Ben Gilbert

There's a bunch of stuff to skip, like the USFL and all the teams moving cities and Deflategate, to focus really on the strategic moments that created the conditions of the NFL's business today.

Yes, this is my biggest criticism.

The thing that got them here, this league first mentality, is eroding because of the way that the revenue splits are happening.

So you look at the local stadium sponsorships, you look at every stadium is dedicating more and more real estate to luxury suites.

The local merchandise sold in the stadiums is local revenue.

And so the teams are making more and more money locally.

So a greater percentage is coming from things the teams are doing on their own.

And you got to wonder if that individualistic, I'm Jerry Jones and the Cowboys deserve all the revenue mindset will be the thing that eventually kind of causes them to get unseated in some way.

Yeah, this is a great place to talk about that.

Let's go to 1993 and talk about the first time free agency and the salary cap comes into the NFL, how that's computed and how that impacts the sort of leverage going forward.

The league has been negotiating with the Players Association for a while, I think since the 60s, in various collective bargaining agreements.

But the 1993 one is unique.

The NFL didn't really have free agency for a while.

And in 1993, players finally got it, at least as long as a player had been in the league for four years.

In exchange, there was a salary cap put in, capped at some fixed percentage of the amount of revenue that the league generates.

Right.

So that today is actually a pretty high number.

It's 48.8% or something like that.

So players are effectively a partner in the league because the league's success ends up being their success, not necessarily evenly distributed among all players by any means.

In fact, quite the opposite.