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

[Riggo#44]

You know, the more I think about this, and considering Mara's comments about "no Haynesworth deals this year," the fact that the Redskins outbid Mara for Fatty (which should be punishment enough); Mara has been itching for retribution.

This is all because Mara didn't get his was a couple of years ago. This is just payback.

[Dirt]

All the league had to do was say no to the contracts. That's what they would do any other year in the existence of the league. That's why no one else has ever been cap penalized like this in any year, capped or uncapped. In other words, the LEAGUE actually took advantage of the uncapped year by 'letting' a couple teams break the rules so they could punish them later. If it were a capped year, the letter of the law wouldn't have allowed the contracts to go through. The league made the decision to let them. That's on them.

Speaking of fairness (since that's what this is all about right?), it's awfully unfair to give the contracts a thumbs up then punish you later. This is an odd comparison, but it actually reminds me of Joe Gibbs asking an official if he's allowed to call 2 timeouts. "you can." What was stopping that ref from being decent, fair, and just telling Joe it's a penalty?

"Here's these contracts. They're made differently than usual but this is an uncapped year after all. Can we make these contracts?"......... "you can."

That's my problem. It's like being set up.

[DogofWar1]

I feel dirty for having clicked that link, but I figure I should read the thing and extract quotes in order to rebuke it fairly.

Now:

Reality Refresher: Three years ago NFL owners agreed that teams would not be allowed to exploit the uncapped year to gain a competitive advantage.

What Wise fails to understand is that such an agreement was illegal collusion, end of story. The only reason the NFL isn't being sued by the NFLPA and sacked by the Justice department is because the NFLPA foolishly signed away their right to sue, and they and the teams themselves are the ones with standing to sue. I saw Wise's twitter storm a few days ago, and he was told this numerous times that an agreement about salaries in the uncapped year was an illegal agreement, and Wise seems to sort of just brush that to the side with the notion that the NFL is the NFL and can do what it wants.

There was not a written edict violated or a binding contract broken.

This should be the end of story. Redskins and Cowboys (and Saints and Raiders to a lesser extent) were unfairly punished. If there's nothing in writing then there's no rationale for punishment.

There were simply a few teams who made a mockery of a negotiated solution to preserve competitive NFL balance, and the most conniving and manipulative among those teams, the Redskins and the Cowboys (who suffered lesser penalties), basically got voted off the island by their peer group.

Again, agreement was illegal, but setting that aside, Wise ignores all the other teams who acted similarly. Bears spent 8M over phantom cap and bought Julius Peppers. Raiders were punished, and yet Vikings, Seahawks, Jets, and Packers all spent more than them. http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com...-a-salary-cap/

11 teams spent over 130 million with the phantom cap of 123M in place.

And let's not forget that in most years there is a salary floor. Most of the time it's above 90% of the cap, but we'll be generous and only mention the teams who spent below 80% of the phantom cap. Cards, Jags, Chiefs, and Bucs all spent below 80%.

The NFL's rationale for punishment was weak to begin with, but they have nothing to stand on when you consider that 4 teams spent more than the Raiders, and yet none of them were punished, and the cap floor issue was sort of just swept under the rug.

Reality Refresher II: In 2010 the team employed a deceptive loophole that allowed them to distribute all of Albert Haynesworth’s $21 million signing bonus and make it count against the 2010 salary cap, instead of rationing it over the length of his deal. This is doable in years the NFL imposes a salary cap. But it was forbidden that particular year, when the Redskins used it to create future flexibility, so they could spend like crazy in a year they happened to acquire Griffin.

A clause written directly into a contract that all parties agreed to and the league approved can hardly be called a "deceptive loophole." It was neither deceptive, nor a loophole.

Nor was it forbidden that year. For it to have been forbidden the NFL would have had to put something in writing or put to an official vote, something Wise admits no one did. If no one did anything official it isn't forbidden.

Yes the Redskins made many poor contract decisions and it would have created severe cap problems if they didn't act as they did during the uncapped year. Were their actions during the uncapped year completely morally sound? Probably not. But Wise ignores that the NFL committed the first sin here, they allowed the uncapped year to happen.

The NFL basically decided to have their cake, your cake, my cake, and everyone else's cakes, and eat them all. They wanted to squeeze the NFLPA by having a lockout, which required them to not renegotiate a new CBA and go through an uncapped year. The uncapped year was specifically put in the CBA to create incentives to get a deal done because the idea was that in an uncapped year contracts would balloon, and the owners didn't want that. But instead of accepting the consequences of their gambit to squeeze the NFLPA, they implemented a phantom cap.

Of course, it's funny because 14 teams apparently didn't listen to the memo anyway and went over 123M, 11 of them going over 130M, but still only 4 of those teams were hit with anything.

Wise starts on the right path when he admits that there were no written rules broken, and that the punishments were somewhat arbitrary, subjective, and harsh, but promptly ignores those facts to basically say the Skins were in the wrong anyway, which is not true.

At the end of the day, the NFL is justified in doing what they did because the NFL owners can do whatever they want with a vote within the laws of the United States, and they even circumvented that with clever contracting. That doesn't make the NFL right, and it doesn't make us wrong. It just makes the punishment all that more arbitrary.

[E-Dog Night]

Even if this whole business makes me mad as hell, I sort of agree with the basic premise, except I have ZERO doubt that John Mara saw this as a very convenient way to weaken two teams in his own division. At the very least, he should have recused himself of any involvement BECAUSE the two teams in question were in his division. He did exactly the opposite; he led the charge, and that makes him nothing but a petty, vindictive little man.

If I'm bring honest with myself, I have to admit -- I wouldn't be nearly as upset about the way the penalties were laid down if it happened to some other team. Especially if it happened to, say, the Cowboys and the Patriots. I might instinctively know it's a bunch of bull****, and it might disgust me on some level that the owners of NFL teams are glorified mafia bosses, but it wouldn't cause me angry thoughts of what I’d like to do to John Mara if I ever met him in a dark alley.

In the end, this column is just another in a series of axe-grinding hatchet jobs by Mike Wise. If Wise wasn't so blinded by his own pithy contempt for all things Snyder, he (ostensibly) could have crafted a more eloquent, original and thought provoking argument than to hack up a lazy re-wording of this column, which posted almost exactly one year ago today.

[Darc Requiem]

It's irony that this guy has Wise as a surname because he is anything but. I'm not giving that tool any more hits. I can't agree with anyone blaming the cap penalties on the Redskins. They didn't break any rules. The league did.

[Califan007]

All the league had to do was say no to the contracts.

The league couldn't say "no" to the contracts, because if you go by the CBA and every written rule and by-law, the Skins and Cowboys did nothing wrong. The league had no basis for saying "no" to the contracts. And they knew it. And Allen and Snyder knew it.

And the reality is, the league would not have been able to administer any cap punishment whatsoever unless the NFLPA agreed to it...the agreement was needed by both the NFL and the players union to--in essence--ratify the CBA after the fact to now include a "rule" that both teams allegedly broke. If the NFLPA had said "nope" to the punishments, there would have been nothing Goodell or Mara could have done.

[Dirt]

And wtf, who's 'making a mockery of a negotiated solution to preserve competitive NFL balance.'??? What a childish thing to say, they didn't alter the contracts to mock the NFL....they did it because the previous regime made the contracts ridiculous. There was nothing conniving or manipulative about it, no matter what they want to do, the league has to approve it, and THEY DID. This is written like Shannahan went Watergate with ski masks and flashlights. wtf

The only way I'll lean away from this is that....perhaps the Redskins should have known damn well the league was going to **** them. Probably should have bit the bullet, accepted the dictatorship-ish nature of the NFL and just followed the made up rules.

---------- Post added March-14th-2013 at 11:06 PM ----------

if you go by the CBA and every written rule and by-law,

That's the thing, they weren't. They were making up rules as they went, as you pointed out. By 'saying no to the contracts', I don't mean in a letter-of-the-law way, I mean a conversation with Bruce and some league/players association people discussing how it may not be a good idea because a punishment could be made in the future. At first, this is exactly what we heard, what Goodell and Mara said. After hearing Bruce and Mike mention that no such warning was made, I believe them.

From what I gather, there was a vague warning given to all the teams about not messing around in the uncapped year. When it comes to the contracts in particular, everyone acted as if they would be fine, there was no such warning about that. With Tampa and other teams doing similar (but different) things, the Redskins had even more reason to believe it would be ok.

And yea, it's important that people understand this is the NFLPA, too. I understand that.

[Califan007]

Just a refresher of what Graz said, to counterpoint Mr. "Wise":

And if there are people out there who believe (as I do) that the NFL has acted with irresponsible, petty arrogance in this case and imposed unjustified penalties against teams that broke no actual rules, Mara's stance isn't likely to change their minds.

There was no salary cap in 2010. This is a fact. Mara repeatedly brushed that aside during questioning Sunday, irritated at the fact's mere existence. "We've had a cap for 29 of the last 30 years," he said more than once, and he explained rather clearly that teams were told, more than once, to watch the way they spent money and structured contracts during the uncapped 2010 season. He basically admitted to what, in any other business, would be collusion and grounds for an antitrust lawsuit. But he bristled at the mention of that word, too, saying, "This has nothing to do with collusion. It has to do with teams attempting to gain a competitive advantage through a loophole in the system. They attempted to take advantage of it knowing full well there would be consequences."

What we know about this case is that the NFL basically engaged in a sanctioned form of collusion in 2010, telling its teams that yeah, there was no cap, but that they needed to act as though there were one because they were sure the cap would come back and it was wrong to use this "loophole" as a means of gaining an advantage against the cap in future years. Mara admitted all of that Sunday, and he did so in a way that strongly indicates he believes himself to be on the correct side of the argument.

But he is not, of course. And in more ways than one, he is very much in the wrong.

http://espn.go.com/blog/nfceast/post...uld-be-talking

[armada58]

There is absolutely nothing surprising at all about this article. Under no circumstances can we expect anything resembling unbiased, factual journalism from Unwise when it comes to the Redskins. Nor can we even take his editorial columns seriously. His personal crusade against the Redskins name will cloud and taint every article he writes about the team.

Do yourselves a favor. Just stop reading Unwise. Not for boycott purposes (they never work) but, just to save yourself the wasted time.

[STBonecrusher21]

This coming from a guy that just dissed a US Veteran.

Mike Wise ‏@MikeWiseguy

@mattsfusaf Another punk, using camo in his avatar to prove how tough he is. You small man, you. Beat it.

[NLC1054]

Mike Wise told me yetsterday that his job was to enflame.

He says it was sarcastic now (after he blocked me for pointing out that's what he told me), but there's a lot of truth in jest...

[skinsfan_1215]

Mike Wise can (insert offensive, hateful remarks).

Seriously, how is this dip**** employed at all, let alone at the the premier dc paper?

[TheShredSkinz]

http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/...n-mistake.html

Says we restructured to pay 21 mill in 2010 to our biggest mistake. Where do they get the other 15?

[Califan007]

http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/...n-mistake.html

Says we restructured to pay 21 mill in 2010 to our biggest mistake. Where do they get the other 15?

From our restructure with DeAngelo Hall.

[paloosa]

Yes the Redskins took advantage of the situation at hand but there was no rule. They sent the contract rework to the league for approval and it was approved by them. That has been stated and a sworn written document by the league states that and also states they violate no rule or agreement. This is just a bunch of bilionaires agreeing to impose a penalty they have no legal grounds to impose. If it ever went to court they would rule in favor of both the Redskins and the Cowboys. That would mean that everyone that got additional money would have to pay them both back and that would make a lot of teams over the cap. So Wise can make any stupid argument he wants but the facts are the facts. Secret handshakes and backroom love affairs are not the only way to do business. This was the abuse of power by a NFC East rival that saw a way to keep both of these teams down for a couple of years while he rebuilds his aging team. So Mike Wise can go takes his opinion and flush it down the toilet where it belongs.