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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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The Anatomy of an NFL Holdout

When a star NFL player enters the final year of his contract, it's customary for his team to negotiate a deal that will keep the player with the club long-term and usually compensate him handsomely for it. Occasionally, however, the player and the team can't come to terms. Sometimes the player will bide his time until he can become a free agent and see if the market is willing to give him the deal he thinks he deserves. But other times the player feels an emotional connection to his team and wants to stay, but on his terms, not the team's. And sometimes the team doesn't even attempt to negotiate a new contract when the player wants one. In times past, these second two scenarios would occasionally lead to a training camp holdout, when a player would stay home from team practices in an attempt to gain leverage in negotiations. Theoretically, any player unhappy with his current contract could hold out, but it was more common when players were entering the final year of a deal and wanted to renegotiate early, since that would usually result in a higher salary for the current year. The 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement (the master deal between the league and the players union), put an end to this practice, imposing ruinous fines on players for not performing in accordance with their contracts. But there are exceptions.

Lamar Jackson was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens near the end of the first round of the 2018 NFL draft. He took over for injured starter Joe Flacco in November of his rookie season, became the youngest QB to start a playoff game, and quickly made a name for himself as one of the league's most exciting young players. In 2019 he was unanimously selected as league MVP, and in 2020 he had another great season and recorded his first playoff win. Jackson's value comes from a unique combination of arm strength and mobility. There had been mobile quarterbacks before, but for most of them their mobility was their only real strength; if they were forced to beat you with their arm, they couldn't do it. So guys like Michael Vick, Colin Kaepernick, and RGIII would give defenses fits—there's one less linebacker to blitz or drop into coverage if you have to assign one to spy the QB on every play—but these defenses soon found out that their strength could be mitigated by neutralizing the ground game and forcing them to throw. Jackson, for all his running talent, was a traditional pocket passer in college, and was as comfortable throwing the ball as he was running it. He could roll out on what appeared to be a designed run play, bait the defense in, then stop and throw a perfect over-the-shoulder fade. It was incredible.

Jackson entered 2022 on the final year of his rookie contract, and it was widely expected that the Ravens would sign him to a long-term deal. That didn't happen, but both sides seemed optimistic, and the year passed mostly uneventfully. But, as the season wound down, it became clear that trouble was afoot. The NFL is unique among sports leagues in that most contracts aren't fully guaranteed; the team can, subject to certain constraints in the CBA, cut a player without paying them. Often teams will guarantee part of the contract, and these terms get too complicated to describe here, but the amount of guaranteed money is usually the biggest sticking point in negotiations involving superstars. It was assumed that, though the Ravens were probably willing to give Lamar Jackson a ton of money, they probably weren't willing to guarantee all of it. The NFL salary cap prevents teams from just eating bad deals; it's hard to bring in good players to improve your team when one player is responsible for a huge cap hit, and doubly hard if that player is no longer a key contributor.

This unwillingness to guarantee became more salient as 2022 unfolded. The 2022 offseason was marked by two big deals. The first was the Cleveland Browns giving the Houston Texans a king's ransom for QB DeShaun Watson, and then immediately resigning Watson to a fully guaranteed $250 million deal. Watson had been the subject of lawsuits and a criminal investigation for sexual misconduct toward massage therapists. He was very good, but the Texans wanted nothing to do with him, and benched him for the entirety of the 2021 season. The legal issues went away, but the NFL still suspended him for the first 12 games of the 2022 season. So Watson entered the Browns on a monster contract but hadn't played a game in over a season and a half, and when he finally took the field in November, it showed. The jury's still out on whether Watson can shake off the rust, but the move seemed questionable when it was made and seems incredibly foolish in hindsight. The other big move was the Denver Broncos sending a similar haul to Seattle for veteran QB Russell Wilson, and similarly renegotiating his contract to one with a lot of guaranteed money. Wilson won a Super Bowl in Seattle and was one of the better players in the league for a long time, but the Seahawks struggled in 2021, and with the team entering the rebuild stage, and Wilson being their obvious best player, it made sense to move him. When he got to Denver, however, it became clear that Wilson was a large part of the reason why Seattle had been underperforming. Wilson was awful in Denver, a team that was supposedly a quarterback away from greatness, and Seattle almost made the playoffs with Geno Smith, a journeyman who was a bust with the Jets, under center. If the jury is still out on the Watson deal, most pundits agree that the Wilson deal screwed over Denver for a long time.

The Browns deal surprised no one since the Browns are notorious for being the most incompetent team in the league. But a lot of people thought that the Broncos got a fair price for a player of Wilson's caliber. Either way, the Ravens are known as one of the more competent teams in the league when it comes to personnel decisions, so it's certainly in character that they wouldn't want to commit to guaranteed cash, even for their undisputed best player. After these two fiascos, though, it makes it seem insane that any team would be willing to commit so much money, let alone the Ravens. Furthermore, Jackson has not proven himself immune to the other big weakness of mobile QBs: Injuries. Mobile quarterbacks take more hits than pocket passers, and as such tend to get injured more. Jackson sat out the last several weeks of both the 2021 and 2022 seasons injured. So it's clear that Jackson's bargaining power is greatly diminished compared to last year.

Technically, Jackson is a free agent. But the Ravens weren't willing to let him walk just yet. In an effort to keep teams from losing key players in free agency, the CBA has a Franchise Tag. What this means is that each team can select one player to tag, and the league will essentially write a one year contract for them. The Franchise Tag comes in two flavors. More common is the exclusive franchise tag. This simply says that the team keeps the player for one additional year at the average salary of the top 5 players at the position. Less common is the non-exclusive tag. This comes with a lower salary number, but allows the player to negotiate with other teams. If the player can reach a deal with another team, the original team has the option of matching the offer. If the original team decides not to match, they get two compensatory draft picks from the new team. Earlier this month, the Ravens announced their intention on giving Jackson the non-exclusive tag. This is normally a risky move, since the compensation provided is less than what the team could get than from simply trading the player. But it's genius in this case: Baltimore knows that after the Watson and Wilson fiascoes there won't be too many teams looking to sign a guy who wants a fully-guaranteed contract. And indeed, so far no other team has shown any interest. Things have become more contentious in light of recent reports that, prior to last season, Jackson turned down a five-year, $250 million deal with $133 million guaranteed. The message from the Ravens is clear: Your demands are unreasonable. We offered you a fair deal, and you won't get that deal anywhere else. If you don't believe us, we'll let you test the market and see for yourself, and if you don't like it, you can play here for another year for $30 million.

Seattle almost made the playoffs with Geno Smith

They did make the playoffs, losing against San Francisco on Wildcard Weekend.

Geno had a hell of a season.

https://www.fantasypoints.com/nfl/articles/season/2021/mobile-quarterbacks-and-injury-rates#/

The claim that mobile quarterbacks are more injury prone is unsubstantiated at best.

Dumb luck and how good a team’s offensive line is at pass protection are where I’d put my concern.

My mind immediately goes to Cincinnati’s brass knowingly rolling the dice on a suspect front five in 2020 and having to watch a guard’s fuckup result in their franchise QB’s knee getting imploded.

unsubstantiated at best

Nitpicking phrasing (though I disagree overall as well), "at best"? So, at moderate, it's worse than unsubstantiated? Which (to me) means actually the inverse of truth? So, at moderate, mobile quarterbacks are less injury-prone, is the hypothesis?

Brady, Young, Fahurev, his benchwarmer Rogers or whatever, Montana, Aikman, were thus the injury-prone cohort, while the less-injury-prone cohort spearheaded by Randall Cunningham (who in the o-fkn-riginal Madden Football is the greatest player to ever fondle a pigskin), Michael Vick, Cam Newton, and Robert Griffin III's surgical team.

Sorry, I'm being tipsy and a bit smarmy. Base point is that, of the top ten qbs in rush yds/game, two have played 100+ games. Of the top twenty, same two. Top 25 qbs in rush yds/gm, a total of three have played over 100 games.

Statistical analysis fails here because of the changing nature of the game, small sample sizes, and an inordinate number of confounding factors. Some mobility is good and contributes to longevity, but turning the passer into a runner exposes them to blows of a fundamentally different nature than those a passer takes--this isn't theoretical or statistical, but real, in a very tangible way for the guy getting smashed by a few hundred flying pounds. This isn't to say pocket qbs don't get laid out, but the repetitive stresses simply cannot be ignored, and the most holistic grand-scale view possible of "do running qbs hold up?" says, no, they do not. RBs have a lifespan of maybe six years...to play a QB like an RB and expect a twenty year lifespan is foolish.

Non of the running qb aged well. Maybe they aren’t hurt more but how many did anything impressive after 30.

Lamar also has the issue he’s been figured out. Ever since Brian Flores hit him with cover 0 he hasn’t been the same.

The 30+ zero blitz game was a wonderful bit of daring and ingenuity from Flores, and it was surprising it continued to work immediately after the half, but I’m not so sure I agree it was some huge catalyst. Baltimore did finally adjust before that game was over.

281 YPG passing before that Dolphins game, 275 YPG from that game on for the rest of ‘21.

But even if the non intuitive answer is true (running QBs that get hit more or not more likely to be injured) the effectiveness of a running QB after injury may be entirely different compared to a passer QB. Thus even if the risk of injury may be the same it doesn’t follow the risk from an injury is the same.

That’s fair. But I also think that since the advent of the zone read, any QB that can average even say 5 YPC and 6-10 carries a game gives his offense an extra man in the run game.

With any contract, teams want to pay for future performance and I think there’s consensus Jackson’s demands are optimistic. At the same time, even if he regresses on the ground he has some room to fall before he’s no longer effective.

I think running QBs fall off much more than passing QBs because their success as a passer is a bit of a mirage. It is because of the running threat. Thus a small decrease in running effectiveness can lead to a large decrease in passing effectiveness.

I think this is true. For example, the parent listed RG3 as an example of a quarterback who could only run, not throw. This wasn't always true. In fact, RG3 holds the NFL record for the highest passer rating by a rookie. And his passer rating in college was one of the highest ever. It's only in the rear view mirror that RG3 is seen as an ineffective passer. He got injured and his career tanked.

RG3 was a better pure passer than Lamar Jackson. If Jackson loses his ability to run, his value to an NFL team will fall to zero.

I’d like to see some data and a large sample. And only looking at Jackson, his QBR has been meh the last three years while his YPC have fluctuated from 6.3 to 5.8 to 6.8.

Worth pointing out before you look at the data that QBR takes into account rushing. I was referring to passer rating which does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quarterback_rating

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passer_rating

You can’t win the Super Bowl with an “effective” QB on a massive contract. You either need an elite QB on a massive contract, or you need an effective QB on a tiny contract that you can build a great team around.

Eli Manning was about as average as it gets and won two Super Bowls with large contracts. He was somewhat cheaper than contemporaries, but not much.

Of course, I wouldn't try to build a team with that pattern, but it's not necessarily a complete disaster.

No one said otherwise, above. But it’s not impossible — Peyton Manning’s 2015-16 salary was $18M (high for that year), and he was cooked in his final season. (I hope he still thanks Von Miller for that last ring).

LJ is a good passer *for a running QB. *

There is a reason he sucks when trying to come from behind. When the threat of the run isn’t there, his passing skills are sub par.

I think that’s why Ravens are hesitant going really really long term.

Part 2

With no other teams making offers, and Jackson’s relationship with the Ravens deteriorating, it’s expected that he will refuse to sign the tender offer and sit out the season. This expectation was bolstered today by Jackson posting that he had requested a trade at the beginning of this month, and subsequently had the tag slapped on him. While the 2020 CBA technically ended contract holdouts, Jackson’s situation is different because he’s not currently under contract. He’s subject to the tag rules, but the league has no basis for fining him for missing team activities.

This refusal to sign has only happened once before, and with disastrous results. In 2018, Le’veon Bell was one of the best running backs in the league. He had already played one season on the franchise tag, and, unable to come to terms on a deal, the Steelers tagged him again (it can be done two years in a row but it’s significantly more expensive). The Steelers purportedly offered him a deal that would have made him the highest-paid RB in the league, but this wasn’t enough; he was also a key component of the passing game, and thought that he deserved RB money and WR money.

Bell entered 2018 as a training camp holdout, not unexpected since this was still common. What was uncommon was that he didn’t show up for the first game either. Or the second game. It was speculated that he might come back during the bye week. He didn’t. He came back to Pittsburgh in early November, as he had until the 13th to sign his tender offer before forfeiting the season. But he never reported to the team. When the Steelers said in early 2019 that they wouldn’t tag him again, Bell had technically won.

But then came reality. Bell had lost out on roughly $14.5 million in salary from not signing the tag, and an estimated $19 million from not taking the Steelers up on their offer. When he hit the market in the Spring of 2019, he signed with the Jets, who offered him a deal worth an average of $13.1 million a year, less than the $14 million on average the Steelers had offered. And the first year of that deal paid roughly what he would have made on the franchise tag the previous year. And only some of that money was guaranteed. Little more than a year into his time with the Jets he demanded a trade, realizing he didn’t like playing for an awful team. His own production had suffered in the absence of a decent O-line. The Jets simply released him, and he signed with the Chiefs, a good team, but found himself at the bottom of the depth chart, and later made critical statements about Andy Reid.

In the span of 4 years Bell went from being the kind of player who could credibly demand becoming the highest-paid player at his position to having completely burned his bridges with 3 different teams and being out of the league entirely. The holdout was an unmitigated disaster. Like Jackson, Bell was injury-prone, which may have had something to do with the Steelers’ reluctance to give him what he wanted, but it’s hard to see them making him a better offer in any event. The one crucial difference is that Bell was hit with the exclusive tag, meaning he couldn’t negotiate for other teams and can thus be forgiven for thinking his market value was higher. There’s no excuse for Jackson; if teams are unwilling to negotiate with him now, it’s unlikely that they will after he sits out a year. And Jackson has a recent example of how that works out that Bell didn’t. Complicating matters is the fact that Jackson is acting as his own agent. Any agent worth his salt would have told him that the strategy he’s been pursuing thus far is a bad one and probably would have signed him last offseason. Any agent also would have told him that his request for a trade was inappropriate since he wasn’t under contract at the time and thus couldn’t be traded until he signs the tender offer.

The interesting thing to me about this, though, is the reaction. Most situations involving pro athletes elicit one of the following responses:

  1. Fans and media mad at players for acting unreasonably, e.g. Antonio Brown

  2. ans and media mad at team for not treating player fairly, e.g. study clauses, voided guarantees, etc.

  3. ans and media mad at league for collusion, e.g. Colin Kaepernick, every threatened lockout

Instead, there’s a sense of sad resignation. Lamar Jackson was supposed to win Super Bowls. Instead Ravens fans got one playoff win and 2 unfinished seasons due to injury. But still, Jackson is nonetheless one of the most talented and exciting WBs in the league, and is very much deserving of a nice contract. But nice wasn’t good enough, and he seems intent on throwing his career down the toilet to prove it. And he doesn’t even have the courtesy to become unlikeable. Prior to his holdout, Bell had been publicly dissing the team for years for supposed lack of respect, and during his holdout he claimed to be staying in shape but was evidently spending a lot of time at strip clubs. When he came back to Pittsburgh, his first public sighting wasn’t at the team facility but playing pickup basketball at a local LA Fitness. That may not seem like a big deal (he is exercising), but coaches hate it when players do stuff like this because they have a tendency to injure themselves.

Jackson remains appreciative of the fans, if not the team, but seems to be taking advice from friends and family rather than an agent, which is inexcusable because NFL agent fees are capped at 3%, and a high-earner like Jackson can probably get 1%. The Ravens seem determined to do everything they can to prove to Jackson that he won’t get a better deal elsewhere, although the terms of the non-exclusive cap may limit that since the teams most likely to sign Jackson are rebuilding teams that can’t afford to give up draft picks and are reluctant to put out offer sheets that the Ravens will probably match. The most logical thing would be for the 49ers to offer Trey Lance and draft picks in exchange for Jackson, but that would require Jackson signing a tender offer first, and wouldn’t give him a new deal, just a chance to play for a different team and maybe negotiate a long-term deal. It’s complicated, and who knows how it will play out.

This is interesting (but probably rather more so to those with at least a passing knowledge of football), but I admit that I'm not entirely clear what the culture war angle is. Just that the fans are NOT really taking sides, when they might ordinarily?

This reminds me of something I read a few years ago about how the Philadelphia 76ers were using contracts to essentially sell their players extremely expensive insurance.

IIRC, players in the NBA get an automatic 4 year rookie contract whose terms are dictated by their order in the draft. When the contract is up they become a free agent. At that time, if the player has become an established starter, he will earn a massive payday. But if not, he will get at best a marginal contract or maybe even get bounced from the league.

The 76ers leveraged this uncertainty by offering guaranteed extensions far before the expiration of the rookie contract. The offer would be much less than the expected value of the contract, in effect charging the player a huge premium to remove the uncertainty of becoming injured or playing poorly. While theoretically a win/win, the rules of the league prohibited other teams from making similar offers, so the 76ers had a defacto monopoly on this type of insurance. And naturally the 76ers could, in theory, tank a player's value by refusing to give him playtime or a role in the offense. So, for a player, it would take a lot of guts to bet on yourself instead of taking a much lower guaranteed payday.

Indeed, and it more or less worked with the Embiid contract and more or less backfired with the Simmons contract.

Baseball teams have started doing this as well. Sure guys go from career earnings of say 400m to 150m but after the first 50m does it really matter?

With how tax brackets work, I wouldn't be surprised if the "low" earners in these sports might actually have more expected value from a longer insured contract than a shorter uninsured one. $1m/year for four years is easily better than $4m for 1 year if you think that is the only contract you'll ever get.

I almost wonder if teams and players would be better off negotiating pension style deals rather than big single year payouts. I guess the rules on how many "players" you are allowed to pay probably prevent something like that. But I don't know why teams can't offer something like "team ambassador" or nonsense coaching positions for retired players.

A lot relates to the CBA’s signed. With that said, famously Bobby Bonilla I think is still paid by the Mets. Likewise, Ken Griffey Junior is I believe the third or fourth highest paid player on the Reds and he hasn’t played in about what seven years?

Bell may have been washed the year before. He turned down 14 after a year he averaged 4.0 ypc. The decline may have already occurred which is why you don’t give long term money to running backs.

Good write up but I feel like you kind of glossed over that he’s not really proven as a pocket-passer at all. People point to the injury concerns for a running QB, and Lamar has a bit of an injury history now, but I think the main problem is simply that we’ve only seen him succeed in a sort-of gimmicky offense tailored to his running ability. He had one incredible season, plus a couple more good ones, and he is certainly a good QB. But the reality is that he has thrown for over 3000 yards only once in 5 years and has played terribly in the playoffs. There’ve been plenty of examples of guys who are great runners, and just okay passers having great seasons and then flaming out, and we haven’t seen any QBs who aren’t primarily passers win any Super Bowls.

Regarding the public reaction, I think you’re also ignoring that tons of people have been claiming it’s the owners colluding to not give out guaranteed contracts. I agree though that the reaction at least on Reddit is a little more sane than I would expect. I think that can be explained by the fact that 1) the ravens offered him a mega-deal that just wasn’t quite big enough for him, 2) many fans are skeptical of giving him a long-term deal due to either injury concerns or (like me) thinking he’s unproven as a passer, 3) the player who received the gigantic ill-advised contract he is asking for is black so it makes it hard to argue the racial angle, and 4) the media has had this weird paternalistic relationship towards him since before he was drafted a few teams wanted him to work out as a running back which many media people considered to be racist. So when they see him making a stupid decision like acting as his own agent and essentially asking his team to cripple their future, they can’t condemn him for being stupid and go with the “oh what a pity” reaction instead

Great write-up.

Did not expect to find another U-Tree fan here.

There are dozens of us! DOZENS! (Though of the five Clickbait guys I'm inexorably becoming more and more of a Tom Grossi stan)

I'd already seen the video, and while I wouldn't exactly consider myself a fan (he's not particularly knowledgeable about the sports he covers), his football videos can be entertaining. His hockey videos... meh. His discussions about hockey futility ignore the fact that good teams don't always win championships and he tries to place the blame on the teams themselves, but doesn't offer any analysis beyond "they couldn't get the job done".

But nice wasn’t good enough, and he seems intent on throwing his career down the toilet to prove it. And he doesn’t even have the courtesy to become unlikeable.

I will point out that on /r/nfl there have been a surprising (and, to me, refreshing) number of comments about how Lamar Jackson is basically a complete moron, that everyone has known for a while that he’s very low-IQ (by QB standards, at least) - there was a lot of mockery of the atrocious grammar in his tweet, and one user even referenced the fact that based on his Wunderlic score and interviews with teams before he was drafted, many teams were scared off by the fact that he is functionally illiterate - and that this has been a needless shredding of the goodwill many fans had toward him.

Of course, I do not expect any but a handful of NFL fans to start connecting any forbidden dots about what that might suggest about larger racial patterns in the league, but I was heartened by the exasperated response of most fans when there was some scuttlebutt about Lamar Jackson feeling racially-marginalized because Daniel Jones (a dead-average and whiter-than-white young quarterback for the New York Giants) got a contract and Jackson didn’t. The fans overwhelmingly shouted this down and pointed out the absurdity of the claim and the vast differences between the two players’ expectations and situations.

I will point out that on /r/nfl there have been a surprising (and, to me, refreshing) number of comments about how Lamar Jackson is basically a complete moron, that everyone has known for a while that he’s very low-IQ

I was heartened by the exasperated response of most fans when there was some scuttlebutt about Lamar Jackson feeling racially-marginalized because Daniel Jones (a dead-average and whiter-than-white young quarterback for the New York Giants) got a contract and Jackson didn’t.

He has no constituency. Usually, fans of the QB's team would go through threads downvoting critical opinions and making things unpleasant for anyone commenting on the emperor's clothes. But Ravens fans have emotionally detached from Lamar at this point.

/r/nfl threads don't reflect average opinion, but who can turn out the most passionate mob of slactivists at a given time. If Lamar had an energized base of fans, they'd probably be out in force playing the race card.

What a fantastic recap of the Lamar Jackson saga - thanks!

A couple quickies I'd like to add also:

He scored a 13 on the Wonderlic test (the test given all incoming QBs to the NFL from college) which is abhorrent and although he's clearly literate, it's hard to tell how literate. So he doesn't have an agent imo because he's a dumb guy. An agent that he would listen to would have set him straight last season - he's already lost millions by not signing last season and, like Bell and others, may never be close to recouping. But he is a QB - and he is great - and by all accounts he seems like a nice dude ... So you never know, which is what he's banking on. I just felt important to add the context of how not bright this guy actually is and why, imo, he doesn't have an agent.