The NFL Sells Hope

Professional football is the most popular sport in this country, and tomorrow, April 26, is probably the second favorite day of the year (other than Super Bowl Sunday) for NFL fans. The annual NFL draft of college players begins at 7:00 p.m. Central Time on ESPN and the NFL Network. Each team will have ten minutes to make its pick. The NFL is structured so that all thirty-two teams have a very realistic chance to play .500 ball or better during at least one regular season within a floating three year time frame. It is the only national team sport, at any level, for which that can be said. How far above or below that .500 level (8 wins and 8 losses) any one team achieves is a product of (i) personnel decisions, such as whom to draft, whom to sign as a free agents, whom to cut, whom to trade, and individual player contract terms, (ii) the actual performance of the players and coaches on game days, and (iii) Lady Luck. ESPN radio talk show host Colin Cowherd pointed out a few months ago that, unlike college football where the rich get richer and the same few teams contend for the national title every year, the NFL starts out all of its teams on an equal basis. "After that it's all up to you, baby," he said.

There are four main features of the NFL structure which are intended to result in as much competitiveve fairness among the thirty-two teams as possible. In descending order of importance, they are:

   1. Draft order. The team with the worst record gets to draft first in all seven rounds of the next draft. The team with the second worst record drafts second, etc. The Super Bowl champion drafts last.

   2. Schedule. The teams with the worst records get the easiest schedules the following year. This impacts ten of each team's sixteen regular season games, i.e., all of a team's non-division games. (The eight NFL divisions each contain four teams, and each team plays its three division foes twice, regardless of its prior season's record.)

   3. A "hard" salary cap. Each team has exactly the same maximum amount which it can spend on its roster payroll each season. There are stiff penalties for teams which go over the cap. Compare this to Major League Baseball, in which teams that go over the "soft" MLB cap merely pay a luxury tax. NFL teams cannot simply buy themselves a championship caliber roster, whereas an MLB team can. The New York Yankees are Exhibit A. The Yankees' team payroll for the current season is $198 million; the San Diego Padres' payroll is $55 million.

   4. Revenue sharing. The NFL has a much more even plan for sharing the revenues from television, because the broadcasts and related contracts are tightly controlled by the league. (Heck, the NFL even controls how high the players' socks have to rise below the uniform pants!) In the other pro sports, there is no similar control, with the result being that large market teams have a lot more bountiful revenue stream coming into their coffers than do small market teams.

In college football, a team can have the best quarterback in the country, and still go out and recruit the best running back, the best wide receiver and the best middle linebacker. There is no salary cap, because (unless you're talking about Ohio State or Southern Cal) the players aren't being paid. The NCAA permits college teams to have up to eighty-five players on scholarship at any one time. The NFL's team roster limit is only fifty-three. In the NFL, if a team pays through the nose to have the best quarterback, it won't have enough room under the salary cap to pay the best running back, etc. A team's general manager has to figure out how to divvy up the pie. The wealth of player talent is therefore spread around the entire league.

When you mix in all these factors, the Green Bay (population 105,000) Packers and the Jacksonville (830,000) Jaguars theoretically have just as good a shot of winning a Super Bowl in any three year period as do the New York (8.2 million) Giants or the Chicago (2.7 million) Bears. Someone might ask, why do the New England Patriots, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Packers always seem to have an excellent team, while the Cleveland Browns and the Oakland Raiders seldom do. The logical answer is that the franchises in the former group are better run (see the last sentence of the first paragraph). It's not because the cards are stacked against the latter group (see the four enumerated points in the second paragraph).

As has been said many times, the NFL offers hope to its teams' fans. There are thirty-one NFL teams that are not defending Super Bowl champions. The most important element of hope for each NFL team's fan base that this coming season will be better is the annual draft. That it why the first round will be nationally televised tomorrow night during prime time. Later rounds are scheduled for prime time this Friday night, plus Saturday afternoon. The expected viewing audience is predicted to be above 30 million people, which is very high when you consider that the draft is only carried on cable stations, and the season doesn't even start for over four months. That is also why there are at least eight magazines (at about eight dollars a pop) and dozens of websites dedicated to the draft.

We might be in playoff season in the NBA and NHL, and the baseball season is brand new. But this weekend belongs to football and the NFL draft.