617 NFL Players Will Become Free Agents : Each Club Can Protect Its Top 37, Leaving Others to Test the Market

They have been saying for years in the National Football League that this day would never come.

The owners of the clubs have been saying that they just couldn’t live with free agency.

Nonetheless, it’s here. From now on, free agency will be a fact of life for some in pro football.

Of the 1,653 players under contract to pro clubs last fall, 617 of the most expendable will become unrestricted free agents at 1 p.m. today. That’s 37%.

By order of the NFL Management Council--acting under federal antitrust legislation--all 617 of the players will be free to sign with any of the 28 teams.

Which leaves one question: How many players will actually move?

“I think a number of teams will participate aggressively,” Bill Walsh, vice president of the San Francisco 49ers, said Tuesday. “It will help the (bottom) clubs.”

Said Mike Lynn, vice president of the Minnesota Vikings: “In the next two months, literally hundreds of players will change teams.”

Speaking for most club executives, Al LoCasale of the Raiders said: “We’re going to take a close look (at the free agents), sure.”

The best athletes in the league won’t be on the list. Over the strong objection of the NFL Players Assn., each club was allowed to exempt 37 players before freeing the others.

The mathematics:

--There were 47 players on each active roster last fall. In addition, each club had an average of 12 players on injured reserve and other reserve lists. That’s an average of 59 players under contract.

--Of those 59, the Management Council insisted, 37 can be protected by each of the 28 teams--leaving 22, on the average, to become free agents for a total of 617.

--In Los Angeles, the Raiders, with 62 under contract, have had to free 25 players. The Rams, with 56, have freed 19.

According to a council announcement, the players’ names will be made public late Thursday by Joel Bussert, the NFL’s director of player personnel.

Council publicist John Jones said the clubs were advised not to make premature disclosures because of the possibility that some players might, in Bussert’s evaluation, be incorrectly listed.

In embracing free agency at last, the NFL has moved--reluctantly--for one reason only: to protect itself against antitrust charges by the players’ union.

“We had to change, because the system we’d been using hadn’t produced, quote, movement, unquote,” said Tex Schramm, president of the Dallas Cowboys. “The judge made reference to that.”

The judge is David Doty of the federal district court in Minneapolis, who warned the NFL’s owners last summer that the players, whose most recent bargaining agreement with the league expired in August, 1987, would win if the case proceeded to trial.

Noting that a player-owner impasse had developed, Doty told the lawyers for both sides that under federal labor law, a new plan could be unilaterally implemented by the owners, based on their last offer to the players.

His implication was that the owners would be in violation of antitrust law if they didn’t do something.

Their plan freeing 617 players today is the result.

It’s a phony plan, the players charge.

The union said that NFL players need baseball’s system--unrestricted free agency after 6 years’ service--instead of the NFL’s, which ties up all the best talent, regardless of age and service time.

Said Dick Berthelsen, the NFLPA’s legal counsel: “The media has lost sight of the fact that in restricting 37 of the 47 players on each team, the NFL is condemning a majority to the same old (compensation) system.

“Setting some players free doesn’t prevent the rest--the majority--from being damaged. If even one player is denied access to the free market, he has a cause of action. And the league is denying 37 on each club.”

Thus the owners haven’t improved their shaky antitrust situation, Doug Allen, the union’s assistant executive director, said.

He added: “(The owners) are just creating more confusion. They’re using smoke and mirrors to try to improve their legal position, and it won’t work.”

The old system to which Berthelsen alluded provided for free-agent movement only if a victimized team were compensated if it elected not to match a better offer for one of its players.

The compensation--two first-round draft choices for a good player--was so costly that there has been hardly any action.

This year, the Management Council has revised that system, which was based on size of salary, for the estimated 200 highly regarded athletes who will be on the protection lists today although their contracts have expired.

“(The council) has only moved the (salary) lines up,” said Berthelsen. “You still have to come up with two first choices (for a desirable player). That isn’t free agency.”

From NFLPA headquarters in Washington, Allen said the new plan, as a whole, is actually a continuance of the owners’ long war against the players.

“At bottom, this appears to be an effort to intimidate the players,” Allen said. “The plan only affects (those) who would be turned over anyway--the players who would be cut or (otherwise released) at training camp next summer.

“And (the owners) have accompanied it with an announcement that they are discontinuing severance pay from now on. That is intimidation, plain and simple.”

The league, in other words, is tightening the screws, the players believe. The first turn was made last year, when the owners discontinued payroll checkoffs of NFLPA dues, forcing the union to become a collection agency in each city.

“Losing severance will be a blow to hundreds of players,” Allen said.

Finally, the union notes that today’s free agents will remain free for not more than two months.

“The plan provides that you’ve got to cut a deal for yourself by April 1,” Allen said. “If you don’t, you revert after that to your former club.

“What’s more, if they’ve put you on the (free-agent) list, they don’t have to raise your pay the (mandatory) 10% if they ask you back.

“I don’t call that a very good plan.”

Will Doty think it’s an acceptable plan?

“At this point, that’s hard to tell,” Steven Derian, a UCLA law professor, said. “The court is sympathetic to the owners’ main argument--that too much free agency would (inhibit) competitive balance. But do you need to (tie down) 37 of 47 players to achieve competitive balance? Could you do it with, say, 25?”

Who knows?

The owners are keeping their fingers crossed.

The players, judging by their leaders’ reaction, are still mad as hell.

Apparently, peace in pro football is still far away.