Fixing Football: The Degree Tax
With the Coaching Carousel stopped for the moment, I thought I would use some of the time before the NFL Combine and the beginning of the new league year to get a few things off my chest about some of the crises facing football and there are several big ones. The arrest this week of Marshawn Lynch on weapons possession charges (after months of Plaxico and Pacman) means the NFL has not met the challenge posed by the criminal conduct of its players.
The Crisis
Last year, along with my colleagues at NYU, Dr. Lee Igel and professor Wayne McDonnell, I forecast that arrests and criminal conduct were threatening the integrity of the NFL and said that if Commissioner Roger Goodell didnt do something, he would be in trouble, as this is as serious a crisis as any his predecessors faced. In fact, we said that Goodells ability to manage this crisis in the short-term would define his tenure as commissioner. It was easy to applaud him and the NFL Players Association for attempting to eliminate the criminal culture from the league, but changing a culture takes more than just penalties.
A year later, Goodell has been somewhat effective, but more is necessary. The three strikes policy may eventually force out some of the games worst bad actors (think Pacman Jones), but it also serves to turn NFL locker rooms into probation units as players with up to two criminal or antisocial acts are both tolerated and enabled.
What remains necessary is fundamental cultural change and encouragement of the right kind of behavior. The league has strayed too far from the edict of Vince Lombardi, that his players carry themselves off the field as the most dignified professionals in their town, and this threatens the economic and social future of the league.
Identifying a Successful Control Group
Virtually every piece of data regarding players who leave early for the draft points to one counter-intuitive but inescapable conclusion: Players who stayed in school actually enjoyed longer careers and made more money in professional sports. This is counter-intuitive because players who leave early, at first blush, would figure to be better than those who didnt, and because they are younger, they would figure to have longer careers. But they dont. And these were just some of the statistics Pete Carroll was so animated about at the press conference last month announcing that quarterback Mark Sanchez was leaving USC without playing four full seasons. Sure, Carroll was unhappy about losing Sanchez, but it is also because Carroll is innately aware that no other trait not race, not ethnicity, not whether he likes hip hop or country music is as big a predictor of an individuals success as a professional athlete with a college degree.
This isnt to say that having a degree impacts ones ability to block or tackle or catch over the middle, but it does have a correlation with an individuals ability to be on time, be responsible and be prepared mentally and physically. And those are precisely the traits of an effective professional athlete and a superior employee of a team, which is what they are. They are highly paid, idolized short-duration career employees who, unless they are wildly successful, must have other careers beyond sports.
Taxing the Problem: The Solution Pays for Itself
So the answer to diminishing the criminal culture in the league and providing an incentive for positive behavior centers on giving players a financial incentive for staying in school and joining this statistically significant success group or encouraging those players without a degree to put in their time and get one, even remotely, rather than frequent strip bars and party boats and making it rain.
The solution is simple provide salary-cap relief and income redistribution for players with degrees. It would work like this: Two young players, one with a degree and one without, sign contracts for the NFL minimum of $300,000. Except that the player with the degree actually is paid $400,000 and the player without a degree is paid $200,000. This $100,000 differential holds until the $1-million threshold, when the differential becomes $250,000 per $1 million. So if the two players were making $4 million annually, the one with the degree would actually receive $5 million and the player without would get only $3 million. The team doesnt pay the difference; it is actually a league-wide redistribution of pay, similar to the one that already exists to redistribute revenue based on playing time. But this program is actually funded by taxing the players without a degree. Call it a degree tax.
The NFLPA should be willing to sign off on this kind of proposal because it has no negative impact on overall player pay. It is likely that certain stars without degrees would be able to command contracts which account for the taxed difference and the degree tax might actually serve to boast overall player compensation. Teams can do what they like, but those contracts would be less salary-cap friendly than those given to players with degrees. At a minimum, the degree tax redistributes compensation to the unions more successful, reliable and longer-term members. Similarly, nothing would convince a player to get into or focus on school more than being paid less than the guy playing next to him, or worse yet, the guy below him on the depth chart. And a player in school, even by correspondence, doesnt have as much time to be out getting arrested. Since not quite half of active NFL players still dont have their degrees, the program funds itself until it is no longer necessary and could sunset like most tax laws.
Is this discriminatory? Actually, its not. Most jobs in the public and private sectors give a pay differential to people with more training or academic preparation that correlates in some way with their employment. Sports, when the data suggests that players with degrees are more successful employees and team members, should follow this basic principle. Consider the costs a team faces managing a problem employee in terms of coaching, counseling and disciplinary resources and lost playing time due to misconduct. Analysis tilts in favor of the more stable employee.
Academic training doesnt offer a perfect one-to-one correlation to successful employment in the NFL or any other field. But then, neither medical nor law school directly prepares their graduates for the problems faced in the real world practice. But those two fields deem not one but two degrees as pre-requisites to practice, so dont rule out the benefits of academic training entirely.
Make Agents Part of the Solution
Agents should also be able to collect, or conversely, have their fee reduced, based by this redistributed percentage. Agents, whether liked or nearly universally disliked, are an important stakeholder in the game and its culture. They should be part of the solution, not part of the problem. The degree tax would give agents an incentive to encourage all but their most high-level draft eligible clients to stay in school rather than leave early or drop out early to prepare for the Combine and draft at some far flung workout factory. The degree tax would also make agents a force for change in pushing their young clients back to school to finish their degrees and become eligible for their full contract salary and, by extension, their full agent commission. Might this lead to the creation of Drew Rosenhaus University so his clients could get all their contract money and the flamboyant Miami-based agent every penny of his fee? Perhaps, but how this is worse than whats happening now in the league.
Questions of Bias
I can hear you now. Wait, college isnt a panacea! What about binge drinking? Drug use? And just how does the ability to decline a noun in Latin make someone a better employee in a business where blocking and tackling are the stock and trade? Werent the Unabomber, the Enron conspirators and probably Bernie Madoff all college graduates? Arent you just egghead college professors perpetuating your own trade?
All are fair questions. College isnt, in and of itself, an answer as much as it is a hurdle, which young people either clear by learning self-discipline and responsibility or they dont. The undergraduate years can be either the best 10 years of a slackers life or a time for someone to develop critical life skills to be responsible in later life. The NFL cant wait for potential players in their early 20s to mature emotionally or intellectually; it has to create an environment for facilitating the growth of that maturity and demanding it. The degree tax creates just that incentive. For a player to get the most out of his career, he needs to get his degree. Yes, the NCAA should support the degree tax wholeheartedly.
A Point of Cultural Comparison
Compare for moment the cultures of the NFLs Cincinnati Bengals and New York University, where the authors work. Both have similar age demographics, but the Bengals had nearly 20 percent of their roster arrested two years ago, some multiple times. If NYU had a similar percentage of arrests, it would mean that 10,000 of our students had been arrested last year. The real number at NYU wasnt even one percent, and that would be a figure Commissioner Goodell, his broadcast partners and, perhaps most importantly, his sponsors could live with. Fans should be demanding this, too, since most of them wouldnt keep their jobs after carrying a Glock to work or getting stopped for their third DUI. It would hold players to a similar standard.
Give a Degree Tax Exemption for Military & National Service
Not everybody is college material or has a chance at college, so what about them? Well, the league might want to consider giving the same pay redistribution and cap exemption to individuals with two years of military or national (working as a police or fireman, for example) service. For a nation at war and still bearing the scars of 9-11, this honors the courage of those serving and would mirror the collegiate experience in developing responsible and reliable players worthy of the admiration of fans young and old.
Franchise Incentives
Teams also need a positive incentive to do the right thing. So each team would get a $50,000 salary-cap exception for every player with a degree. This way, a team could potentially add $2.65 million to its payroll if all 53 roster spots were filled with players with degrees. This could increase to $100,000 for every player with a graduate degree or involved in active national or community service. The NFL needs to get back to having multifaceted role models among its active players as it did when Rhodes Scholars like Pat Haden, doctors like Jim Kovach and lawyers like Steve Young and Bart Oates played.
It would be the height of head-in-the-sand denial to expect talented young players, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, to remain in college when they can collect millions by entering the draft. But the culture of the locker room must change to become a climate directed to making these younger players more successful in their pro careers and in later life. The degree tax would serve to help these early entrants because it would create an incentive for both players and teams to encourage lifelong learning and the players to use their careers in pro sports to set up the remaining years of their lives.
Football in the NFL has become a demanding year-round business. Will franchises slow down their demands on players to let them get in school? The NFL currently gives a significant tuition benefit to all its players, but few use it, claiming theyre too busy with offseason conditioning and mini-camps. It may be difficult to change this part of the team culture since the goal of NFL teams is to win games, but the degree tax may give them a reason to do precisely that. If a club can qualify for the competitive advantage of cap relief because more of its players have their degrees, they may be able to afford to keep additional productive players rather than losing them to free agency
Some teams may not be quick to adopt the cap-relief provision of the degree tax because it will enable some teams to pay salaries in excess of the cap go cash over cap in NFL jargon but that already happens in a variety of ways, and the degree tax is the only way to promise profound social and image change.
A New Question for the Leagues
It is simply a human resources question that pro sports leagues face, one they never had to answer before. No longer is it merely a question of who is the best player, but who is the more successful employee and relates better to the customer. Companies spend tens of millions of dollars trying to identify and train the best employees, both in terms of actual performance and in their relationship to their customers. Sports leagues shouldnt forget the second part of the equation, and the degree tax is a simple, sound solution for positively changing the culture of the NFL locker room and franchise. Can you also have a conviction tax for players with previous criminal convictions? Salary-cap penalties for teams with players who commit crimes? Theres no reason why not, but neither fundamentally changes the culture; both merely perpetuate the current one.
Its time for Commissioner Goodell, with the cooperation of the NFLPA, to send a clear message to players, agents and teams where it counts in the pocketbook. The key to success in the league is learning the skills, self-discipline and responsibility the academy teaches and that the time spent in college off the field means something to your career as well. A degree tax would positively transform the culture of the league, and it would favorably impact the bottom line of Americas most successful sport by making players more representative of the league brand and more accessible to fans, sponsors and advertisers. And dare we say it, make them role models again.