The NFL Media is Structurally Anti-Player

even though the people within it generally aren't

Check out the above episode of the Athletic Football Show. To me, it’s indicative of a much larger issue in the NFL media: its unthinking, unintentional, but profound anti-player bias. These three guys are not, I’m sure, unsympathetic to NFL players or unduly beholden to the owners of NFL teams. I imagine they understand that the teams and the league make an ungodly amount of profit and that, relative to the owners, the players make far less money than they should compared to what they contribute. I bet if I asked them individually whether the system is fair to the players, if the amount players receive is up to the level of their true value, they’d say no. Their natural tendency, I imagine, is to support players and want better for them. So why, exactly, do they end up endorsing an extremely anti-player vision of the NFL?

They three analysts here aren’t guilty of favoring ownership over players in any intentional way. Instead, they’re big believers in the modern “meta” of building a football team - and so they end up being functionally anti-player without intending to be. Modern NFL analytics primarily serves ownership interests by optimizing cost efficiency at the expense of players, and this whole conversation reflects those assumptions. Teams use production-per-dollar metrics to discard veterans the moment their value peaks, while preferring cheap rookie labor to brutally suppress the broader market. Positional valuation models have essentially cartelized pay, crowning a handful of worthy positions while systematically underpaying others, and because all 32 teams draw from similar data - and because the NFL’s antitrust exemption prevents new firms from entering the market - there’s no competitive pressure to deviate. The result is industry-wide wage suppression dressed up as objective analysis. And because the system is bent this way, analysts end up carrying water for a deeply exploitative system even when their personal tendencies are often firmly on the side of the players.

Consider ESPN.com wonks Ben Solak and Seth Walder. Both use an analytics-heavy approach to justify reprimanding teams whenever they pay players a dollar more than the very least they could possibly pay. Analysts like Solak and Walder exemplify the mainstream NFL media’s uncritical adoption of franchise-friendly analytics by routinely praising teams for “smart” roster construction that means cutting veterans, devaluing running backs (average career length: 2.5 years), and maximizing cheap rookie production. Consider Walder’s open-mouthed contempt over the Buffalo Bills giving receiver DJ Moore a generous contract extension; his disdain for the idea of paying players is palpable. Solak’s tendency is to relentlessly question every dollars players are paid. Or you could look at independent football analyst Warren Sharp, he of the shitty ironic mustache and (alleged) predilection to delete old wrong predictions on Twitter; he’s dismissive of any move to acquire any actually-existing player, largely because draft picks and cap space will forever amount to unformed potential while players eventually have actual statistics to analyze and judge. (This get-out-of-jail-free-card nature of cap space and picks has backstopped the careers of many NFL pundits, allowing them to posture as gurus without ever actually risking being wrong.) Meanwhile, ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, who regularly points out the inherently exploitative nature of the NFL labor market, is often regarded as one of the more disliked insiders in the business.

Whatever their personal sympathies, whether intentional or not, when the sport’s most prominent analytical voices treat ownership's cost-efficiency logic as neutral and objective, they launder what is effectively a labor-suppression framework into conventional wisdom, making it harder for players and their union to push back. The system gets reinforced not by the league’s paid lackeys but by smart analysts who’ve simply accepted the league’s financial interests as the default lens. But that lens is the result of a series of the fundamentally anti-labor antitrust exemption and a deeply unfair league history.

Sometimes this gets personal. In the podcast above, in the context of saying that he was badly overpaid, Athletic analyst Robert Mays says of former NFL wide receiver Russell Gage, “Russell Gage made $29 million playing professional football, so he did just fine.” Dave Helman points out that it’s unfortunate for a guy like Gage to claw his way up from being a sixth round draft pick to getting a decent contract, only to end up as a roundly-mocked cautionary tale, but he can’t bring himself to disagree with Mays. Well, sure, if we wanted to take a look at the entire human economy and decide whether Gage “deserved” to make that money and conclude that he was well-compensated, we could do that. But in context of the NFL system, where players are essentially robbed of their fair value every year? No, Gage wasn’t overpaid. In a truly free market system where he was able to freely barter his labor power, he would have very likely made more than that in his career. And this is precisely what I mean when I say that people who probably don’t think of themselves as anti-labor end up carrying water for NFL teams and their billionaire owners. I’m very happy any time a Russell Gage gets one over on a system that pours money into the pockets of people like Jerry Jones, Woody Johnson, and Jimmy Haslam, and you should be, too.

Of course, NFL players earn more than the vast majority of workers in any industry, and yes, that context matters. But within the industry, they’re structurally underpaid relative to the revenues they generate, with careers averaging just over three years, no long-term guaranteed contracts for most players who ever play a down in the league, and a union that has repeatedly traded long-term player interests for short-term gains. When it’s over, many walk away with broken bodies, chronic pain, and cognitive damage accumulated over a lifetime in the sport. It’s not a surprise, then, that a mind-boggling share of former NFL players end up in serious financial difficulty within years of retirement, having had too short a window to build lasting wealth from the billions they helped create.

And yet, somehow, the NFL media wants you to root against any deal that ends up player-friendly. Turn on any NFL podcast, pull up any team-building analysis, or read any offseason preview, and you’ll hear the same gospel preached all over the place: the correct strategy for NFL success is building through the draft, exploiting the rookie pay scale, letting aging veterans walk before they get paid, being disciplined and minimalist in free agency, stockpiling compensatory picks, and using the franchise tag to squeeze one more year of abuse out of a player before he reaches open market. This is the received wisdom in NFL media circles. It’s also, when you stop to think about it, a comprehensive guide to maximizing owner profits at the direct expense of the players those owners employ.

The journalists, analysts, and podcasters who promulgate this philosophy are, by and large, politically progressive people. They believe in workers rights, they believe in collective bargaining and living wages. I mean, sure, Colin Cowherd and others like him exist; it’s certainly not a universally progressive bunch in the NFL media. But in general, those who cover American football for a living are no less progressive than the media is generally assumed to be. There are all number of prominent media personalities who have a deep interest in the NFL who have progressive politics - Dan LeBatard, Mina Kimes, Bomani Jones, Jemele Hill, Dominique Foxworth, most of the Ringer crew…. And those are rare individuals who are willing to be explicit about politics in their coverage. Many more are liberal Democrats who rarely engage in partisan political discussion on their platforms but who also don’t hide their preferences. As a class, they tend to believe that labor deserves its fair share and that management will exploit workers whenever the rules permit. And yet the moment the conversation turns to NFL roster construction they become the most enthusiastic advocates for a system of labor suppression that would make a Gilded Age railroad baron blush. Professional football is an industry where workers are at an immense disadvantage relative to management, and yet generally progressive people relentlessly push strategies that benefit the bosses rather than the laborers.

---

Let’s be clear about what the “smart team-building” strategies they recommend actually are: techniques for legally underpaying employees.

The NFL rookie pay scale exists to ensure that incoming players - including some of the very best players in the world, the ones selected at the top of the draft - earn a fraction of their market value for the first four years of their careers. The draft itself, of course, strips players of any choice in who employs them, eliminating the foundational condition that makes a labor market function. There’s no competitive bidding for a first-round pick; there’s one offer, take it or leave it football entirely. So take presumptive first overall pick in the upcoming 2026 NFL draft, Indiana University Quarterback Fernando Mendoza. I’m not as high on Mendoza as some, but there’s still no question in my mind that he could get $40 million dollars a year on a truly open market. After all, the top 15 QBs in the league make that much or more, and free agent QB Malik Willis (who has thrown a total of 155 passes as an NFL quarterback and was considered a far less valuable draft prospect than Mendoza is now) is widely expected to get a contract worth $30 million a year or more. Mendoza, meanwhile, is projected to make a total of about $55 million over the course of four years. That’s what the NFL rookie wage scale does. It’s true that the players negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that made that exploitation possible, but they did so under the duress inherent to a legal monopoly that operates in a profoundly anti-worker way.

Or take the tag system. The NFL’s franchise tag is a one-year hammer that teams use to prevent their best players from ever reaching free agency at their peaks. Each season, an NFL team can prevent a player who would ordinarily reach the open market from doing so, instead roping them into another year where they’re forced to play for the team that currently holds their rights. The terms of that contract are generous compared to the average player at their given position, but the franchise tag is used almost exclusively on the best players in the league, and those players could often make dramatically more in the open market than they do on the tag. Rather than rewarding excellence with a long-term contract, teams can tag a player, locking him into a single-year salary that, while large in absolute terms, is almost always well below what a true open market would bear. Cowboys wide receiver George Pickens, a young and transcendently talented player who just had a breakout season, is currently slated to play under a $27.3 million franchise tag. Had he hit the open market, he would have easily cleared $30+ million per year on a multiyear deal that would have afforded him financial security. Now, if he plays on the tag and suffers a career-ending injury - which all NFL players risk on every play - he would never receive another NFL contract. It’s a scandalously anti-player system.

And then there’s NFL free agency itself: constrained by a hard salary cap, limited to a pool of thirty-two employers who have an antitrust exemption from Congress, and populated mostly by players who are either past their prime or were never quite good enough to get extended or tagged in the first place. Free agency is where NFL players have the ability to claw back some small amount of the value that they’ve lost to the rookie salary system, and NFL writers hate it! The 33rd Team’s Sam Monson and Steve Palozzolo seem to think signing players to market-determined contracts is for suckers; Pro Football Focus acts as though aging veterans who have been able to negotiate their labor value on the market have some sort of STD. When analysts praise a team for being “disciplined” in free agency, what they mean is that the team successfully avoided paying a player what he’s worth. Lost in this debate is what’s fair, what’s ethical.

(There’s long been a debate among NFL fans about whether the salary cap is “real.” This stems from the fact that the NFL is ostensibly a hard capped system and yet teams seem to find ways to wriggle out of salary cap problems every year, often without seeming difficulty. The answer is simple: when the NFL salary cap might constrain the ambitions of wealthy owners, the cap is not real; when the salary cap functions as a tool for suppressing player salaries, the cap is very much real. Hope this clears up any confusion!)

Consider Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. After his 2018 MVP season, one of the most transcendent individual performances in the sport’s history, Mahomes returned to the Kansas City Chiefs for roughly $5 million. That was his contractually-obligated salary as a third-year player on his rookie deal. In a genuine free market, a 23-year-old who had just demonstrated he was the best quarterback alive would have had thirty-two teams competing for his services. The bidding would have been ferocious. A five-year, $500 million contract, $100 million annually, would not have been an outrageous outcome, not at all. Instead, he earned $5 million because the system said he had to. When Mahomes eventually signed his first contract extension, it was celebrated as one of the richest contract in sports history at that time. What went largely unexamined is that it was still a substantial discount from what a real market would have produced. After all, it was negotiated under the shadow of the franchise tag, the salary cap, and the absence of any competing offers. The Chiefs held all the leverage because the system gave it to them! The highest paid NFL player by average annual salary right now is QB Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys, at $60 million/year. Cowboys fans might complain about his failure to get the team to a Super Bowl. But I promise that he generates more value than that for the Cowboys and the league than that. I promise.

None of this means that analysts are evil for advising teams to operate rationally within the rules they’ve been given. But NFL media has a responsibility to be honest about whose interests they’re actually serving when they explain why a team was smart to let its star receiver walk rather than pay him. They’re not just dispensing neutral strategic wisdom; they’re endorsing a system designed to underpay workers - workers who, it bears repeating, destroy their bodies and risk their neurological futures to do their jobs. NFL media should keep covering team-building strategy. If you think a deal is a bad deal, say so. If you think teams should prioritize the draft over free agency, in general, fair enough. But when you do, you should be vocal about the fact that you’re advocating for strategies that are rational but deeply exploitative within a highly-unjust system. Any NFL analyst who lambasts teams for paying players adequately should also be willing to say out loud, regularly, that the system they’re analyzing is rigged. Because it is.

Unfortunately, NFL media is media and media is clubby, based on insiderism and dedicated to protecting those with clout. The kinds of analysts I’ve referred to here, all of them very prominent and influential, are protected by the usual code of omertà that dictates media culture. Sports media is weird; in one sense, there’s no part of media where it’s easier to build your own following and start a career on your own terms, while in another sense, there’s no part of media where bigtimers are more protected from criticism or where less-influential writers, reporters, and analysts face more risk in critiquing stars. So I don’t expect anything to change. Who wants to be the one to stick their neck out in that way?