OmarK was listening into Joe Rose's Drew Rosenhaus appearance this morning and DH mentioned that he has a large number of clients who are Jr's who are coming out in 2010 to avoid the rookie wage scale. As has been predicted, no surprise there, however thinking about this for a moment, imho no one should be suprised if we see a large number of trade backs and trade outs in exchange for 2011 picks. The 2010 Draft Class will more than likely be extremely expensive to sign as Agents know this is one of their last shots at making even 4th round picks millionaires, the 2011 class will not face the same pressure, so teams like Jacksonville, Buffalo, St Louis, may make the strategic decision to trade back in this draft to contol draftee costs. Add in the removal of 4 million per team (on average) in revenue sharing, and those small market teams with tight budgets are under even more pressure to control costs. The #10 overall this year will cost..maybe 15 million to sign? #10 overall in 2011 will be significantly below that level, they also have nowhere else to go play professional football.
ironically all of the juniors declaring will make it a very deep draft pool, thus ensuring that many players will be drafted considerably lower than they would next year, so they won't get nearly as much money as they're expecting.
I think they will, even 4th and 5th round picks are getting 2 or 3 million dollar contracts, in 2011 I'd expect that to be cut down by at least 1/3.
The juniors that have applied for this year have already matched the number from last year and it will only grow.
The other thing that we have not seen before, that youngin's have never seen before is the lack of a salary cap means there is also no salary floor, meaning teams can cut/trade veteran players to dump their salaries, and there is no cap hit because there will be no salary cap. Look at a team like the Bengals, they actually underpaid Andre Smith, there are virtually certain (imho) to either peddle draft picks or release expensive veteran players. Which means players like Ced Benson will hit the open market as they won't Franchise tag him at 8 or 9 million per year for a Rb. And they won't be the only team to do so. Life after the salary cap nor salary floor, along with the last Draft with contract slotting system will make for a wild and wacky offseason
Count me among the folks that very much doubts that they will put a godsmack on rookie wages. The problem has been the rampant inflation of rookie contracts over the last ten years. IMO, when they come out with a rookie wage scale, the focus will be on slotting so that the contracts can be signed immediately without any holdouts, and on controlling the inflation. The third focus will probably be to cut down on the money paid to top 5 and top 10 picks. I seriously doubt they will want to run into a situation where you have dozens of players saying wow, I'm making a third of the money I could have made all because I decided to stay in school and get my degree. The only juniors that should come out because of a looming pay scale, should be guys that are sure they'll go very high in the draft. Everyone else will likely be the victim of a greedy agent pulling the wool over their eyes.
Peter King made a very good point agents putting the fear of God into juniors about losing cash when actually they won't really lose that much cash at all.
God damnit I've been making that point for ages and now that Peter King says it oh what a great point Peter! ACKNOWLEDGE ME!!!! ME ME ME ME ME ME!!! Hehe. How's it goin, btw? How much Jake Locker have you taken a look at?
LOL. You're the Peter King of Tampa. All good my man. Hectic with real work up till Christmas. Locker? Once in full this year, against USC. Couple of times in 08.
Well, at least I know how the scouting experience will go down in Orlando in a few weeks. O.K. we'll rename UD to CKDraft.com is that better?
