NFL enters twilight zone the un-capped year

[TN TITAN Fan In STL]

From Washington Post:

The NFL's great experiment begins in the early hours of Friday morning, just after midnight.

Since the mid-1990s, the league has been governed by an economic system that included a salary cap designed to promote competitive balance among the teams. The sport and practically everyone in it prospered, and owners and the players' union agreed to a series of extensions of the labor agreement to keep the salary cap in place and avoid the uncapped season that was included as the final year in each collective bargaining agreement. It was an incentive to owners and players to negotiate earnestly and settle their differences at the bargaining table so that no one had to face the uncertainty of a year minus a salary cap.

But the men who presided over that labor peace, former commissioner Paul Tagliabue and late union chief Gene Upshaw, no longer run the sport, and these are new times for the NFL. The owners and players are engaged in a bargaining stare-down that has prompted predictions of a lockout of the players by the owners next year. But first, both sides are prepared for a year without a salary cap, which officially begins with the opening of the NFL's free agent market Friday at 12:01 a.m.

The question is whether any NFL team will attempt to become the league's equivalent of baseball's New York Yankees, far outspending everyone else in a bid to win a championship.

"I think teams are always willing to be competitive, and teams are always looking for ways to win," Baltimore Ravens General Manager Ozzie Newsome said last week in Indianapolis at the NFL scouting combine.

The Washington Redskins were mentioned by executives of several NFL teams in private conversations last week as a candidate to go on a free agent spending spree without the constraint of the salary cap. But those executives conceded they don't know exactly what to expect from the Redskins after their hiring of a new general manager, Bruce Allen, and a new coach, Mike Shanahan.

Several other teams have said they will exhibit restraint.

"I'm sure there will be some activity," New York Giants General Manager Jerry Reese said at the scouting combine. "I think we just have to let it unfold and see what direction people are going to go. . . . You always see some teams jump out there and try to make some moves. But with the uncertainty of everything that's going on, I think you'll see teams be cautious."

As NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has pointed out on numerous occasions, several new free agency rules automatically go into effect in an uncapped year to promote competitive balance without the salary cap there to take care of that task.

Players need six seasons of NFL service time to be eligible for unrestricted free agency, rather than the four required in the salary cap system. That has created a sizable group of players, those with expired contracts and four or five years of NFL experience, who would have been unrestricted free agents under the old system but are only restricted free agents in the uncapped year, meaning that their teams can retain them by matching any contract offers they receive from other clubs and possibly can receive draft-pick compensation if those players sign elsewhere.

Teams usually are wary of signing a free agent if it means surrendering a draft choice or choices to the player's former club. Some around the league say they wonder if that tendency will change in the NFL's new world.

[sundance]

Expect the big market teams Ny,Chi,Was,Ne & Dal to go all out 2-3 singings could mean going to super bowl there is some very good players out there. You will see 30-40 million in signing bonus upfront for about 6-8 players this is like christmas in the nfl with no salary cap might not never happen again. McCaskey's better open up their vault who cares about draft picks get Cutler some help and rebuild the defense.