By Rich Tandler
NFL free agency will start six weeks from tomorrow. The word “overpaid” always gets thrown around and it is likely that the word will be trending madly on Twitter when March 13 rolls around. Fans of teams from coast to coast will be experiencing sticker shock on player contracts.
The main reason is the new TV contracts that will kick in for the 2014 season. The deals with NBC, CBS, and Fox will pay the NFL about $3 billion per year. That is an increase of about $1.1 billion per year.
The effect of the new money on the salary cap will be dramatic. One element of the new CBA is that players get 55 percent of TV revenues.
You don’t have to be a math major to figure out that when the new deals start up the players’ slice of the new money will come to well over $500 million per year. In terms of the salary cap, that comes to an increase of about $19 million per team per year. That will mean that we will see salaries and bonuses rise dramatically in the last few years of deals.
Add that to the fact that teams will be able to add unspent 2011 cap dollars to their 2012 salary caps and we will see some record deals for top players and very pricey contracts for average players.
We might see some of it before the actual start of free agency with some players getting new deals from their current clubs. But the Brinks trucks really will start parking in players’ lawns and dumping big money when free agency launches at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 13.
Brace yourself, Redskins fans. Your team will be overypaying and oversending left and right, but everyone else will be, too.
Rich Tandler blogs about the Redskins at www.RealRedskins.com. You can reach him by email at RTandlerCSN@comcast.net and follow him on Twitter @Rich_Tandler.
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