Frankly I was not aware of the magnitude of these changes, I knew there were some, but I was not aware just how much these went in the players favor.... I personally thought the owners had much more leverage than then to allow this to happen.
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Under the new labor deal, players get the edge on contracts.
Lito Sheppard violated his contract with the Eagles when he elected to ride his Suzuki GSX-R1000 motorcycle to work on Tuesday. He wore a helmet, and the trip from Sheppard's home in Moorestown to the NovaCare Complex was uneventful, Sheppard said, unlike Ben Roethlisberger's much-publicized journey in downtown Pittsburgh on Monday.
In the days after Roethlisberger's accident, when he smashed into the windshield of a car and broke his jaw, several Eagles said they would not give up their bikes. Not out of safety, and not because of their contracts.
The number of players who are willing to take risks - be it riding a motorcycle, or using steroids or possibly holding out of training camp - soon might increase because the penalty for such infractions has been dramatically reduced.
According to a high-level official at an NFC team, when the NFL Players Association presented the league with its final take-it-or-leave-it collective bargaining agreement in March, the Players Association added a section regarding signing bonuses. Under the previous CBA, each team could negotiate what is called signing bonus forfeiture language. The teams could put in strict deterrents - in the form of dollars - for behavior it deemed risky, like skiing or riding a motorcycle.
Under the new CBA, clubs now can recoup only 23.5 percent of a player's signing bonus prorated for one season, the team source said. And that goes for players who test positive for drugs, commit a crime, or hold out of mandatory team activities, the source said.
"You see baseball moving toward a 50-game suspension for steroid use," the source said. "You see the NBA and their union agreeing to things like a dress code. And here you have the NFL and the union, which historically have had this positive relationship looking out for the best interest of the game. I don't think it's in the best interest of the game to minimize the penalties for steroid use, holdouts, or motorcycle accidents. The union's comeback is, 'We agree there should be a deterrent, but we believe the old deterrent is onerous, just too much.'
"The reality is with the levels of salaries the players were making - and now they're going to jump up to a whole other level - you really need a very significant [penalty] before it really serves as a deterrent."
NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said that the league has "not agreed to do anything" and is "still negotiating all of the terms." But Aiello did say the league is "discussing possible maximums on the bonus forfeiture in certain areas," such as drug use, holdouts and early retirements.
A source close to the Players Association called this a "fluid process," but acknowledged that the union had scored a major victory when it comes to teams forcing players to repay signing bonus monies.
Consider the Terrell Owens case. After Owens failed to show up for a minicamp last spring, the team asked him to repay $1,725,000 - a whopping 75 percent of the $2.3 million signing bonus Owens received when he signed a seven-year deal with the Eagles. If the new language includes holdouts, it is believed the Eagles would have been able to recoup only about $77,000.
"It worries me that we've reduced a player's sense of consequence," the NFC source said, "and I actually think it's going to create a very dramatic change in the game, more from a holdout standpoint. The other part [drugs and steroids], I'm not sure that we'll know, now that we have [Jason] Grimsley talking about people using human growth hormones you can't even test for. Who knows what's going on?"
Although the NFC source said that the new rules would affect only players who sign a contract beginning in this NFL calendar year - such as the Eagles' Shawn Andrews, who signed an extension last week - many speculated that the rules will apply to all contracts.
"If I got hurt with a motorcycle, I'd have to pay back some of my contract, and that was just a couple months before the new [CBA] deal," said Eagles kicker David Akers, who signed a contract extension last November. "The one thing we talked about was it would be hard for an arbitrator, if there's now a standardized contract, to rule against a player."
When negotiating a new contract, the signing bonus forfeiture language typically is a sticking point, said Jerrold Colton, Akers' Voorhees-based agent.
"From my standpoint in negotiating contracts, you hate when you get all the terms of the deal done, and then the club drops on you the bonus language, some onerous forfeiture language," Colton said. "I have felt it's been way too tilted in the clubs' favor, and the P.A. had to put in some different language... . It can be the most difficult part of the negotiations."
Players can ignore it anyway, like Sheppard. He said he grew up riding bikes - scooters, motorcycles, dirt bikes and three-wheelers. He isn't about to stop now, whether $1 million is at risk or $1.
"There's a risk of getting hurt whatever you do," Sheppard said. "You can't say, 'I'm at more of a risk doing this than this, so I'm not going to do it.' But everybody has their own opinion about it. People who like motorcycles like them, and people who don't, don't."
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Under the new labor deal, players get the edge on contracts.
Lito Sheppard violated his contract with the Eagles when he elected to ride his Suzuki GSX-R1000 motorcycle to work on Tuesday. He wore a helmet, and the trip from Sheppard's home in Moorestown to the NovaCare Complex was uneventful, Sheppard said, unlike Ben Roethlisberger's much-publicized journey in downtown Pittsburgh on Monday.
In the days after Roethlisberger's accident, when he smashed into the windshield of a car and broke his jaw, several Eagles said they would not give up their bikes. Not out of safety, and not because of their contracts.
The number of players who are willing to take risks - be it riding a motorcycle, or using steroids or possibly holding out of training camp - soon might increase because the penalty for such infractions has been dramatically reduced.
According to a high-level official at an NFC team, when the NFL Players Association presented the league with its final take-it-or-leave-it collective bargaining agreement in March, the Players Association added a section regarding signing bonuses. Under the previous CBA, each team could negotiate what is called signing bonus forfeiture language. The teams could put in strict deterrents - in the form of dollars - for behavior it deemed risky, like skiing or riding a motorcycle.
Under the new CBA, clubs now can recoup only 23.5 percent of a player's signing bonus prorated for one season, the team source said. And that goes for players who test positive for drugs, commit a crime, or hold out of mandatory team activities, the source said.
"You see baseball moving toward a 50-game suspension for steroid use," the source said. "You see the NBA and their union agreeing to things like a dress code. And here you have the NFL and the union, which historically have had this positive relationship looking out for the best interest of the game. I don't think it's in the best interest of the game to minimize the penalties for steroid use, holdouts, or motorcycle accidents. The union's comeback is, 'We agree there should be a deterrent, but we believe the old deterrent is onerous, just too much.'
"The reality is with the levels of salaries the players were making - and now they're going to jump up to a whole other level - you really need a very significant [penalty] before it really serves as a deterrent."
NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said that the league has "not agreed to do anything" and is "still negotiating all of the terms." But Aiello did say the league is "discussing possible maximums on the bonus forfeiture in certain areas," such as drug use, holdouts and early retirements.
A source close to the Players Association called this a "fluid process," but acknowledged that the union had scored a major victory when it comes to teams forcing players to repay signing bonus monies.
Consider the Terrell Owens case. After Owens failed to show up for a minicamp last spring, the team asked him to repay $1,725,000 - a whopping 75 percent of the $2.3 million signing bonus Owens received when he signed a seven-year deal with the Eagles. If the new language includes holdouts, it is believed the Eagles would have been able to recoup only about $77,000.
"It worries me that we've reduced a player's sense of consequence," the NFC source said, "and I actually think it's going to create a very dramatic change in the game, more from a holdout standpoint. The other part [drugs and steroids], I'm not sure that we'll know, now that we have [Jason] Grimsley talking about people using human growth hormones you can't even test for. Who knows what's going on?"
Although the NFC source said that the new rules would affect only players who sign a contract beginning in this NFL calendar year - such as the Eagles' Shawn Andrews, who signed an extension last week - many speculated that the rules will apply to all contracts.
"If I got hurt with a motorcycle, I'd have to pay back some of my contract, and that was just a couple months before the new [CBA] deal," said Eagles kicker David Akers, who signed a contract extension last November. "The one thing we talked about was it would be hard for an arbitrator, if there's now a standardized contract, to rule against a player."
When negotiating a new contract, the signing bonus forfeiture language typically is a sticking point, said Jerrold Colton, Akers' Voorhees-based agent.
"From my standpoint in negotiating contracts, you hate when you get all the terms of the deal done, and then the club drops on you the bonus language, some onerous forfeiture language," Colton said. "I have felt it's been way too tilted in the clubs' favor, and the P.A. had to put in some different language... . It can be the most difficult part of the negotiations."
Players can ignore it anyway, like Sheppard. He said he grew up riding bikes - scooters, motorcycles, dirt bikes and three-wheelers. He isn't about to stop now, whether $1 million is at risk or $1.
"There's a risk of getting hurt whatever you do," Sheppard said. "You can't say, 'I'm at more of a risk doing this than this, so I'm not going to do it.' But everybody has their own opinion about it. People who like motorcycles like them, and people who don't, don't."
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