Dysfunction at it's finest

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(06-12-2025, 10:57 PM)THE PISTONS Wrote: Yeah...I mean the average person is happy to make $100k a year. These guys get millions and there's some wording in a contract they won't sign.

Don't get me wrong, I dont like how the Bengals negotiate sometimes, but if other teams have the wording...we should.

This is the most cliched terrible argument that exists when fans talk about players money. If the average person could do what an NFL player could do, they would no longer be an average person and they would no longer be happy to make $100k a year.

There's ~25,000,000 people in the US age 20-25 who the Bengals could have drafted instead. They chose Stewart as the 17th best of them at football. He's not an average person. There are only 32 people in the entire world each year who are NFL first round picks. 

As a general rule, not even professional athlete-wise... if there's wording in a contract you don't like? Don't sign that contract. Signing a contract you don't like is about the worst advice you can give someone. That's a terribly weird take.

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Besides, the average person gets to choose who they work for, and they get to negotiate for their salary and their companies generally aren't guaranteed profitability through huge tax breaks and anti-trust exemptions.

So unless you want to get rid of the draft, the rookie wage scale, the salary cap and revenue sharing... and open up the NFL to an actual free market system, I don't think you want players being held to the "average person" standards.

We would have never gotten Joe Burrow. He would have signed out of college with New Orleans for hundreds of millions of dollars and a minority share of the team if he were able to get his services bid on by companies like a true "average person" in the job market.