Deal’s Done, but Plenty of Questions Remain

I’m with Ralph Wilson.

I can relate to the Buffalo Bill owner who shuffled out of Wednesday’s NFL meeting scratching his head and trying to wrap his mind around the league’s new revenue-sharing plan.

“I don’t understand it,” said Wilson, one of the dissenting voters in the 30-2 landslide. “It’s a very complicated issue, and I didn’t believe we should be rushing into a vote in 45 minutes. I’m not a dropout ... or maybe I am. I didn’t understand it.”

Surely, he gets the basics of the deal. The 15 teams that earn the most local revenue -- money not acquired from national TV contracts or ticket income -- will contribute to a player-revenue pool that will add $850 million to $900 million over the life of the six-year labor deal. The bottom 17 teams don’t have to contribute to that pool.

So, in the new NFL, it pays to be poor.

Better yet, it pays to be ranked 16th in local revenue -- the richest of the poor -- which is a little like living at the very top of your tax bracket.

What’s less clear are the long-term effects of enhanced revenue sharing, and how the new system could affect putting a team back in Los Angeles.

If we’re to believe what the NFL has been saying over the last few years, L.A. has moved to the top of the to-do list. It has long been considered the third priority behind extending the collective-bargaining agreement and sorting out revenue sharing. Now that those two dragons have been slain, putting a team back in the nation’s No. 2 market should take center stage.

It remains to be seen whether owners will even discuss L.A. at the league meetings March 26-30 in Orlando, Fla. -- let alone make any kind of decision -- rather than brushing off the issue again.

Does the new revenue-sharing structure make an L.A. team more or less enticing? Having guaranteed labor peace for the next six years is definitely a positive. But now a potential owner of an L.A. (or Anaheim) team can’t count on collecting all the money from the sale of luxury suites, naming rights, local TV and radio deals, etc., and using it to pay down the $1-billion-plus price tag of a team and stadium. Now a significant portion of that money must be shared with poorer teams, assuming L.A. is among the high-revenue clubs.

Another issue is whether the richer teams will start putting the squeeze on poorer teams to make those teams less dependent. If, say, the lower-revenue Jacksonville Jaguars can’t sell luxury suites, what effect will that have on the higher-revenue Dallas Cowboys? Will the owners of richer teams pressure the owner of a poorer team to relocate to a better market such as L.A. and become less of a financial drain?

Are teams less valuable now than they were before the deal? There’s more stability now, which is a plus, but the cost of running a franchise just went up with the impending increase in player salaries. And now, when it comes to sharing, local revenue is no longer off-limits.

Will the new deal help or hurt New Orleans’ chances of keeping the Saints? At first blush, it looks as if it could help. The Saints are consistently bottom-dwellers when it comes to local revenue, and every little bit of help is a good thing for them.

And what about the Chargers, who are trying to get a stadium deal done in San Diego? Now that the league is spreading the wealth among teams at the bottom, many San Diegans might be less sympathetic to the team’s claim that it needs a new venue to stay competitive.

In fact, opponents of using public money to subsidize pro sports now have another compelling argument: With the NFL, it’s not only about investing in your local team, but -- if yours is a higher-revenue team -- sending money to the league, money that might be used to help pay the salaries of players from other teams.

In other words, why should taxpayers in Texas spend for a new stadium for the Cowboys when, indirectly, some of that money could wind up in the hands of the Jacksonville Jaguars?

It’s convoluted, it’s murky, it’s perplexing. Even if you aren’t a dropout.