Now I'm new to the DSFL and professional football in general. This means that I have a lot to learn about a lot of different aspects of how to conduct myself as a professional. Some of that is fairly mundane - learning the practice schedule for the new team, making sure my contact information is set up right in our contact portal, basically things I've done before with other organizations. But this is the first time I'm being paid for my football games and so the details of detailing with a contract is definitely a new experience for me and so I made sure to scrutinize everything to make sure I wasn't going to overlook an important detail. But, the contract didn't have one detail I was expecting to see. Specifically, there was no mention of what our pay was for the playoff games.
(As an aside, yes in some ways it's presumptive to think about payoff play before even stepping onto the field, but the MB environment is stressing how well we did last year and everyone's focused on getting back to the playoffs. So, I don't think this is a concern I should ignore prior to signing).
I brought this up with Dax Frost, the MB GM, who let me know that "Nope there are no [playoff payments]" in either the DSFL or (more surprising to me) in the NSFL. Do the hundreds of professionals who are now my colleagues really play more games for free? That seemed absurd to me at first glance but since it seemed to be taken as normal operating procedure by other players, I decided to think about it more deeply.
So first of all, the advanced medical nanites that the NSFL and DSFL provide all players have resulted in no on-field injuries (though some people manage to run into off-field problems) which means that there's no 'risk' to players for playing in the up-to-3 additional games of the NSFL playoffs. Second of all, everyone wants to win - it's the main reason why most of the players put in effort into training and other team activities. And for some, the winning is enough.
But I don't want to accept those two reasons as a sign that I should stop thinking about the issue. I'm a very numbers-focused kind of guy and I majored in economics, so I'm going to look at the playoffs from an owner's revenue perspective.
Taking the NFL-lowest 2003-era Soldier Field's 61,500 seating capacity as a guide, gate receipts at a lower-than-average ticket price of $200/seat would create $12.3 million in gate revenue plus a much harder to estimate amount of additional amount of revenue from merchandise, parking, concessions, etc. along with costs to operate the game such as salaries for the stadium workers, power for the lights, etc. Being generous, I'll assume that net profit of all these ancillary activities works out to $2.7million so that each playoff game is producing $15 million in profit in its current state. I suspect it's more given other tag-on effects, but it's hard to measure given the lack of published league financials related to broadcast rights and other media deals.
So, given that every playoff game is making the owners another $15 million dollars, I think players are owed some of that. Thinking of a 20 player team (which looks about average for the NSFL), I think that 10% of the game earnings should be distributed to players with $1m going to the winning team ($50k each) and $500k going to the losing team ($25k each). I believe that would be a way to fairly reward players for doing well without wildly distorting contracts - an NSFL player that won 3 playoff games would earn an additional $150k. And as I said above, I suspect that this $15m/game number is on the low side - I'm sure that paying players a small amount more will not be ruining any owners profit and loss numbers for the year. Remember too that $50k/game at 13 games/season is only $650k/year, less than most NSFL players and nearly all stars make.
Thank you fellow players for taking the time to read this, and be sure to bring it up with your GMs to try and make this change happen.
(As an aside, yes in some ways it's presumptive to think about payoff play before even stepping onto the field, but the MB environment is stressing how well we did last year and everyone's focused on getting back to the playoffs. So, I don't think this is a concern I should ignore prior to signing).
I brought this up with Dax Frost, the MB GM, who let me know that "Nope there are no [playoff payments]" in either the DSFL or (more surprising to me) in the NSFL. Do the hundreds of professionals who are now my colleagues really play more games for free? That seemed absurd to me at first glance but since it seemed to be taken as normal operating procedure by other players, I decided to think about it more deeply.
So first of all, the advanced medical nanites that the NSFL and DSFL provide all players have resulted in no on-field injuries (though some people manage to run into off-field problems) which means that there's no 'risk' to players for playing in the up-to-3 additional games of the NSFL playoffs. Second of all, everyone wants to win - it's the main reason why most of the players put in effort into training and other team activities. And for some, the winning is enough.
But I don't want to accept those two reasons as a sign that I should stop thinking about the issue. I'm a very numbers-focused kind of guy and I majored in economics, so I'm going to look at the playoffs from an owner's revenue perspective.
Taking the NFL-lowest 2003-era Soldier Field's 61,500 seating capacity as a guide, gate receipts at a lower-than-average ticket price of $200/seat would create $12.3 million in gate revenue plus a much harder to estimate amount of additional amount of revenue from merchandise, parking, concessions, etc. along with costs to operate the game such as salaries for the stadium workers, power for the lights, etc. Being generous, I'll assume that net profit of all these ancillary activities works out to $2.7million so that each playoff game is producing $15 million in profit in its current state. I suspect it's more given other tag-on effects, but it's hard to measure given the lack of published league financials related to broadcast rights and other media deals.
So, given that every playoff game is making the owners another $15 million dollars, I think players are owed some of that. Thinking of a 20 player team (which looks about average for the NSFL), I think that 10% of the game earnings should be distributed to players with $1m going to the winning team ($50k each) and $500k going to the losing team ($25k each). I believe that would be a way to fairly reward players for doing well without wildly distorting contracts - an NSFL player that won 3 playoff games would earn an additional $150k. And as I said above, I suspect that this $15m/game number is on the low side - I'm sure that paying players a small amount more will not be ruining any owners profit and loss numbers for the year. Remember too that $50k/game at 13 games/season is only $650k/year, less than most NSFL players and nearly all stars make.
Thank you fellow players for taking the time to read this, and be sure to bring it up with your GMs to try and make this change happen.
Draft Steal (retired S35 CB) - Profile/Update | Wiki
Troen Egghands (retired S22 DE) - Profile | Update | Wiki