Report: NFL Owners Withheld Roughly $120 Million From Players, Arbitrator Rules
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- In America, the NFL is king. The average NFL franchise is worth $2 billion, TV networks clamor to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the league for broadcasting rights, and between the season and the combine and the draft and all of the off-the-field drama that dominates the news cycle, professional football has officially become a 12-month sport.
And in a league so hungry for more, a recent ruling by an arbitrator found that the owners improperly withheld about $120 million from players over the past three years. The Wall Street Journal reported the news, noting that the league must return that revenue to the NFL Players' Association.
According to the report, the owners cited a ticket-sale revenue exemption which allowed them to not count that revenue toward the money they share with the players' union. However, that exemption did not exist, and so, the money must be paid to the players who are the ones who make all that money for the owners in the first place.
"They created an exemption out of a fiction and they got caught," NFLPA executive DeMaurice Smith told the Journal.
The NFL sought to make the ruling seem less devious, with spokesman Brian McCarthy telling the Journal that the issue arose from a "technical accounting issue under the CBA involving the funding of stadium construction and renovation projects."
That PR spin, however, did not fly with arbitrator Stephen Burbank. He ruled that "while the language and provisions of the agreement are complicated, interpreting the contract isn't," per the Journal.
As a result of the ruling, the salary cap will go up about $1.5 million in 2016, money that otherwise would not be going to the player pool if not for the NFLPA catching the imaginary "exemption."
So it is true that whether players are going over the middle of the field to catch passes or whether they're simply trusting the league to compensate them properly, they always need to be on the lookout for a blind-side hit. The ones delivered by the owners could be every bit as painful as the ones dished out by linebackers.
