In the aftermath of last month’s $4.7 billion antitrust verdict against the NFL in the Sunday Ticket case (which, if it stands, will become $14.1 billion), the NFL said the liability won’t directly impact the salary cap. More recently, Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal reported that several owners are considering foisting some of the financial responsibility onto the players.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, the only owner who testified live in court during the trial, said Saturday that the verdict will impact the team-by-team spending limit.
Via David Harris of the team’s official website, Jones said he expects “a lot of ramifications on cap” due to the class action.
“It has to be considered,” Jones said. “It doesn’t make me flare, but it’s a fact. I think I know better than anybody of what the cap will be four years from now.”
To the extent that the Sunday Ticket verdict will potentially impact the cap, the specific amount is impossible to know because the end result of the case could still be zero or close to it. And with the case destined to be taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (after it goes to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit), it could take three or four years before the litigation has reached a final conclusion.
This reality permits Jones’s remarks to be interpreted in one very specific, narrow way. If he envisions “a lot of ramifications” to the cap and if he knows what it will be “four years from now,” Jones possibly expects the league to begin accounting for the amount due before it becomes official.
The union would have to agree, of course. As explained the other day, the NFL Players Association could advance various arguments against the Sunday Ticket outcome impacting the cap, since it’s for management not the players to turn TV rights into revenue.
The league’s hammer could come from telling the NFLPA that it will disband Sunday Ticket for a model that avoids antitrust issues — and that in turn impacts revenues in a negative way. The NFLPA could call management’s bluff, or it could play ball with the league’s effort to begin taking money from the shared revenues and squirreling it away for a rainy day that could end up being a monsoon.
That’s really the potential message lurking in Jones’s remarks. The NFL might have decided to begin planning for paying $14.1 billion not by telling the teams to start figuring out how to come up with $440 million each when the appeals are exhausted but by creating a global fund for paying it all off. Then, if the NFL wins the case, all of the money will flow back into the cap.
It would still be a mess in the interim. Slowing the growth of the cap considerably while more and more cash gets siphoned into the Sunday Ticket fund.
Again, the union would have to consent to this approach. The goal for the owners would be to persuade them to do it.
If nothing else, sharing the burden would incentivize the NFLPA to support the league’s position that Sunday Ticket didn’t violate the antitrust laws. The problem with expressly taking the league’s side comes from the possibility that the precedent created by the case could, in theory, generate principles and reasoning that would negatively impact the players, if/when there’s another reason to shut down the union and sue the league for antitrust violations committed against its labor force.
