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PFT: Redskins, Cowboys could go “nuclear” over cap mess

Fear The Spear said:
What is this "other solution" ? The lawsuit itself ?
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Sorry to be vaugue there.

It is the one where BGO, ES, and Cowboys fans/forums show up en masse for the draft in NY and boo Goodell every single time he steps to the podium. I'm sure there would be more than booing. :betterwink:
 
Burgundy Burner said:
Sorry to be vaugue there.

It is the one where BGO, ES, and Cowboys fans/forums show up en masse for the draft in NY and boo Goodell every single time he steps to the podium. I'm sure there would be more than booing. :betterwink:
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Oh yea. Nice idea, but I'm not sure it would be practical.

Something tells me they would be escorted out of there, immediately by men in suits, due to some technicality in their rules.

I was once forced to take down a sign at a Redskin game, by stadium security, because it was deemed as slightly negative. The above idea seems even more likely to be squashed by security.
 
boy i tell that is some good information guys .....you guys are the S**t.......
 
look on the bright side....even were it the strategy not to go stratospheric on FA signings....the cap hits guaranteed it!
 
Burgundy Burner said:
We could sit here and speculate about every scenario possible under the sun. We won't know until it actually occurs and there are going to be many theorists (including us) who will offer their $0.02 along the way.

"Nuclear" could mean anything and/or everything. Who thinks the jobs of D. Smith and R. Goodell are in jeopardy? Who thinks the other target (Mara family) could be ousted? I wouldn't put anything beyond the realm of possibilities now that the term "nuclear" was used by someone at Redskins Park or Valley Ranch.
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I could see them wrapping up their FA agent signings as soon as possible, waiting for the contracts to be approved by the league office, and then pursuing whatever recourse "nuclear" or otherwise. So I'm anticipating one or two more signings in the next couple of days (ILB - hopefully Fletcher - and maybe Bell) and then the other shoe drops. Although the public might not be immediately (if ever) made aware of these actions should they ensue.
 
Instead of "Nuclear", we could go to arbitration:

Is the Washington Redskins salary cap case headed to arbitration?

A person with knowledge of the case said there have been discussions about using an arbitration provision of the league’s collective bargaining to challenge the penalty imposed by the NFL. The league took away $36 million in cap space over two years from the Redskins, and $10 million over two years from the Dallas Cowboys, for improperly structuring player contracts in 2010, when the league had no salary cap.

The Redskins and the NFL declined to comment. People familiar with the case have said the Redskins have been considering their options in response to last week’s ruling by the league.

People with knowledge of the case have said the Redskins might contest the league’s ruling, either via an appeal or a legal challenge. The Redskins have not said what, if anything, they will do, and one person familiar with the case said last week that the Cowboys were unlikely to join the Redskins in a legal challenge. Both teams have denied wrongdoing.

It is not clear, however, whether the Cowboys would join the Redskins in a proceeding before an arbitrator, which might generate less animosity among other team owners than a full-scale court challenge.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...lary-cap-case/2012/03/19/gIQA3WCBNS_blog.html
 
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but am I the only one who finds it odd that the league has yet to come down on Gregg Williams?

Maybe Goodell is using Gregg as leverage. Maybe he's sitting back, thinking "if you sue us Dan, we'll say that Gregg's bs originated in Washington, and take a future first rounder from you."
 
McD5 said:
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but am I the only one who finds it odd that the league has yet to come down on Gregg Williams?

Maybe Goodell is using Gregg as leverage. Maybe he's sitting back, thinking "if you sue us Dan, we'll say that Gregg's bs originated in Washington, and take a future first rounder from you."
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I'm not positive, but I think players from his Buffalo & Tennessee days have already come out and said the bounty system existed back then.
 
You can take what I said on Thursday about bounty penalties not coming out last week and draw your own conclusions. One thing is certain, the process has been delayed for some reason.
 
From ESPN's NFCE Blog

Washington Redskins
Mark Maske reports that the Redskins are considering challenging the NFL's decision to strip them of $36 million in salary-cap room due to the way they structured contracts in the uncapped 2010 season. The challenge would be through arbitration, not through an antitrust lawsuit, and Mark reports that the Cowboys (who lost $10 million in cap space for the same ridiculous reason) could join them in seeking arbitration. I still don't know if they'll do this, or how likely it would be to work given the way the CBA is worded. But it's clear the Redskins are upset, as they should be, and haven't yet let this go, as they shouldn't.
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I posted a look at the relevant provisions of the 2011 CBA related to a possible arbitration challenge on the cap hit thread on ES: http://www.extremeskins.com/showthr...ncapped-year&p=8899538&viewfull=1#post8899538

The gist is:

As Maske/Graziano are suggesting, we could apparently file a challenge relating to the salary cap before the System Arbitrator. As the filing party, we would bear the burden of proof by a clear preponderance of the evidence.

My reading of the CBA provides the following possible helpful angles for the Skins (summarized below, provisions quoted in the ES post):

Article 11, Section 5(b)(i) provides: "ARTICLE 11
TRANSITION RULES FOR THE 2011 LEAGUE YEAR
Section 5. Salaries and Salary Cap Accounting:
(b) Proration from Preexisting Contracts. For Preexisting Contracts, any proration under the Salary Cap rules under the Prior Agreement (including amounts treated as signing bonus) to any League Year covered by this Agreement shall continue to be charged to Team Salary for those League Years, provided that (i) no signing bonus proration to the League Years of this Agreement shall apply for any Preexisting Contract that was terminated, traded, or assigned via waivers prior to March 11 , 2011 , and (ii) any Preexisting Player Contract entered into in the 2010 League Year shall have maximum proration of six years (including the 2010 League Year). Notwithstanding the foregoing, any Preexisting Contract that was traded or assigned via waivers and then renegotiated or extended prior to March 11, 2011 to include any signing bonus or amount treated as signing bonus shall have such bonus prorated as if the renegotiation or extension were a new Player Contract, unless such second Player Contract was terminated, traded or assigned via waivers prior to March 11, 2011." Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it seems to me a) this is the new CBA provision dealing with the current cap hit arising from preexisting contracts, and the current CBA simply doesn't prohibit what we did--and indeed, it provides that if we had cut or traded Haynesworth before 3/11/11 we would have been able to wipe out his entire cap hit in 2010--but because we traded him in late July we are on the hook for $21 million (more than if we hadn't renegotiated his contract)? That seems inconsistent with the provision.

Article 13, Section 1 states that the salary cap is the same amount for each club. Might be helpful.

Article 14. I think I've found a mechanism to take the burden of proof off of us. Rather than just filing an arbitration claim, if we submit a contract to the Commissioner that would exceed our "adjusted" salary cap, he would disapprove it as exceeding our cap (or approve it, in which case, no problem). Then, under Sections 4 and 5 of Article 14, the appeal to the System Arbitrator would be de novo, rather than with a heavy burden on us. It would require us to propose a contract that a) would put us over the salary cap, and b) would be something we'd want to be upheld. I would think that would be doable: proposed a renegotiated contract for Kerrigan in which more of his cap hit would be shifted to this year? Wait until we draft/sign RGIII and propose a deal that would make his guaranteed money a signing bonus rather than roster bonus (i.e., no difference to us or to him, but for cap accounting purposes the cap hit would be this year rather than spread out over future years)?

Conceivably, we could get a player to bring a claim under Article XVII, the anti-collusion clause of the new CBA, that is arguably not as narrow as suggested by the ESPN legal expert Graziano quoted in his 3/15 post.
 
I appreciate the work that you have been putting into this situation - sounds like it is going to take a few months and not a few days.

What are you hearing as far as our chances to regain a certain percentage of the cap or 100% of it - or nothing at all?
 
I'm not an insider at all (so am not hearing anything), just a Skins fan and contracts law professor (with no particular expertise in labor or antitrust) who's been reading up on it and trying to figure out what's going on.

As to timing, I'd think for an arbitration claim to actually play out, you're right that it would take months rather than days--though settlement might come sooner. (And for an antitrust claim, which seems unlikely, at least months.)

And as to some versus all of the cap, my rough sense is that it's unpredictable what the arbitrator/appeals panel would do, and it could be anywhere from complete retraction of the cap hit to endorsing it fully, and there's no obvious reason why the decision couldn't be a reduced hit. My gut sense is that we'll file an arbitration claim and it'll get settled, with an agreement that we have to take some but not all of the proposed cap hit (at the very least it seems we should get back the amount of Haynesworth and Hall's cap hits that would have been absorbed in 2010 if we hadn't renegotiated).

All of this is guesswork/trying to follow media accounts, and trying to parse the language of the CBA (and in another post on that ES thread, the NFL Constitution and Bylaws, which don't seem to provide any basis for the Executive Committee action, either). So I don't really know what I'm talking about. But frankly, it appears that I've figured out at least as much as anyone in the media/so-called experts seems to have done. Florio and Graziano seem pretty on top of it.
 
I tend to agree that we will never see the full amount being restored. Last week, I suggested that there will be some sort of an agreement that will allow all sides to "save face" and for everyone to live in harmony. For those who could be thinking that this idea came from a source that I have used - that is not the case. The last thing the teams want is to have the anti-trust things hanging over their heads.

Florio's take is an interesting one and he seems to suggest that the Redskins and Cowboys would have an open and shut case, but we know nothing is ever that easy with the NFL. I wonder who told him about the "nuclear" option (he is claiming a source on the inside), especially in light of the news that the likely path to resolution seems to be arbitration now. However, Florio could be taking some initiative on his own and that is not surprising when you consider how he kept the Michael Vick case going when it seemed to lose steam - and we saw what happened in the ensuing months.
 
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