Free agency screws everybody's allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It's really hard.
To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.
The small-market teams should know I've always been with them.
Once you've been around this business long enough, anything is a possibility. It's a business first and foremost. Guys play it because they love it, but it is a business, and if you don't understand that it's a business, you're lying to yourself.
The NBA believes if you play for a team and get paid by a team, you're the property of that team for 24 hours a day.
Free agency is free agency. I love when NBA players get paid.
The two major things that changed the makeup of all professional sports are money generated by television and courts that players went to in order to win their freedom as free agents.
You cannot talk to a player who has a contract. It's not in my code.
In fact, an awful lot of N.F.L. club owners have practically no influence on their players at all, simply because they're not full-time working owners.
You don't want to get to the point where you play out your contract and you get to those complicated situations where they can put the franchise tag on you and things like that.
Baseball has all the money.
Unfortunately, there are no mulligans when it comes to pro football contracts.
I understand every piece of business in this league.
The owners don't win by having a lockout. Shutting down your business is not good for anybody and it's certainly not good for the players, it's certainly not good for the fans. And that's most important to us.
I can't speak on anybody else's free agencies, how that's going, but for myself, it helps to kind of be patient and let it happen.
The NFL is a very fortunate business. The players are very fortunate.
The players wanted more money, higher salary caps and they didn't have that family relationship we felt with the players. Mentally, the players were more businesslike.
When you play in the NFL now the teams are very, very equal.
It's always that time of year around January where trade talks come.
The NFL is a business and I accept it for what it is.
In '94, we made the deal during collective bargaining that wasn't the right deal, just to save the season. Allowing the 'in the crease' rule, the foot-in-the-crease rule, we should have not done.
So let me be clear, Collective bargaining isn't a right, it is an expensive entitlement. Once and for all, we are giving the taxpayers a voice in this debate. We put the power back in the hands of the people.
Our economics are not baseball's economics. Our game is not baseball's game. Our owners are not baseball's owners, with one or two exceptions. Our union is not baseball's union. What we do has to be crafted and suited to address hockey, to address the NHL, to address our 30 teams and our 700-plus players.
A lot of players know I've been around 13 years and this is my second lockout. I got a lot of respect. I know what's going on both for the league and the union.
My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.
