WP: Redskins salary-cap woes were a hometown production (Wise)

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Originally Posted by elkabong82

Taking a cue from zoony and mad mike, I wonder if Redskin STHs could sue the NFL as a collective group for damaging their investment because of a cap penalty that came out of illegal collusion.

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If I was a STH I would be contacting a law firm right now to discuss the merits of a class action law suit against the NFL. They are selling you a product they have deliberately tried to tamper with, and they are distributing the money you pay to watch the team that has been tampered with to other teams. STH pay to watch a team that is supposed to be as competitive as the other team they are playing on any given Sunday. Where each team has the same opportunity to succeed. Sure, one team always emerges as the better team, but that is why you play the games. Both teams are supposed to be starting on equal footing though.

The Redskins have had that opportunity to start on equal footing tampered with. If they manage to overcome it again this year, which we all hope they do remains to be seen. Still doesn't change what the NFL has done, and at the end of the day a class action lawsuit from Redskins season ticket holders would at least annoy the **** out of them which would delight me personally to no end.

The people who insist on saying Dan Snyder and the Redskins deserved what they got in any way just bug the **** out of me.

"Oh, there was agreement amongst the teams, the Redskins broke that agreement..." So did almost every other friggin' team in the league. A bunch of teams in the league dumped money into the uncapped year. Some players got paid huge base salaries in the uncapped years. Some contract written as late as 2008 had huge bonuses be paid out in the uncapped year, big bonuses were paid in the uncapped year. The only team I can find that didn't, in some way, abuse the crap out of the uncapped year, ironically enough, the Giants. So at least Mara's a man of his word when it comes to colluding to keep salaries down.


People who walk in and say that the Redskins deserved to get penalized are wrong. They are wrong. The Redskins and Cowboys did what they did to gain a competitive advantage. So did every other team who did what the same way. And so if that were the case --- that the Redskins and Cowboys gained an unfair competitive advantage by restructuring money and dumping it into the uncapped year (and one could argue that the Cowboys failed miserably at that, because their cap was still a mess even after they did Miles Austin's deal the way they did it) --- then every other team in the league that supposedly agreed to this should've been punished.

In fact, the Saints and the Raiders both did the exact same things we did, but they weren't punished at all, except they didn't get a cut of our cap space. Why weren't the Saints and Raiders punished when the league came straight out admitted that they also structured contracts in a way to clear cap space and give themselves an unfair competitive advantage? Why didn't they get the entirety of their extra cap space removed? All things being equal if they're guilty of committing the same crime, no matter what the extent is, they should get the same penalty we got.

Why? Because this has **** all to do with the Redskins breaking an agreement and getting an unfair competitive advantage.


In my humble opinion, what this was about was 1.) Jeffrey Lurie and John Mara conspiring to screw over division rivals, and 2.) a handful of small market teams being pissed off at Dan and Jerry for constantly outbidding them, overspending and pushing up the franchise tag numbers so they couldn't keep guys an extra year without giving them a big deal.

Lurie and Mara saw the Redskins with $36 million in cap space, a blockbuster trade for one of the best quarterbacks in the draft, and an opportunity because small market teams were cheesed off at Dan. And they worked it to perfection. The Redskins (and to a lesser extent, the Cowboys) didn't gain a competitive advantage over the NFL. The Redskins gained a competitive advantage over the Eagles and Giants, the two big dogs of the NFC East. Sure, Dallas popped up every once in a while, but most of the time, the Cowboys and Redskins played second fiddle to the Eagles and Giants.

And so those two organizations conspired against their division rivals. Mara used his power on the NFL Management Council to influence the other owners to go along with it saying they'd get a cut of the cap. And smaller market teams automatically get two of the biggest players in free agency and the guys who typically set the market on players out of there.

And then the NFL strong-armed limp-dicked D. Smith and the NFLPA into going along with it under threat of not raising the salary cap. Remember how long it took for the NFL to set the salary cap last year; they waited until damn near the start of free agency, March 13th, to set the salary cap. For sake of contrast, the salary cap this year was announced on February 28th, 3 weeks in advance.

They held onto the salary cap number until the very last minute, with the NFLPA under threat that if they didn't agree to the penalty, there'd be a low cap number, and D. Smith couldn't have that with his re-election coming up that same week, and no one had realized what a crappy CBA this was for the players just yet. And so, because D. Smith is a *****, the NFLPA agreed to the cap penalty (despite having all the evidence of collusion he could've ever wanted if he had ever just asked why).

The NFL, John Mara and Jeffery Lurie conspired to **** the Redskins and Cowboys. It's hard to gain a "competitive advantage" when all but a handful of people are doing the same thing.

It's like getting punished for doping in biking by being stripped of every title you've won, only to find out that everyone else is doping, but in slightly smaller quantities. Everyone else is still doping, so what difference does it make how much or how little they're doing?

If Dan, Bruce and Mike made any mistake, it was opening themselves to a body shot that, if they took a glance around at what the rest of the league was doing despite being "warned", they had no idea was coming.

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Originally Posted by NLC1054

The only team I can find that didn't, in some way, abuse the crap out of the uncapped year, ironically enough, the Giants.

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Well the giants did go over the "cap" in 2010, so in some sense they are culpable.

But right now I can't actually trace the money trail for that year, the info seems to have vanished mostly. But I have read recently and do remember some posts from Florio at the time, detailing all of the teams who went over the cap and what means they used. As I remember, the Giants did accelerate bonus into the 2010 season.

Same act as the Skins.

The source was Jacobs' contract and Tuck's contract. Now to the exact numbers, again, I can't find it now through searches to verify and I don't have any bookmarks from 2010. I know that Jacobs signed a huge deal in 2009 after a monstrous couple of years. He then eventually restructured in 2011 after a disappointing 2010 season and then had another disappointing, injury laden year(s) of '10 & '11 seasons. So he was released in 2012 by the giants and you have to wonder if the contract was set-up so that the release was feasible due to the fact that 2010 had the largest hit. I've read he had some dead money in 12, but they didn't go belly-up from it.

I've read, from an unverified source with various total numbers that I can't trace, that both the Tuck and Jacobs deals had accelerated bonus money in 2010 and it was very much like Hall's kind-of arrangement.

And it was more than just a handful of teams that were over the cap, something in the teens of teams were over. Same number of teams were using the "dumping" strategy. You covered New Orleans, but Green Bay too and Chicago accelerated the money.

And we're not even talking about what Tampa did to gain record cap room in future years by spending 79 million on a 123 million cap in 2010, "under the floor." In 2009, teams had to spend a minimum of $107-million on players' salaries.

The fact that this thread is still on the front page is the reason why Wise still has a job.

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Originally Posted by HateYanksDukeCowboys

Wise's argument = "She got raped b/c she dressed like a slut, so she had it coming."

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:ols:...Very true. :yes:

It's depressing to keep seeing this thread and thinking about it, it just ain't worth the stress at this point but in the end, we gave 'em a clear shot at us and they took it. There's no right to it, no justice, but the if you step off the curb when that bluehair down the block is comin' at you in her beast Buick, you can only ***** so much about getting run over.

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Originally Posted by Monk4thaHALL

And we're not even talking about what Tampa did to gain record cap room in future years by spending 79 million on a 123 million cap in 2010, "under the floor." In 2009, teams had to spend a minimum of $107-million on players' salaries.

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Exactly.

To me, it's not even about Wise. He saw Redskins fans on Twitter getting salty and pounced on an opportunity to piss people off. He openly admits he really likes to dig at Redskins fans, which should be a disqualifier from employment, but whatever.


To me, at this point, it's about the Redskins fans who have to keep finding some way the Redskins are in the wrong here. Did the Redskins take some sort of principled stand against collusion? No. They worked a loophole. So did everything else.

Pretending that this is about the Redskins breaking some unwritten rule and that they deserved what they got because they were "warned" is creating a solution in search of a problem. It's not about an unfair competitive advantage being gained. It's about screwing them over, plain and simple.

No one's complaining about how little money the Bucs spent 2009-2011 when Raheem was there, and the ginormous amount of cap space THEY gained by simply not spending any money in preparation of two of the most well stocked free agency classes in recent memory. But the Redskins gained an "unfair competitive advantage" by doing something that nearly every other team in the league did.

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Originally Posted by NLC1054

They worked a loophole

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Agree with your post. Something else that is irritating me, is people keep using that word "loophole" to describe the Redskins and Cowboys actions.

http://dictionary.reference.com/brow...ole?s=t&path=/

3. a means of escape or evasion; a means or opportunity of evading a rule, law, etc.: There are a number of loopholes in the tax laws whereby corporations can save money.

There was no "loophole" to be exploited. There was no salary cap in 2010. The prior CBA allowed for this, by the design of the owners and players union who agreed to said CBA that stated very clearly 2010 was to be uncapped. To say that the Redskins exploited a "loophole" implies rules regarding a salary cap where none existed. As far as I know, there was nothing in the CBA that implied teams were required to act as though there was a cap even though a cap did not exist.

Failing to comply with a verbal back door gentleman's agreement to violate Federal Law (Collusion) is not exploiting a "loophole."

It's not commiting a crime, whatever their reasons self-serving or not.