Bottom Line Today's Players are in it for the money

In his induction speech, John Madden swore the busts inside the Pro
Football Hall of Fame chatted with each other in the middle of the
night.

The old legends from a nickel-and-dime era must talk about money. They
won't argue that they were better players. They already know that. They
just happened to play in a time when the NFL was a second-string sport
to the college game and sports television was just a crazy idea.

In retrospect, the staggering rise in player salaries has been the most
significant change in the 87-year history of the pro game. The players
are bigger and faster. And the 1977 rules changes made the NFL the land
of milk and honey for quarterbacks and receivers. Yet, the busts of
those legends will tell you the biggest change in the game involves
salaries.

Credit former players executive director Ed Garvey and attorney Dick
Berthelsen for the money tree. They finally won enough court fights to
gain the right to obtain copies of each player contract.

"It was essential," Garvey said, "because not knowing what other
players were getting, you had no bargaining leverage whatsoever. The
word was out that Vince Lombardi had two sets of contracts." Garvey
even recalled hearing that Forrest Gregg, an all-pro Packers tackle,
had played for $19,000.

The players union distributed its first salary survey after the 1982
season. The numbers were shockers. St. Louis Cardinals quarterback Neil
Lomax ($130,000) earned only $30,000 more than Joe Bostic, one of his
guards. Many earned less than $40,000.

Everson Walls, a cornerback signed by Dallas in 1981 as a free agent,
intercepted 18 passes in his first two years. His salaries were $32,000
and $37,000. After two Pro Bowls, the Cowboys offered him a modest
raise that Walls rejected.

"Ronnie Lott and Lawrence Taylor used to kid me about my salary at the
Pro Bowl," Walls said. "One night, Ron Springs and I had a couple of
beers and came up with a plan. I didn't want to get fined, so I retired
for five days."

The fuming Cowboys brought Walls back with a $125,000 signing bonus and
a $120,000 base. When the nervy United States Football League launched
a salary war, the Cowboys signed Walls to an annuity deal that
guaranteed him $100,000 for 10 years.

Meanwhile, the NFL owners agreed to a historic free-agency/salary-cap
system in which the players were guaranteed a percentage of gross
revenue and were free to move after four years. Garvey had proposed the
system for years.

"It was one of the greatest innovations for salaries in terms of labor
peace," Garvey said. To keep their players, teams began offering
signing bonuses right up there with CEO deals.

Today teams employ money crunchers known as capologists. And if they
never touched a football, who cares - as long as they keep the team
under the $102 million salary cap. Players last year earned 65.5% of
DGR (defined gross revenue such as ticket sales; TV revenue, etc.). In
1973, teams paid players only 39.2% of gross income, an average of
$2.452 million a team.

Agent Leigh Steinberg said there were two factors that held salaries
down before the boom. "The revenue base was exponentially smaller," he
said. "And there was no free agency."

Then the base exploded, with each new TV deal virtually doubling
revenue. There were renegotiations and huge bonuses and tricky
free-agent deals in which the capologists were magicians with the
numbers. "Pro football became an established primacy, the No. 1
attraction in the United States," Steinberg said.

As the late George Young once said, "It was a great time to be a
player." Yet, agent Peter Schaffer notes the owners prospered, too,
with franchise values soaring past the billion-dollar mark. "Everyone
associated with this fantastic sport recouped the benefits," he said.

So the game is draped in thick layers of money. It is the perfect sport
for TV in terms of action, event spacing and time frame. Remarkably,
there isn't a tiny clue that revenue will eventually level off.

The busts in Canton will tell you they played for the love of the game.
Now they play for the love of the big money.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/columnist/forbes/2006-09-07-forbes-column_x.htm

David E. Garnett
President
iAM Solutions, LLC
703.926-9134 - mobile