NFL Casts Off Free Agents to Save the Ship

Conundrum: Why does the National Football League remind you of that character in the Russian fairy tale who threw the babies out of the sleigh to the wolves to save the rest of his family?

Answer: Because the NFL is throwing some 600 of its players to the wolves to save the league.

It’s hard to put any other interpretation on the league’s “free agency” plan, which went into effect Feb. 1.

As of now, some 600 of the players have been cut loose, told that they can sign with any other team that wants them without penalty or compensation.

Does this mean Joe Montana is free to move about? Bernie Kosar? Jerry Rice?

Don’t be naive. What the league is offering are the players no one particularly wants in the first place: backup tackles, kick holders, over-the-hill tight ends. Chorus liners. The kind of players it would deal off to stock (if that’s the word) an expansion franchise. Marginal players. Non-roster players. The sort Norm Van Brocklin characterized as “a bunch of stiffs” when he got a look at what the league dealt him for the expansion Minnesota Vikings 25 years ago.

A team can “protect” 37 of its top players. The rest go to the wolves. Since a team can suit up only 45 a game, you can see that these lucky fellows who can go out and bargain for themselves are not too apt to have much of an effect on the economy.

This is a Save-the-NFL ploy, pure and simple. The league is currently under legal attack. It is without a union contract, and its relationship with its organized (if that’s the word to describe the NFL players’ union) labor is under scrutiny in federal court.

Still, why would the NFL be offering free agency at this time? It has the unions on the run, it has its fat $2-billion TV contracts. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

The answer may lie in the fact that, without a union contract, the bedrock of professional football is in jeopardy. The college draft. What football thinks it can’t live without is the draft system. This is the lovely situation in which, every year, scores of crack football players, fully trained and refined in football skills and publicized to an extent where they are already household names and ticket-sellers, come out of the colleges and are parceled out to the NFL teams.

Pro football doesn’t want anything to interfere with this gorgeous scam.

It doesn’t take a law school graduate to see that the athlete coming out of college is having his options severely curtailed, his freedoms violated.

But, so long as the union agrees to it, it’s legal. And binding. Football goes on. But, with no union, and the hot breath of the federal court on its neck, the wolves circling, it behooves football to make gestures.

In the fine print under the revised system that replaces the extinct collective bargaining agreement, which expired Aug. 31, 1987, is a provision to extend the draft agreement to the year 2003.

It sounds like heresy, but, without a union contract, the college draft, an American institution, might be as illegal as slavery. And without the college draft, pro football as we have come to know it and love it would cease to exist.

Professional sports have been pretty well permitted to operate outside the Constitution in this country historically.

It used to be thought that, without the reserve clause, the last stand of Simon Legree in America, baseball would perish. Every player would rush to join the Yankees. The World Series would be in New York every year.

Well, the reserve clause has been severely curtailed (a team “owns” a player only for four years now) and, instead of the Yankees winning an annual pennant, the World Series has been played in places such as Kansas City, Minnesota, Oakland and San Diego in recent years. The fact of the matter is, the Yankees won more often when the rest of the league was “protected” by the lifetime reserve clause.

Star baseball players have the near freedom of movement of gypsies. Star NFL players have about the freedom of movement of the inmates of a gulag.

You can see the humbuggery immediately when you know that about 250 other football players who are protected in the 37-man pen come up for contract renewal this month and are theoretically free agents themselves. A fellow might think he could pluck an Eddie Murray from the Detroit Lions, a Darrin Nelson from the Vikings, an Eddie Brown or Max Montoya from the Cincinnati Bengals.

The joker here is that if you pick one of these unsigned but unoffered free agents, you have to: a) let the team that has them match your offer; and b) if it does not match your offer, you must compensate them with payment that can amount to two No. 1 draft choices.

The price is so steep that there is almost no known instance of a star moving from one team to another under his own power.

Would the fabric of pro football hold if the draft were outlawed and, say, the San Francisco 49ers could sign Troy Aikman and Rodney Peete at the same time as well as Barry Sanders and whoever won lineman of the year?

True free agency would begin at the college level. This is what the NFL sees in its worst nightmares. Compared to that, tossing a few babies out of the sled is, well, child’s play.