Plan B : That’s ‘B’ for a Better Answer to Questions of Player Movement

Did you see where the New York Jets signed Emanuel McNeil the other day?

Yeah, Plan B guy. No, not Freeman McNeil, Emanuel .

Right, no relation, 22, nose tackle, No. 10 pick of the New England Patriots a year ago out of Tennessee Martin, played in one NFL game.

Ain’t free agency great?

Thus Plan B begins its second season. It’s a system to gladden owners’ hearts, as it should be, since they installed it unilaterally over the broken bodies of the defeated NFL Players Assn.

Since 37 players are frozen--make that your starting offense, defense, 11 bomb squadders, your punter, place-kicker and two prospects--it is clear this is a token effort.

The funny thing is . . . it works.

Militants of the players’ association, who can’t agree on anything with the NFL Management Council, no longer condemn Plan B in toto .

The players have statistics suggesting that the more of these unknowns and past-their-primers you sign, the better your record.

And if the San Francisco 49ers drop a $1.8-million contract on Dave Waymer to back up safety Ronnie Lott, and the Raiders make 32-year-old Max Montoya the richest offensive linemen in a team history that includes three Hall of Famers, can that fail to pull everyone else’s salary up, too?

“We don’t think what they’re doing now is any more lawful than what they’ve done before,” said Doug Allen, assistant executive director of the players’ association, from Washington, “but it does illustrate some helpful points, as far as what would happen if there was player mobility.

“And it isn’t what management said would happen.”

According to management, football players didn’t really want to move and wouldn’t go to small, cold, non-glamour cities, which wouldn’t have the money to hire them in the first place.

How then does one explain Green Bay, which long ago retired the competition for small, cold and unglamorous?

The Packers signed 20 Plan Bs a year ago, including veterans such as 33-year-old Blair Bush. Bush wasn’t too settled in Seattle, after spending his last six seasons as the Seahawks’ starting center, to call in the moving van if it meant a raise.

Voila! The Packers went from 4-12 to 10-6.

The Cleveland Browns and the Denver Broncos, thought to be on swift declines, came up with five and two starters, respectively, and reached the AFC championship game.

The Raiders tried to buy a whole new linebacking crew and spent almost $800,000 on players they waived or didn’t start. They still wound up with three Plan B starters--nose tackle Bob Golic, linebacker Thomas Benson and kicker Jeff Jaeger. Despite season-long tumult, they improved from 7-9 to 8-8.

The losers, as much as those who threw cost efficiency out the window--the Washington Redskins spent $785,000 in signing bonuses--were the downtrodden such as Tampa Bay, which turned up its nose at the opportunity. The Buccaneers kept their money and their status.

It’s a new ballgame, and the league is trying to learn how to play it.

Anyone still reading must have some questions, such as:

--Where did this thing come from?

--Whatever happened to Plan A?

The NFL, defending an antitrust suit by the players’ association in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, was told by Judge David Doty that a system that allowed no player movement wouldn’t do.

The NFL then took one of a series of proposals it had made after the breakdown of negotiations in 1987 and implemented it. It had been the second of its proposals, hence Plan B.

The league says it put in Plan B for several reasons, its legal position being only one.

No one else is convinced.

“We were forced to draw a line because of the litigious climate of our society,” said General Manager George Young of the New York Giants.

“Clearly, it was a maneuver by the league,” said John Weistart, a Duke professor who teaches a course on sports law. “I think their strategy was something like this: They said, ‘We’ll put in Plan B, and what will happen is, there will be movement. So when we go back to court and get called on this, we’re going to be able to cite that X number of players moved.’ ”

The union has since suffered an appellate court defeat and has decertified itself--of course, the league insists that the union has not decertified itself--so the suit is dead for the moment.

However, the league is, indeed, citing that X number of players moved.

“It’s a documented fact that more football players (229) changed teams last year than in major league baseball and the NBA combined from 1982 to 1987,” said John Jones, spokesman for the NFL Management Council.

Of course, a football roster plus developmental squad (53 players) is more than four times bigger than a basketball team (12) and more than twice the size of a baseball team (24). But undeniably, lots of football players moved.

And lots of NFL types didn’t like it.

This is the stuff of longstanding impasse: Management’s attempts at conciliation are generally viewed as modest, but within league circles they are controversial.

“This year, people are going to go slower,” said the Giants’ Young last week, after the Waymer signing but before Montoya’s signing.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take before we really start to make fools out of ourselves again.”

Young is no idiot. He is well-read, well-rounded and independent politically--”I’m a Democrat in a world of Republicans”--but, most of all, he’s an old-fashioned football man.

“Our sport is not like other sports,” he said. “The careers, for the most part, are shorter. Guys learn to fit a niche or mesh with a team, because it’s a team sport. For the most part, they’re more valuable to their own team than they are to other teams.

“I’ve been in this game a long time and I think you have to get your own players and develop your own players. I’ll never change my mind on that. I’d rather develop our own players--not other teams’ problems.

“We’ve got to draw the line at 37. Most of us don’t want to do that, but whenever we have to cut a player or trade a player, there’s a reason why we no longer want him.

“The union was saying, ‘We’ve got to make the world safe for the Andy Headens.’ (The union used Headen, a reserve Giant linebacker stuck behind Lawrence Taylor, as an example during the failed ’87 talks when it was trying to negotiate free agency.) So then we had Plan B, addressing the issue they raised.

“So now they say, ‘What do we say to the quarterback in Miami?’

“You say, ‘Congratulations, you’re a millionaire.’ That’s what you say to him.”

What they have is hardly perfect.

Take Gary Anderson. The San Diego Chargers’ halfback, in his option year, sat out last season when he couldn’t come to terms with the team.

This season, he’s not an unrestricted free agent who could sign with anyone for no compensation, nor a Plan B, although the Chargers didn’t have to protect him .

But let’s just say there aren’t a lot of lawyers who would be afraid to walk into court representing Gary Anderson.

Then there are the abuses.

The clubs could barely wait to start cheating their own system, hence this season’s side agreements: We’ll give you extra money, we won’t protect you, you tell anyone who calls you’re not interested, you’re our boy. The Bengals tried that with Montoya, who was then offered a $150,000 raise above the Cincinnati numbers by the Raiders.

Montoya hadn’t played in the offensive line so long that he couldn’t tell where he was better off. He’s a Raider today.

Mistakes are expensive. A year ago, the Raiders wouldn’t go above $275,000 for center Bill Lewis. When he sued the club and lost, they turned him into a non-person.

Lewis now has the Browns and Rams panting after him and stands to move into the $400,000s.

Ask Lewis, is this a great system or what? “Absolutely,” said Lewis’ agent, Larry Muno. “Without it, Bill would have had no way to go.”

The ante on front-office competence has been raised, bad news for such as the Phoenix Cardinals, who had long struggled with the college draft and now have discovered a new venue in which they could goof.

“They spent a ton of money on a lot of garbage,” said Joel Buchsbaum, Pro Football Weekly’s plugged-into-personnel-directors editor. “I mean, they’re paying Gary Hogeboom megabucks.”

Buchsbaum gives nose tackle Dan Saleaumua of the Chiefs a chance to be the first real Plan B star. A two-year Detroit Lion, Saleaumua carried a bad rep--”fat, lazy, underachiever,” Buchsbaum said--and was left unprotected. In Kansas City, he kept his weight down and filled in admirably after Bill Maas was hurt.

Other good tabs, Buchsbaum said, were former Rams Gary Jeter and Eric Sievers by the Patriots; Ted Banker and Robert Banks by the Browns; Alphonso Carreker and Wymon Henderson by the Broncos; Benson--”I don’t mean he’s a great player; I mean, he’s an adequate player at a position they were hurting terribly”--and Golic--”I think you’d put him on, but I don’t think he was that great”--by the Raiders.

Buchsbaum considers Montoya expensive but worth thinking about, Waymer just expensive. “ They (the Saints) didn’t protect him because he was letting too many people behind him at free safety.”

Still out there for teams to pick over are Curt Warner, Fred Smerlas, Raymond Clayborn, Ronnie Harmon, Zeke Mowatt, Joe Morris, Clarence Kay and a cast of hundreds.

Still to be explained is what this league has against capitalism.

“My own opinion is the owners would have a very hard time justifying this particular arrangement,” said Weistart, the Duke professor.

“The assumption of Plan B is that it would be disruptive of competitive balance if a team lost one or two or three of its top 37 players. And quite frankly, I just don’t see any grounds in which that’s believable. We have examples in both the NBA and baseball that suggest the contrary. The NFL makes the argument that football is more of a team sport. They’re just not persuasive at all. I think the league hasn’t met its burden of persuading that its needs are so unique it can’t sustain itself following the model set out in baseball and basketball.”

In the absence of a bargaining agreement, a union and any goodwill between players and owners, Plan B may have to do.

It’s not quite a Bonanza, nor is it completely Bogus, but at least it’s Better.