see added to the chart!

How do trades work in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching Moneyball with my husband. We were curious how trading works in various sports. Can you explain the rules and how they are implemented. For example why do trades happen in the middle of the season for some sports, but not others?

Thanks,
Sarah

Dear Sarah,

At it’s heart, Moneyball is a story about how careful analytical thought can provide an organization an advantage over its competitors. The team at the center of the story, the Oakland Athletics baseball team, exploited its competition mostly by making unexpectedly smart personnel decisions. In any sports league, teams have three main ways of acquiring players: by drafting players not yet in the league, by signing players who are free agents, and by trading for players. As you pointed out in your question, trades work a little differently in each major sports league in the United States. While an explanation of the exact rules in each league could easily give even the most long-winded Russian novelist a run for her money, I’ll try to lay out a few of the major differences in a few mercifully brief paragraphs below.

Hard Cap, Soft Cap, or No Cap?

One of the biggest factors affecting how players are traded in a sports league is the salary cap structure. A salary cap is a value, set before the season, against which the aggregated salaries of all the players on a team are compared to. In leagues with a hard salary cap, like the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL), teams are (with very, very few exceptions) not allowed to exceed this value. In leagues with a soft salary cap, like the National Basketball League (NBA) there are a host of ways that teams can exceed the value set by the salary cap. Depending on how a team manages to exceed it, they may be assigned a financial penalty but not one that hurts them on the court. Some leagues, primarily Major League Baseball (MLB), have no salary cap. In baseball, teams can pay their players as much or as little as they choose and the market will bear.

These rules have a deep impact on the trading culture of the leagues. Having a hard cap restricts the possible trades teams can make. Any potential trade that would put a team over the salary cap is a non-starter. Having no cap, like in the MLB, means that teams are free to trade players pretty much however they want. The in between world of the soft capped NBA is perhaps the most interesting. NBA trades are often more about finances than they are about basketball players. Because teams are constantly in the process of manipulating their payroll in order to position themselves best within the complicated world of soft-cap exceptions, you’ll often see basketball trades that, if you don’t understand the financial and cap implications of them, seem totally crazy. For instance, one team might seem to give a player to another team for virtually (and sometimes literally) nothing. Or a team might send a good player to a team for a player who has had a career ending injury. In those cases, what the team is getting back is not the injured player or nothing, but some element of financial flexibility.

To trade a draft pick or not?

In all four major U.S. sports leagues, there are entry drafts each year where teams get to take turns choosing players who aren’t in the league yet. In all but one, teams can and often do trade their right to choose in a future year’s draft to another team. The one league where that is (again, basically) not allowed is the MLB. Teams in the other three leagues often get themselves in trouble by mortgaging their future for their present by trading a lot of their future draft picks away. One entertaining aspect of trading draft picks is that the order during drafts is set (more or less) by how teams did in the previous season. The worse a team does, the more likely they are to have a high pick in the upcoming draft. If the team you root for has another team’s draft pick, it’s order is still set by how that team performs, so a good fan will root against that team all year to optimize the chance of its draft pick being a good one.

Do the players get a say?

This all seems fine and dandy until you stop and think about players and their families who can get uprooted at any moment and forced to move to another city. This is definitely part of the business of sports and most players don’t have much control over their careers in this way. There are a couple major exceptions. When a player negotiates his or her contract, they can negotiate a full or partial no-trade clause. A no-trade clause, sometimes abbreviated as a NTR means that a player does have some say over whether and where they get traded. A partial no-trade clause means a player has to maintain a list of some number of teams they would be willing to be traded to. A full no-trade clause means they have complete veto power over any trade. Usually only veteran or star players have the clout to negotiate these clauses into their contracts. In the MLB, players who have played for 10 years and have been with their current team for five consecutive years are automatically given no-trade clauses. This is called the 5/10 rule.

How does the sport itself affect trading?

The final major factor that goes into defining the trading culture of a league is how easy it is for players to switch teams mid-season. You mentioned in your question that some leagues don’t seem to have mid-season trades. That’s only partially true. All leagues allow for mid-season trades (at least before a trade deadline) but there is one league where they rarely ever happen. That league is the NFL. This is mostly because football is so complicated and so reliant on the close-to-perfect collaboration of lots of interconnected parts. It’s really difficult for a player from one team to move over to another team in the middle of the season, learn their plays and their terminology, and make a difference to the team’s fortunes that season. Compare that to the NBA where teams often run similar plays and the individual talent of one player (of the five on the court at one time compared to the 11 in football) can make an enormous and immediate impact. NFL trades are rare. NBA trades are quite common.

— — —

Like I said, trading is such a complicated business in sports that a post about how it works from league to league could easily morph into an unreadably long essay. I think this is a good stopping point for today. These four factors probably account for the majority of the trading differences within the four major U.S. sports leagues.

Thanks for reading and questioning,
Ezra Fischer

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why do sports leagues have All-Star games?

Thanks,
Greg

Dear Greg,

With the NBA All-Star game coming up soon, it’s a good time to tackle your question. All-Star games are an exhibition that many sports leagues put on in the middle of their seasons. Based on voting by fans, coaches, or some combination of the two, the best and most popular players are selected to play a game in mixed teams against each other. These games take many shapes and have different histories, but the common theme is that they generally lack the competitive nature typical of professional sports. They are essentially an entertainment, not a competition, and they are often accompanies by a host of other sports related competitions. All-Star games are loved by some fans, hated by others, and both loved and hated by a third group. They are more successful in some sports than others. So, why do sports leagues have All-Star games? Like any good child of children of the 1960s, my short answer is: follow the money.

From the start, All-Star games have been about money. The roots of today’s All-Star games can be found in games that were quite literally about money — benefit games. The NHL seems to have been on the forefront in this department. Wikipedia lists several early benefit games including a 1908 game to raise money for the family of a player who had drowned, a 1934 game to benefit a player who had his career (and almost life) ended in a violent hit, a 1937 game in honor of a player who had his leg shattered and died soon afterwards, and a 1939 game to benefit another drowned player. From raising money for a particular cause, All-Star games soon became about raising money directly or indirectly for the league itself.

Wikipedia tells us that the first professional league to have an All-Star game was Major League Baseball which held what they thought was going to be a one-time event in 1933 as part of Chicago’s World Fair. (quick side-note, if you haven’t read Erik Larson’s book about the fair, The Devil in the White City, you should!) History.com has a good article about the game, in which they claim that, “the event was designed to bolster the sport and improve its reputation during the darkest years of the Great Depression.” In the three years before the All-Star game, baseball’s attendance had dropped by “40 percent, while the average player’s salary fell by 25 percent.” Teams were experimenting with all sorts of promotions to try to bring fans and money back into the game and while Major League Baseball donated the proceeds of the All-Star game to charity, they surely profited indirectly from the attention it garnered. The All-Star game was a success, with hundreds of thousands of fans casting votes for which players they wanted to see and the top vote-getter, Babe Ruth, hitting a home run during the game. After the success of the 1933 game, baseball decided to make the All-Star game an annual tradition.

Other professional leagues in the United States soon followed along: the NFL in 1938, the NHL in 1947, and the NBA in 1951. For newer leagues, like Major League Soccer, the WNBA, and Major League Lacrosse, the inclusion of an All-Star game must have seemed like an obvious move. It seems like the All-Star game is primarily an American thing with some international sports leagues following along, but not all of them. The world’s most popular leagues — all soccer leagues, of course: the British Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, and the Italian Serie A don’t have All-Star games. The Canadian Football League had one on and off from the 1950s but has not had one since 1988.

The format of All-Star games and accompanying competitive side-dishes have been tweaked over and over over the years to try to make the games slightly more competitive and therefore more entertaining to watch. These innovations seem to have generally moved in waves. Early on, some All-Star games were between last year’s championship team and a mixed team of players from other teams. After that, the now standard game between two mixed teams based on conference or league came into fashion. Two other formats that have been experimented with in the hopes of ginning up some competitive juices have been teams based on geographic origin (often the United States or North America vs. the rest of the world) or having teams chosen by two players or former players alternatively picking from the pool of All-Stars. I’m not sure that either of these have been very successful. The more successful though rare and extreme version of this is to actually invite a foreign team to play against a team made up of All-Stars. This happened very successfully in 1979 and 1987 in the NHL when teams of NHL All-Stars played against a Soviet national team. It’s hard to replicate that success because it was so reliant on the Cold War. Major League Soccer’s All-Star team plays against a European club team which kind of works but also is an admission of how weak the MLS is in comparison to other leagues. All of these innovations are intended to make the game more competitive. Perhaps the most extreme attempt came in 2003, when Major League Baseball took the extraordinary step of awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the league whose team won the All-Star game.

All-Star games are not only an opportunity for professional sports leagues to attract attention and earn money, they are also great opportunities for players. Players on the NBA All-Star teams this year will make $25,000 for playing in the game and another $25,000 if their team wins the game. The side-show events like the dunk contest and three point contest have their own purses that go to the individual winners of those competitions. Like for winning the Super Bowl, players may also have negotiated bonuses in their contracts for making the All-Star game.

The NBA All-Star game, which takes place this weekend in New York City, is definitely the biggest and most visible of the professional All-Star games in the United States. Check back in later today for a beginner’s guide to all of its elements.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

Was Deflategate NFL misdirection?

Remember Deflategate? The scandal that rocked the National Football League (NFL) world for the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl? Just hours after the ACF Conference Championship game (one of the NFL’s two semifinals) word started to spread on Twitter that league authorities were going to be investigating the Patriots for illicitly manipulating their set of footballs to gain a competitive advantage. For the next two weeks, we learned more about the NFL’s process for providing, handling, and manipulating the footballs that each team uses when they play offense than we ever thought necessary. We heard from physicists and statisticians. Billions of words were spoken and written about this story — how serious of an offense was it? how should it be penalized? how does it change the legacy of the Patriots as a team and franchise? of coach Bill Belichick? of quarterback Tom Brady? Then, finally, on the day of the Super Bowl, news came out from NFL sources, that of the 12 balls the Patriots provided and used, 10 were inflated only slightly under the permitted lower limit and only one was significantly under-inflated. This was an almost complete reversal from what we thought we had known for the previous thirteen days, which was that 11 of the 12 balls were significantly under-inflated. Of course, now that the Super Bowl is over, most people have moved on from this controversy. It’s left me wondering though: how much was Deflategate NFL misdirection? Is it possible that the NFL used this half-scandal the way a magician would use a harmless explosion — to distract from more important and revealing subjects?

It’s not an argument that Cyd Ziegler of Outsports makes about the apparent black-balling of gay football player Michael Sam, but he easily could. Instead, Ziegler makes a determined, unrelenting, well-researched, and ultimately convincing case that Michael Sam has been denied an equitable chance to play in the NFL because of his sexual orientation. Read the article, read the article, but even if you don’t, read Ziegler’s conclusion:

The answer to the question I’ve posed to so many – Why is Michael Sam not with an NFL team? – is also likely the most obvious one: because he’s openly gay. Defensive ends with the same size and the same speed – yet with less production in college and the NFL preseason – are in the NFL and Sam is not because he’s gay and he just won’t stop being gay.

The question I would like to pose to NFL executives is this. Knowing that you were distinctly vulnerable to criticism on big social issues like providing employment opportunity free of discrimination to people of all sexual orientations and your season-long struggle to come up with and stick to a coherent policy on domestic abuse, did you gleefully glom onto a much less meaningful controversy about deflated footballs and keep fueling it through the two-week period before the Super Bowl that is often used as a referendum on the stories of the season and the state of the NFL? If you knew that only one of the 11 under-inflated footballs was more than marginally below the permitted range, which you must have known when you tested them at halftime of the game, why did you only correct the story that all 11 we’re significantly under-inflated on the day of the Super Bowl?

I’m simultaneously interested in figuring out if the NFL chose to use Deflategate as misdirection so people would not be thinking or writing about more serious topics leading up to the Super Bowl and also happy that people like Cyd ZIegler are focused on what is important.

What do football players earn from winning the Super Bowl?

Dear Sports Fan,

What do football players earn from winning the Super Bowl? From the looks of abject despair on the faces of the losers and joy on the faces of the winners, it’s hard for me to imagine that they’re playing just for love of the game.

Thanks,
Devin

Dear Devin,

You sound awfully cynical about the motives of professional football players! You’re right that the players in the Super Bowl were not just playing for love of the game but my guess is that the joy and excitement or despair and anger you saw in the final moments of the Super Bowl were more purely motivated by a desire to win than you expect. There’s a long argument to be had there but instead, let’s focus on the other aspect of your question: what do football players earn from winning the Super Bowl? As with many questions of money, the truth is surprisingly elusive. There are lots of hard-to-know or define details about the potential financial benefit of winning a Super Bowl. There are also some very well known parts of the equation. We’ll start with those.

The National Football League (NFL) itself has a set group of financial rewards that go to players who play in each round of the playoffs, including the Super Bowl. Here are those figures:

Wild Card round – $22,000 for members of wild card teams and $24,000 for members of division winning teams.
Divisional round – $24,000
Championship round – $44,000
Super Bowl – $49,000 for members of the losing team and $97,000 for members of the winning team.

There are a complicated set of rules about which players are eligible to receive playoff money. Although the National Football Post has a detailed explanation of how it works here, probably all we need to know is that some amount is given to players who were injured during the season. Even a player who was traded away from a playoff team during the season, like former member of the Seahawks, Percy Harvin, might collect some money. In addition to the amounts above, the NFL sets aside $5,000 per player for a Super Bowl ring. This may not seem like a lot, but the rings are not an insubstantial financial reward, although most players probably regard theirs as mementos rather than an investment. According to Brad Tuttle in his Time article on the topic:

Then we must add in the fact that each of the 150 or so players and coaches on the winning team gets a blingy Super Bowl ring. The NFL allocates $5,000 per ring, but the winning teams are known to spend much more on them. Given how rare and collectible they are, a Super Bowl ring is easily valued at $50,000 to $75,000 and sometimes is worth in the hundreds of thousands if it’s owned by a notable player or coach.

Players do not generally earn salary during the playoffs. At first, it seems awful to ask players to risk their bodies and minds in playoff games without being paid for it, but if you look at it another way, it seems reasonable. Only 12 of 32 teams make the playoffs. If I were an NFL player, I would be far more angry if my salary was only paid to me in full if my team made the playoffs. Whether it’s literally paid during the 17-week regular season or over the 22-week season with the playoffs, or even in even chunks across the entire year would not matter as much. Still, this split between regular season salaries and playoff payouts from the NFL does lead to some curious differences. Bloomberg has a beautifully illustrated article by David Ingold and Adam Pearce that points out the absurdity of the Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, who is still on his relatively limited rookie contract, being able to make up to 20% extra during the playoffs while New England Quarterback Tom Brady capping out at only an additional 1.1% because his normal salary is so big. If it were really all about the NFL payouts, Brady wouldn’t care nearly as much as Wilson about winning the Super Bowl.

There are many other financial factors though. Players can negotiate for performance-based incentives in their contract. Some of these may be playoff or even Super Bowl incentives. It’s hard to know what all of these are for the players on the Patriots and Seahawks, but you can get a hint by looking into each player’s contract history in a tool like Spotrac. Take a look at Patriots tight end, Rob Gronkowski. The last time the team made the Super Bowl, in 2011, he got a $800,000 incentive bonus. I don’t know specifically what that was for, but he didn’t get anything like that much in any other year. Spotrac lists out the performance incentives for Patriots defensive lineman Vince Wilfork for 2014 and they included a $2.5 million bonus for playing 70% of the team’s snaps and making the divisional playoffs. We don’t know the particulars of every player contract but it’s safe to say that some have significant playoff or Super Bowl bonuses worked into them.

The last piece of financial reward is the hardest to quantify. Winning a Super Bowl makes you more famous and well-regarded. Fame can easily transform into endorsement or advertising deals, at least for players in visible positions or who made extraordinary plays. Being regarded helps players get more money during their next contract negotiations. Teams value players who have had the experience of going to and winning a Super Bowl and are sometimes willing to pay extra for a player who has done that.

Put all together, the NFL playoff payouts, the Super Bowl rings, the various possible performance incentives, and the hard to quantify but significant benefit that being a Super Bowl lends a player in future football or business contracts, there is a large amount of money riding on the outcome of the Super Bowl. I still don’t think that’s what players are thinking about in the weeks leading up to the game or even the weeks following it, but it is possible.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

College football: If you can't beat them, make them join you

College football is a notoriously hypocritical business. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry but the people who are the main attraction and who take all the physical risk, the players, don’t have salaries. College football players are meant to be amateurs — college kids who also play football. That the NCAA and member Universities are able to maintain this fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary, is absurd. College football is big business. Being a college football player requires well over a 40 hour work week. And, although it varies from school to school and player to player, football is the primary focus for most college football players.

If we’re honest about it, playing football so intensely doesn’t leave that much time for academics. Now, you might be thinking that you didn’t spend that much time on academics when you were in college either. Maybe you spent most of your time following your favorite rock bands, crushing on your classmates, or exploring drugs and alcohol for the first time. Well, you weren’t as focused as most college football players, now were you? These athletes are basically holding full-time jobs down AND going to college while you were just messing around. It’s a lot to ask and frankly, there are lots of ways around it. Many big football schools find a way to make the academic side of college life easier for their football players. They get them private tutoring or help them figure out which classes are easiest to pass. There are also countless more shady means that universities use to help their football players concentrate on football while playing into the charade of academics that the NCAA requires of them.

This is all pretty stupid. The most obvious suggestion would be to divorce football from academia. Create a minor-league for the NFL so that young football players can concentrate 100% on developing their skills while also making a fair salary for the entertainment value they help create. For years, however, I’ve been fascinated by another option. What if, instead of divorcing football, universities embraced it even more fully? Create a football major and allow football players to major in their sport. You can already graduate college with a major in ballet or bassoon. What’s the difference? Like football, ballet is primarily a physical activity. Like football, the market for high-paying bassoon jobs is harsh and limited. That doesn’t stop either of those pursuits from being thought of as legitimate studies. If anything, I would argue that you could create an extremely interesting major around football.

For the first time, this idea seems to be gaining a little bit of mainstream attention, if not steam. Ben Strauss wrote an article in the New York Times about the idea recently. In the article, he quotes two key supporters of the idea, “David Pargman, a professor emeritus in educational psychology at Florida State University, and William D. Coplin, director of the public affairs program at Syracuse University.” I recommend reading the whole thing but here are some highlights:

Dr. Pargman, who started a doctoral program in sports psychology at Florida State and has written several books on athletes, proposes a sample curriculum for a sports performance major that follows two years of basic studies, including anatomy and physiology, educational psychology and a particular sport’s offensive and defensive strategies. By graduation, players would have taken courses in public speaking, nutrition, kinesiology and business law. Practices become labs, supervised and graded by their coaches, though grades wouldn’t depend on game performance — no A for scoring a touchdown.

Dr. Coplin, who has spent his career designing programs to serve students in the job market, believes the skills learned through sports — from highly specialized training to learning a complex playbook to simply being a good teammate— are more valuable to employers than classroom knowledge… He envisions a three-credit seminar in conjunction with an “internship” — a semester on the team. The course could require players to keep logs of what they do each day and write a self-evaluation on career-building skills. “Athletes sometimes don’t realize the value of the skills they’re learning,” Dr. Coplin said. “But employers do.” He argues that their skill set — competitiveness, drive, the ability to work toward a common goal and take responsibility — is particularly valuable in sales and business management. Another idea for the class: an Excel lesson in which a player tracks his performance using trend lines and percentage change.

In the uneasy marriage between higher education and football, divorce is more likely than a renewal of vows, but I am fascinated by the idea of the two sides embracing more fully. I’m a lover not a hater, I guess.

Super Bowl XLIX: What was going on after the Patriots' interception?

In my daily podcasts where I give a forecast of the next day’s sports happenings, I always start out with the refrain, “Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on!” That might never have been more true than last night at the end of the Super Bowl. A lot of dramatic things happened very quickly at the end of the game and if you weren’t well versed in football’s rules, tactics, and language, it was probably difficult to understand what was happening. Lord knows, the football fans in the room were too busy screaming and hollering to explain it rationally to you. This morning I ran through the biggest play of the game, the interception that Patriots cornerback Malcolm Butler made to win the game. The truth of the matter is that the game wasn’t completely over after that play. There were still 20 seconds on the clock. This was enough time for a few confusing things, including a scuffle between players that almost turned into a brawl, and an important penalty. Here’s what happened after the interception and why.

After Malcolm Butler’s interception, there were 20 seconds left and the Patriots had possession of the ball. With that little time, and with the Seahawks only having one timeout, the rest of the game would normally be a formality. There’s a funny little end-game trick about the NFL. It goes back to the rules we talked about in this morning’s post that dictate when the clock runs and when it stops at the end of a play. The clock keeps running if a player is tackled within the field. Because of a loophole in the NFL rule book, a quarterback can simulate being tackled in this manner by simply kneeling with the football. I wrote a whole post about how the kneeling thing works if you want more details. By kneeling with the ball, a team can run up to 40 seconds off the clock on a single play. With only one timeout, Seattle could only stop the clock once — therefore the Patriots needed to kneel twice to win the game.

The problem for the Patriots was where they had the ball. They were so close to their own goal line that there wasn’t enough room to kneel without kneeling in their own end-zone. Remember that the kneel-down is a simulation of being tackled. If a player is tackled with the ball in his own end-zone, the other team has scored a safety. A safety, (covered in more detail in our post about how scoring works in football) is worth two points. Giving up two points wouldn’t have been the end of the world for the Patriots because they were up by four points, but after a safety, the Patriots would have had to kick the ball to the Seahawks. Given even as few as 15 seconds, the Seahawks could possibly have completed a pass or two and kicked a game winning field goal. No way did the Patriots want to risk that!

The Patriots had two options. They had to either call a play that moved the ball forward and then execute it without mistakenly turning the ball over to the Seahawks — a dangerous proposition — or they could try the sneaky way out. As is their M.O., the Patriots went sneaky. They lined up for the play and then just sat there while Tom Brady hollered and screamed to make the Seahawks think he was about to snap the ball and start the play. Movement on both sides of the ball before the play begins is heavily regulated. If members of the offense flinch, their team gets a false start penalty. If members of the defense come across the line of scrimmage where the ball is and touch the offense or force the offense to move in response, they have committed an encroachment penalty. The Patriots knew that Seattle’s defense was furious at the change of fortune from the interception and that they understood the only chance they had left was to tackle whoever had the ball in the end-zone. The Patriots used Seattle’s aggression against them and tricked them into taking a penalty.

The penalty moved the ball five yards up the field and with that much room, the Patriots could easily kneel the ball twice (kneel, Seahawks use their last timeout, kneel again and the clock would run out) and win the Super Bowl. The Seahawks knew that too and the Patriots knew they knew that. It’s customary in these situations for the defense to allow the kneeling to happen. It’s virtually impossible for a defender to get to the quarterback after the ball is snapped but before he can kneel. All that can reasonably happen is an injury. Whether it was because of the unique situation before the penalty where attacking the kneel-down was a reasonable thing to do or just because the Seahawks were angry, they attacked. When this happened, the Patriots got a little angry back at them, more for breaking with convention than anything else, and there was a little bit of a brawl. Once the brawl ended, the Patriots kneeled one last time and then began the celebration in earnest.

Hopefully that made some sense out of what was legitimately a confusing situation, even for football fans. Thanks for reading!