Salaries Guaranteed
Salaries Guaranteed. For the fans of the NFL, the players are playing the game that they love to entertain us. For the players, they perform on the field so they can earn money to support themselves and their families. They sign contracts, and that is how they get paid. These contracts, however, in the NFL are vastly different from those in other sports.
If you sign a five-year, hundred-million-dollar contract in basketball, you would be ecstatic because you will be receiving the full salary over the next five seasons regardless of your performance on the court. Football is vastly different because the total money in the contract isn’t guaranteed, and that can make all the difference.
An NFL contract depending on your position could have the guaranteed money be as low as half of the stated contract. Why would a player sign a non-guaranteed contract? In a physical sport like football, the players have to reach for the stars when negotiating contracts with their agents.
Player health is often the biggest determining factor in guaranteed money. A player like Danny Amendola, for example, is usually injured or dealing with a nagging injury. That will hamper his play on the field. He might sign a two-year contract, six million dollars contract. That’s a contract that would make the average human salivate. The thing is, given his injury history and age, only like one million would be guaranteed. So he could get injured in Training Camp, and the team could cut him and only have to pay him one million dollars out of the six million dollar contract he signs.
The biggest example of a player using his leverage when negotiating was quarterback, Kirk Cousins. Cousins left the Redskins and joined the Minnesota Vikings on a three-year, eight-four million dollar contract. The contract he signed was fully guaranteed. With the contract fully guaranteed, his play on the field wouldn’t dictate his potential earning from the signed deal.
Guarantees in contracts are things players need to think of because one team might offer more money, but another team might offer more guaranteed money. Depending on the position or age of the players, these are huge factors that could have lasting ramifications that impact their lives.
Given the physical and violent nature of football, completely guaranteed contracts will never become the standard. The players should, however, continue to strive to make this reality. The NFLPA, the NFL Players Association, should continue to push for these during league negotiations so that all players can be financially secure without fear of losing it all to injury or other circumstances.
