NFL Trial Strategy Is Clear: Freedom vs. Big Salaries

The strategy of both sides continues to emerge at the antitrust suit by eight players that could determine the future of the NFL.

The players emphasize freedom. The owners emphasize the wealth of the players.

That was the theme Thursday when guard Dave Richards of the San Diego Chargers and quarterback Don Majkowski of the Green Bay Packers took the stand.

Majkowski and Richards are two of eight NFL players suing for free agency in an antitrust action that challenges Plan B, the system that allows each team to protect 37 players each season and allows the others to become free agents. All eight were protected in 1990, the year they filed the suit.

As they have in the first two days of the trial, the players emphasized their lack of freedom to test their value on an open market. The owners emphasized the money they made to the all-woman jury of nine, none of them with high income.

With Majkowski, for example, they emphasized his salaries of $1.5 million and $1.7 million the last two seasons, when he was limited by injury, and the $1.218 million earned in four seasons by Richards.

Richards, a one-time high school All-American in Dallas, detailed a career that included three years at Southern Methodist and one at UCLA after SMU was given the “death penalty” by the NCAA for recruiting violations.

He said he would have liked to have played in his hometown for the Cowboys but never got the chance--he was passed over in the draft by Dallas and picked by San Diego in the fourth round in 1988. He has started every game for the Chargers since his rookie season.

As a result, he has been protected under Plan B and could negotiate only with the Chargers each year his contract has been up for renewal.

“I’m not unhappy in San Diego, but I want to have the right to test my market value,” Richards said. “I felt the restrictions placed on me as a player degrading and unfair.

“I didn’t feel like I should be bought and sold like a commodity without considering my wishes.”

NFL attorney James Fitzmaurice emphasized under cross-examination that Richards’ salary had continually gone up--from $85,000 in a rookie year in which he also got a $55,000 signing bonus to more than $400,000 last season. Richards noted, however, that Mark May, who signed with the Chargers as a Plan B free agent last year and was his backup, received more than $700,000 in salary and bonuses.