Thursday, January 4, 2007

Free Agency part 2...

There are 2 types of free agents. Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA) and a Restricted Free Agent (RFA). UFA = "[a] player [that] shall be completely free to negotiate and sign a Player Contract with any Club, and any Club shall be completely free to negotiate and sign a Player Contract with such player, without penalty or restriction, including, but not limited to, Draft Choice Compensation between Clubs or First Refusal Rights of any kind." A UFA can sign with any team for any amount of money without that team having to give the original team any compensation. When a player with five or more accrued seasons (or with four or more accrued seasons in any Capped Year) reaches the end of his player contract, he becomes an UFA.

A RFA is "any Veteran player with three or more accrued seasons, but less than five accrued seasons (or less than four accrued seasons in any capped year)... At the expiration of his last Player Contract during such period... [the player] shall be completely free to negotiate and sign a Player Contract with any club, and any club shall be completely free to negotiate and sign a Player Contract with any such player, subject to... certain restrictions." The restrictions are the fun part.

There is one other kind of free agent, which isn't really very "free" at all. That is the Exclusive Rights Free Agent (ERFA). Such a player has no more than two accrued seasons in the NFL and may only sign with his prior team, provided, of course, that the team extends a minimum qualifying offer to the player.

Even with all those free agency options teams still have two options to help them in securing their free agents the Franchise Tag and the Transition Tag. Any team can designate any one of their RFA or UFA a franchise player. That means that player is only allowed to deal with his current team. The team must tender the player at least a one year contract that is the minimum of the average of the five largest salaries (as of April 15) for players at the position at which he played the most games during the prior year, or 120% of his prior year salary, whichever is greater.

Tomorrow we will sum up transition tags and free agents as a whole. I will leave you with today's quote from Winston Churchill

"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm"

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

Free agency...

Today I thought I might do a little research on free agency. I wanted to understand more about how it all worked with franchising and transition players. As I started delving into it all I found out it was a lot more complicated than I had originally thought. So today I will talk about how free agency came to be, and tomorrow I will get into more specifics.

It all started back in 1931 when Browns owner Phil Ball filed a lawsuit against Judge Kennesaw Landis for a restraining order in an attempt to keep him from granting free agency to some of his farm club players for contract violations. It really didn't come to fruition until 1969 when Curt Flood challenged the legality of a team's claim to the right to perpetually renew a player's contract. He filed suit against MLB and lost, but the case went all the way to the supreme court.

In December 1975, the players finally won their right to free agency. The very first free agent was Catfish Hunter who signed for the Yankee's for 3.7 million. The process has undergone many changes over the years to increase sports spectators and team revenues. Thus spawned CBA's or collective bargaining agreements. Because the free agency and cba gave the players too much power the owners decided to check and balance the system with salary caps. Free agency is also limited by the team’s ability to protect certain athletes (Franchise and Transition players) from leaving by paying a salary equal to an average of the top players at his position. Salary caps are caps on the amount of money any one team can spend on players in the year but teams are allowed to amortize the large amounts of signing bonuses over the life of the contract.

Tomorrow I will elaborate more into defining the specifics.

Today's quote is by Theodore Roosevelt
"Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly, I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it."

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Thanks be to Darren...

As I sit down for the night to gather my thoughts, I was peeping around all my favorite sites to see what new happened today and low and behold http://www.sportsagentblog.com/ gave me some nice kudos. I want to welcome all you frequenters of Darren's wonderful site. His site helped inspire me to start my own, and while I may never reach the sophistication of Darren's site, I will try to keep you updated on a daily basis.

Today's progress was pretty good. My coworker who is going to introduce me to Ken Kremer, gave me the name and contacts of another one of his friends who is the director of ministry operations for The Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It may not sound like much but they have a lot of volunteer work with big time stars in all sports. When the new year gets settled in more I am going to see about volunteering for them when I have time. If nothing else I think it will look good on internship resumes for the big name sports agency firms. This guy is also affiliated with Athletes in Action.

Again I want to give props to Darren Heitner for the mention and hope to repay him with more comments on his great topics. Make sure you click on all his advertisement links to help support his tremendous effort. I am also going to leave you with a quote for today to help keep you inspired.

Vance Havne
"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs."

Monday, January 1, 2007

What were they thinking...

Who in their right mind gives a 7 year contract to a 28 year old 3.83 era worth 126 million dollars. No one, the only explanation is the magical wacky weed must be strong in San Fransisco. My hat's off to Scott Boras who somehow managed to get star quality money for a player who had one great season and 5 mediocre ones.

Lets assume he starts 30 games a season for the next 7 years that comes to over 600k a game. According to sports illustrated the average ticket price in Giants stadium is $24.53(http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/baseball/mlb/09/11/fvi.giants/index.html ) just to cover their delusional asses they need to sell over 24,000 additional tickets every time Zito pitches. Who ever made that terrible business decision needs an extreme amount of shock therapy.

Scott Boras you are my idol