An Unfair franchise
Posted: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:30 PM
If you’re a Chicago sports fan, you had better hope and pray that the Cubs’ recent surge is going to continue, because it’s starting to look as if the Bears are not going to reprise their Super Bowl journey of last season.
Even in the best of times, teams that lose the Super Bowl have a hard time making the postseason the following year. In the past six years, only Seattle has pulled it off, as Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times points out.
And in the past month, the Bears have gotten worse, not better. In late June, they cut defensive tackle Tank Johnson for an inability to avoid being arrested. And now, All-Pro outside linebacker Lance Briggs says he will sit out all but the final six games of the season because the Bears wouldn’t negotiate a long-term contract that met with the approval of himself and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Instead, the team designated him their “franchise player,”meaning he gets a one-year contract at the average salaries of the top five players at his position – in this case in excess of $7 million.
The Patriots are facing the same problem with their franchise player, defensive back Asante Samuel. Like Briggs, he’d rather sit than play. And as good as the Pats are, you have to wonder how long they can keep losing great players in the defensive backfield and still keep performing at the level to which they’ve become accustomed.
The franchise tag was invented to help both teams and players, and the players association agreed to it. The idea was that when teams and stars were having trouble agreeing on a pact, the mechanism could guarantee that the team got to keep the player and the player got a pretty good salary.
It hasn’t worked that way. Without guaranteed contracts, players get their money in signing bonuses when they ink long-term deals. So when you read that Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney signed a $72-million, six-year deal, forget about the six years. The only figure that really counts is the $30-million signing bonus. After that, it’s a series of one-year deals. The incentive for the team to keep him is that it amortizes the bonus over the life of the agreement. If they cut him after two years, four years of that bonus, or $20 million, will be charged against the next year’s cap.
So teams would really rather sign one-year deals, even at big dollar amounts. But players, whose careers can end on any play, want the money up front.
And that’s where the franchise tag fails. Designed to help both sides, it really helps only one – the team, which gets to keep a critical player without having to worry about next year. The player gets one good salary but no guarantee of anything else.
The league and the union have to change it. Too many players are disgruntled when they get hit with the tag. And now we’re seeing two great ones threatening not to play at all. For the Bears, it’s pretty much a death sentence if Briggs follows through on his threat. For the Pats, it’s another blow to a team that’s lost plenty of great defensive players over the years.
In the end, it’s also not fair. When careers end so early and so often, players deserve something approaching security. This doesn’t give it to them.
