Rich Tandler's Real Redskins

Free agency deadline still Thursday at midnight

The extra 24 hours that the NFL owners and players agreed give themselves to try to decide on an new collective bargaining agreement (or, more accurately, more time to negotiate another extension) will not change the free agency rules. According to Adam Schefter, the extension is just a negotiating extension. The deadline to sign free agents, waive players, and conduct any other player moves that were permitted prior to the start of the new league year remains at midnight on Thursday. After that, no player moves will be permitted until the labor issue has been resolved. The signing of O. J. Atogwe apparently will have to satisfy the free agency hunger of the Redskins fans for a while, perhaps for a long while.

A ray of sunshine in NFL labor talks?

There is talk that there might be an extension of deadline for the NFL and the players' association to cut a deal. According to multiple sources on Twitter and Adam Schefter speaking on SportsCenter just a few minutes ago, the two sides are discussing pushing back the start of the league year in order to give some more time to work out a new collective bargaining agreement. Don Banks of Sports Illustrated quoted a source who said that the extension talks are "legit but fragile". The fact that an extension is being discussed implies that there is some progress being made in the talks. If there wasn't some give and take going on, which has been notably lacking to date, there would be no reason to to extend the agreement. An offer by the owners to show some financial information may have been the impetus to getting the two sides to talk about extending the deadline. Apparently, the owners have offered the extension and the players are considering it. Multiple extensions were agreed to in 2006, the last time the CBA was being negotiated. The eventually did get an agreement.

Some movement towards rookie scale?

There seems to be some movement that might lead to the inclusion of a rookie wage scale in the next collective bargaining agreement. Kevin Mawae, Tennesse center, was on The Herd on ESPN Radio today and he had the following to say on the subject:

"As a guy who has been in the league for 14 now going on 15 years and being around other veteran guys, for a young guy to get paid that kind of money and never steps foot on an NFL football field, it's a little disheartening to think of," Mawae said. "It makes it tough for a guy who's proven himself to say 'I want that kind of money' when the owners, all they're going to say is, 'Well, you weren't a first-round pick.' "And I know there is sentiment around the league amongst the players like, 'Let's do something to control these salaries and control these signing bonuses' and things like that, and I know that's something that the owners are talking about and I'm sure that's going to play in to this round of negotiations for this collective bargaining agreement," he said.

Mawae is no ordinary grunt popping off. He also happens to be the President of the NFL Players Association. That gives his words a bit more gravitas, if you will. When the subject came up in the weeks leading up to the draft, association head Gene Upshaw essentially said that any rookie wage scale proposal would be dead on arrival.

“Every year at this time, I hear it again,” Upshaw said. “They don’t like how the rookies are paid. ‘They need some kind of pay scale.’ Well, I’m not going to limit how the rookies are paid because it has a huge impact on veterans. I’m not going to agree to it.”

Upshaw hasn't addressed the issue lately. He's right that the huge paydays that the likes of Matt Ryan receive (6 years, $72 million, $34 million guaranteed) impact veterans. That's $72 million that is not available to Falcons veterans who have, you know, actually played a down in the NFL. In addition, the big paydays for rookies run counter to the notion that bad teams are supposed to be able to better themselves through the draft. A team getting a top pick has to pay so much money to the new player that its ability to retain its core players and/or attract new free agents is seriously hampered.

Hopefully, this is not something that will become an issue for the Washington Redskins any time soon. They've had enough top 10 picks in the past 15 years or so. Still, fair is fair and the current system clearly is not fair.

The CBA and the Redskins

As expected, the NFL owners voted to end the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players association on Tuesday. The unanimous vote has no immediate impact but it does start the clock ticking towards an uncapped year in 2010.

That season with no salary cap has many Washington Redskins fans gleefully anticipating a Dan Snyder spending spree to end all spending sprees. It's a long way to go before getting there and it would not be the nirvana that many think it would be.

Let's forget just a minute about how players would have to be in the league for six years instead of the current four in order to be eligible for unrestricted free agency, resulting in an older, thinner group of free agents. And never mind that any potential free agents actually would have to be, you know, free agents for the Skins to be able to sign them. They couldn't throw the Washington Monument and White House at Peyton Manning because he's under contract.

The simple fact is that in the billionaire's club that is the NFL, Snyder isn't up there with the real big boys when it comes to personal wealth. To be sure, unlike Buffalo's Ralph Wilson and Wayne Weaver of the Jags, he sits at the grownups' table, but Seahawks owner Paul Allen could pull enough out of petty cash to buy and sell Snyder a few times over. Snyder made his money in advertising; Jerry Jones made his in oil. Jones' black gold fortune is substantially larger than what Snyder amassed in marketing.

So, even if the Redskins could find enough free agent players that filled their needs, there is no guarantee that they could win a bidding war for the services of those athletes.

It does appear, however, that the Redskins are better prepared for a potential labor standoff than they were the last time the CBA was being negotiated all of two years ago.

Going into the 2006 offseason, the Redskins were way over the cap, some $20 million over the $95 million limit. Some provisions that took effect in the last capped year before an uncapped year (2007 would have been uncapped had the current agreement not been hammered out) that made it impossible for the Skins to use some of their usual methods to restructure deals and lower their cap numbers.

The Skins were headed for cap hell. Not the kind that everyone keeps predicting for them, the kind that never comes. Real, true cap hell.

From an article in this blog entitled "Cap-tastrophe" from February 20, 2006:

One of the problems with cutting players is that with the contracts structured as they are and the fact that most of the contracts are pretty new, there isn't much money to be saved in releasing a lot of players with big camp numbers. For example, LaVar Arrington counts about $12 million towards the '06 cap, but releasing him would result in a slightly higher cap charge than that because of uncharged money already paid to him.

It's like being upside down on a car loan, when the car is worth less than the payoff amount. Cutting Arrington would the put Redskins further away from the goal of being able to get under the cap. The same is true of such players who might be considered expendable in a crisis such as Mark Brunell and David Patten.

Now, to be sure, there are players that the team could release that actually could save money. Some of these players are ones that the Redskins would rather not cut such as Marcus Washington, Ladell Betts, Jon Jansen and Joe Salave'a. However, the Redskins could cut those four plus Taylor Jacobs, Renaldo Wynn, Pierson Prioleau, Philip Daniels, James Thrash, Cory Raymer, John Hall, Patrick Ramsey, Walt Harris, and Matt Bowen and still be about $8 million shy of being able to make it under the cap.

To realize the maximum cap savings, which are obviously necessary, these players would have to be replaced with rookies earning the minimum salary. Thus the "15-20 rookies" alluded to by Prisco and Pasquerelli.

Many Redskins fans have blocked this from their memories since, after a few extensions of the deadline, an agreement was reached and a level of cap hell that no team ever has experienced was averted.

The Redskins appear to have learned from this brush with death. While the same restrictive provisions will be in place in 2009 if there is no agreement before the free agency period starts, the Skins aren't in danger of being decimated this time around.

They only are a few million over the projected 2009 cap and there are a few players who could be cut to save enough money to get them safely under the limit.

There is plenty of time to hash this over in the coming months. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Rich Tandler's Redskins blog archive is located here. You can reach him by email at rich.tandler+bleachers@gmail.com.