Mike Florio

It kind of happened in 86 with Bo Jackson when he said to the Buccaneers, don't draft me, I'm playing baseball, and they drafted him anyway.

But I doubt that Mendoza...

will have seen something yesterday that would cause him to say, I don't want to play for the Raiders, even if he thinks I don't really want to play for the Raiders.

I'm not saying he should come to that conclusion.

But this is a one-way arrangement as well where it's up to the Raiders.

And I don't know.

Is it possible the Raiders would –

would see something that makes them decide substantively, we would be better off trading that pick to someone else who feels compelled to get Fernando Mendoza, and then we can get a bunch of other picks that would help us address a bunch of other needs.

I don't see it happening, but I think that it would be unwise to rule it out, just as it would have been unwise to rule out the possibility of that Max Crosby trade to the Ravens not happening until it was officially done.

The NFL acquired the broadcast antitrust exemption in 1961 as a tool for allowing the various teams of the NFL to come together and sell their TV rights as a group.

And that required the popular teams at the time

to say we're willing to do this and share the revenue in lieu of having each team basically do a Notre Dame type of a deal where we're going to sell the rights to our home games and we're going to make as much money as we can and the hell with the rest of you.

And that is what's fueled the competitive balance in the NFL

for six plus decades now.

So with so much noise being made about that exemption from the FCC to Congress, and yes, it's possible, if not likely, that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is using the levers available to him like the Wall Street Journal to attack that exemption as part of

the broader dance between the NFL and the networks as the NFL tries to get even more money.

But if the exemption would ever go away, it would be chaos for the NFL.

It would blow up the salary cap model because the teams that aren't making as much money from their TV deals would have a salary cap driven by all the money coming in.

All the money being made by the teams like the Cowboys, it's going to push those numbers up when you divide it by 32, and it's going to eat excessively into profit margins.

And I think that the league would potentially fracture into two separate leagues, the popular teams and everyone else.