[OT] Eli Manning and the draft

[billhoward]

[A discussion about whether Eli Manning should belong to the one team that has rights to him belongs in a separate thread from remembering Pat Tillman.]

[Q]adamw Wrote:

 Note:
- The draft is collectively bargained for and is designed to help the sport
- Baseball players are still bound to the organizations that draft them for up to 10 years.
[/q]

The collective bargaining is signed off on by current players. The draft affects not-yet players. I don't think Archie or Peyton can sign off for Eli.

Do we know what helps a sport? Do we really know that major sports would fall apart if college players could go to the Career Development Office and see if the Colts or Ravens, Yankees or Sox, Penguins or Bruins, offered a better chance for advancement and salary and working conditions?

Would the wealthier teams win all the championships if the better players flocked to them? Big-market New York, Boston, LA, and SF teams win more than their share of titles but they don't have a lock on championships. Aren't there tools (besides a forced draft) available for a consortium of teams to give everyone a chance, such as the owners -- nobody drafted them; they're all volunteers -- agreeing to share TV revenues?

[KeithK]

At least in baseball we've already seen what it was like without a draft.  The Yankees were able to sign a large number of prospects by offering more money and the prospect of playing for the Yankees in the World Series.  They then kept many of the best players and had an endless stream of prospects to trade when they wanted to fill a need. This helped them rack up numbers like 14 pennants in 16 years from '49 until '64.

Now, maybe you're thinking that it's like that now.  Well, I hope it continues :-D .  But seriously, the New Yorkers do not have any advantage in developing new talent and actually have a prett barren farm system right now, after trading a lot of their prospects over the last few years.  So there's no way to replace aging players except through free agency, which can backfire badly (see Yankees, late '80s).  My point is that abolishing the draft would skew the already unbalanced system even further in the favor of big market teams.

Now in NFL parity football, this might not be all bad, esp. since the teams share so much revenue.

As for the question of whether the current players should be bargaining for future players, who else could do it?  I don't think you can have the league bargain with every potential player over work rules, etc. separately.  Well, you could, but that's what we had in the old days when players weren't always treated very well.

[BTW - thanks for taking this off of the Tillman thread.]

[jtwcornell91]

We seem to have failed to steer this discussion into the thread started for it, so I thought I'd add a perspective on football contracts courtesy of die toten Hosen:
[Q] Es kann soviel passieren,
Es kann soviel geschehen.
Ganz egal wie hart mein Schicksal wär',
Ich würde nie zum F.C. Bayern München gehen.[/Q]

[Greg Berge]

I don't at all begrudge Manning exercising his leverage.  He wasn't holding a gun to the NFL's head -- he was taking advantage of the NFL's lack of self-discipline in dealing with holdouts.  In that he was just demonstrating that #1s have an advantageous bargaining position.  6th rounders, conversely, are screwed.  Shrug -- it's all about leverage, not morality.

It's particularly disingenuous for NFL teams to whine about players acting this way since NFL contracts are not guaranteed -- indeed they are not "contracts" in an ordinary, binding sense.  The owners obviously try to use the money issue to stoke fan envy and gain the upper hand in the public arena, but that's just the usual class-baiting. If you or I was going #1, we'd try to max out our advantage, either in cash or in destination (or pay an agent to do it).  If you or I owned a team, we'd try to wallpaper over the player's position with some sort of self-serving posturing semi-truth (or pay a lawyer to do it).  Where you stand depends on where you sit.

As for the silliness raised by the panderers in media and politics, juxtaposing Tillman and the issue of patriotism and American values, there's one immortal line that sums it up:

"He decided to put all of his information to good use and make a little money out of it - what could be more American than that?" --  Clue