You're kidding, right? Jerry always gets shafted by Goodell. He and Mara (Giants owner) are best friends.
Yeah, Goodell didn't seem to let his "friendship" with Jerruh get in the way of shafting the Cowboys.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/montebu...e-dallas-cowboys-and-the-washington-redskins/
The NFL's Bizarre Salary Cap Penalties For The Dallas Cowboys And The Washington Redskins
By Monte Burke
This is just weird.
Yesterday it was announced that an independent NFL arbitrator named Stephen Burbank had dismissed the complaint ofthe
Dallas Cowboys and
Washington Redskins in the salary cap dispute between those two teams and the league. The Cowboys and the Redskins,
the two most valuable teams in the NFL, will be penalized a combined $46 million dollars.
The weird part: The two teams are being penalized for overspending on player contracts…
in an uncapped year.
There is not an ounce of logic in that sentence.
The Cowboys will be penalized $10 million, paying $5 million a year for two years.
According to ESPN’s
Dan Graziano, though 2010 was officially an uncapped year (because of the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement),
NFL owners agreed, in secret, to limit spending in 2010 even though there was no cap — to continue to structure contracts as though there were a cap, because the lockout they were about to impose was basically a thinly veiled attempt at union-busting.
Cowboys owner,
Jerry Jones, and Redskins owner,
Dan Snyder—ever the iconoclasts—apparently didn’t do as they were told. They didn’t break the rules, though, at least by my understanding. Because there were no rules.
The NFL
Players Association, which is supposed to fight for the players, has instead stayed on the sidelines during this fight. The union has screwed the very folks it’s supposed to protect twice in this matter: the players. It did not fight the owners on what can only be described as collusion. And it didn’t put up a fight for the Cowboys and Redskins in the appeal. Importantly, as far as players and their salaries are concerned, these two teams are traditionally frequent and big spenders in free agency. They will now have less cash to play with.
Jones and Snyder were very polite in a joint statement they released, saying they would “abide by the arbitrator’s decision to dismiss” the appeal they made to the NFL. I reached out to both men for comment and they both declined. But I don’t suspect that this ruling went down well with either man, both mavericks and hard-driving businessmen in their own right.
Both teams carry fairly high debt-to-value ratios (18% for the
Cowboys; 26% for the
Redskins) because their owners have been willing to take risks that other owners in the league have not, with new stadiums and debt-fueled other ventures. Jones, in particular, has a long history of butting heads with the league. I would be very surprised if there aren’t some repercussions for the NFL and the other owners down the road from these two. ProFootballTalk
is reporting that the teams might be able to still sue the league.
But in the end, it seems, the NFL does pretty much what it wants to do, with no accountability to anyone, really. Except to the fans. And fans of the Cowboys and Redskins, who may end up being the victims of this ruling, have ample reason to be angry about this decision.
