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How To Operate A Rookie Wage Scale
Published: April 24, 2009
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With the NFL Draft this weekend, we are soon to see a new group of young multi-millionaire players who will get $30 million guaranteed for their potential alone.
Something needs to be done. The price to sign high draft picks is massive and destroys the parity that the salary cap was initially brought in to provide.
Last year’s first pick, Jake Long, became the highest paid offensive lineman in the league. The first quarterback off the board, Matt Ryan, became the fourth highest paid player in the league last year.
Of course it is ridiculous that a Pro Bowl veteran tackle makes less than a rookie who hasn’t played a down in the NFL. It is also ridiculous that Tom Brady, Kurt Warner, and Donovan McNabb all earned less than Ryan last year.
Seeing these figures must convince any doubters that the current money given to rookie high draft picks is too much. Surely a rookie wage scale is in the future, but how should it work?
Some people feel the NFL should adopt the NBA’s model, but I disagree with this entirely.
Basketball positions are much closer than football positions. A standard wage scaled down based on how high a player is picked would not work in the NFL.
A quarterback and a safety have completely different roles to play and clearly QB is the more important one when it comes to winning a game of football. The only fair way is for rookies to get paid depending on their position.
Many mock drafters are now predicting that Aaron Curry (largely considered to be this draft’s best can’t miss talent) may fall to the end of the top 10, or even as low as 12 to Denver, as the amount to sign him would be too much for a linebacker who isn’t considered to be a 3-4 edge rusher. How about if the rookie salary structure was dependent on position?
There is already precedent for this. Franchise tagged players are paid by position.
Let’s say you take the franchise tag figure at a position, multiply by 0.5 and call that the salary for the first picked player of that position in the draft.
The second player picked at the same position can have the franchise figure multiplied by 0.48 and so on. This would leave teams free to pick the best available player based on both need and how highly they rank the player, rather than on how much money they need to justify paying at a position.
(NB: I am not advocating the top rookie earning half the salary of a franchise tagged player, the example is merely to illustrate how this system could work. As for how much to pay a rookie, I’ll leave that up to the accountants of this world to work out.)
The NFL would also need to take a long hard look at how the franchise tags are organized, something which I believe is in the works due to more players playing multiple positions, different types of players at the same position (e.g. interior and edge linebackers) and new specialist kick and punt returners.
