Jimmy Graham Should Not Be Catching Your Scorn

To kinda tie Jimmy Graham's new contract into NBA Free Agency: the idea that these contracts in sports now have such rigid ceilings, whether it's a "max contract" or the NFL's franchise tag, players look like assholes for taking all the money they can, but the owners are the ones making bank with such rigid constraints on what their labor can earn. Tom Brady recently took a "team friendly" deal and was lauded for it; this logic makes no sense.

"Loyalty is scarce, and long-time ties are scarcer."

That quote didn't come from a jaded sports columnist, one who longs for the the glory days of print journalism and coverage of athletes spending their entire careers with a single team. Nor did it come from any of the rightfully-jaded athletes of today, those who've seen their peers coldly discarded after years of service with a particular club.

No, that quote came from Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, that social-networking site that's likely responsible for a good-portion of your unread deleted emails. Hoffman was discussing the relationship between employers and employees alike in a recent guest spot in the Wall Street Journal.

Hoffman continues, "yet bosses and hiring managers still ask workers to commit to the company without committing to them in return. This creates a relationship built on mutual self-deception."

That relationship may not be perfectly transferable to the labor markets in professional sports. However, we just watched New Orleans Saints tight end Jimmy Graham try to convince the world that he wasn't actually a tight end. While the definition of "tight end" has certainly evolved over the last 30 years in the NFL, we can paraphrase the old adage, "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and lines up next to the offensive tackle…"

Why does it matter? To Graham and the Saints, there are 5,277,000 reasons why it matters. Graham, a former college basketball player who played only one season on the gridiron for the Miami Hurricanes, will turn 28 in November. At 6-foot-7, he's one of a handful of receivers that can change the complexion of a game. Graham smartly realized that after his contract expired earlier this year, he'd make more money if he was franchised as a wide receiver.

The Saints took Graham to arbitration, claimed their star was a tight end, and won. That distinction could cost Graham $5,277,000 in earnings for 2014, provided he and the Saints can't reach a long-term agreement before the start of the season.

Is that fair? Fair, as in, a fair assessment of this player's value? Graham has led the Saints in receptions in each of the last three years. He scored 36 touchdowns in that span to go with 3,507 receiving yards. In 2013, Graham outproduced all but 13 wide receivers in the entire league, and did this on a team with a quarterback renowned for distributing the ball to multiple targets in Drew Brees. The NFL's arbitrator looked at that (or, more likely, didn't) and said he's more Jordan Cameron than Jordy Nelson.

For those unfamiliar with the NFL's franchise tag rules, here's a quick primer. After every season, each NFL team can snag one of their departing free agents with something called the franchise tag. It's kinda like The Save from your favorite reality show, but it almost works in reverse. That player, as Graham finds himself now, remains stuck with his old team for another year, but he receives a guaranteed contract for the trouble.

The amount of that contract for that player is based on what the top five players at his position earned the year prior. For tight ends, that's an average salary of $7.035 million. That's a shitload of money, but it pales to what a wide receiver would earn under the tag: $12.312 million.

It's hard to dismiss this as simply "negotiating leverage" when Graham is such a young player that could potentially be spending another 10 years in black and gold. The cold designation of tight end surely must sting, even as the Saints navigate what little cap space they have for 2014, a little over $1 million. Graham will be getting a big raise off his rookie deal, no question, but he likely won't be paid what he's worth, relative to his true peers.

And that's a tough thing to say in 2014, with the American economy still in the tank and many families struggling financially. Just even typing out "This million-dollar athlete is getting underpaid"makes me feel like an asshole, even though I'm not the one strapping on a helmet and spending my autumns getting pounded in the ribs every Sunday.

The attitude toward professional athletes being "selfish" or "greedy" during their contract negotiations is an outdated one. The owners of these teams, in the NFL and elsewhere, are holding all the cards. Their labor costs are well-constrained under the current salary cap systems that exist in the NFL, NBA and NHL (to say nothing of the guise of amateurism in revenue-generating college sports. But I digress).

The NFL gets a lot of TV money, about $7 billion per season. Divide that among the 32 teams and each slice of pie is worth about $200 million. That's each year. For the next nine years. Strictly from television.

By contrast, the NFL's salary cap for 2014 is $133 million. Do the math. Any team could hire Lancelot Link to run their front office, go 0-16 annually, and still pocket over $60 million in profit. And that's before team merchandise, tickets, parking, concessions, and all that other overpriced crap that you buy when you go to cheer on your favorite team…in a stadium that your tax dollars likely subsidized.

It's hard to lambaste NFL players looking to secure their respective financial futures. But for some reason, it's easier for NBA players. Kobe Bryant might not be the best player in basketball anymore, but he's indisputably one of its biggest stars, and even he had to defend his $48 million contract extension last November. "You can't sit up there and say, 'Well, I'm going to take substantially less because there's public pressure, because all of a sudden, if you don't take less, you don't give a crap about winning," Bryant told Yahoo! Sports. "That's total [bullshit]."

Since when should the burden of financing a championship roster fall on the players? To go back to Graham's situation: why should he be vilified for getting what compensation he can? The tight end does have some support. Times-Picayune columnist Jeff Duncan correctly points out that the Saints had no problem asking its other stars to take pay cuts. Why shouldn't that door swing both ways?

To return to Hoffman from earlier, he asks, "As an employee, would you rather depart amicably and become a valued member of the company's alumni network? Or would you prefer to depart under a cloud of acrimony?" Rarely does anyone employed as an NFL player have that choice. And when Graham does have his, one can bet he'll be unsubscribing from all the Saints' promotional email listings.

He has earned better, and fans should recognize that.