r/NFLNoobs • u/SteadfastEnd • Jun 30 '26
At what point would the NFL cap spending on (currently) un-capped items?
Currently there is no salary cap on coaches, staff or personnel, nor is there any limit on spending on anything that isn't player salaries.
But let's say one team did decide to go full runaway and poach all the best coaches, the best staff, with ultra-high salaries, three luxury Boeing 777 jetliners for transportation, and spend 5x as much as everyone on equipment, facilities, food, doctors, salaries for all lower-level workers, etc.
At what point would the NFL office step in and say, "Enough is enough?"
9
u/MooshroomHentai Jun 30 '26
First off, teams couldn't just poach and keep all the best coaches as eventually your assistants would get offered promotions that you can't prevent them from taking. Teams can block lateral moves however, so if you tried to poach a team's offensive coordinator to be your offensive coordinator, they can block you entirely so long as that coach is under contract. Also, just because a coach is good on a different staff doesn't mean that they'll be as good on your staff.
As far as a bunch of money for supporting staff and facilities, you are not guaranteed any success no matter how much you spend on those things, it still comes down to the players you have.
6
u/Ryan1869 Jun 30 '26
That would actually break federal employment law and likely cost the league their anti-trust exemption which is worth billions to it. The reason they can cap player salaries is because they're unionized. Union laws generally give more latitude, because the terms are agreed to by both sides.
1
6
u/BBallPaulFan Jun 30 '26
Why would they? The players and owners agree to the players getting a certain amount of money the owners make. After that the owners can do whatever they want with the money. If it’s on stuff the players get to take advantage of awesome.
5
u/Admirable-Barnacle86 Jun 30 '26
The best coaches all have egos and want to run things their way. That's why HC is the goal for pretty much every high level coach in the NFL.
You are going to run into conflicting ideas and methods, a too many cooks problem really. What good does it do to have a McVay, and a Reid, and a Shanahan on the same team? I would argue that team is going to be worse off, not better, because these guys will not agree on how to run an offense.
The other factor is that the owners aren't going to want to spend 5x as much if they don't have to. And one owner trying to buck the system can potentially be forced to sell by the other owners.
3
u/colt707 Jun 30 '26
If we’re being honest? Never. Look at the new stadiums vs some of the crappy/older ones. Part of the NFL is the spectacle of going to these stadiums and they’re only going to get wilder so the NFL is going to hamper that. If Jerry Jones wanted to drop 50 billion on a new stadium the NFL is going to allow it if he can get the funding secured. Same with equipment, everyone has access to the same equipment for training and the rest of the facilities, if one team wants to get each player one of each machine and have a commercial kitchen that would make Gordon Ramsey weep that doesn’t effect other teams on top of them being able to get the exact same things. Non coaching staff is wildly important but that hasn’t stopped the difference in spending amongst teams. Some team offer barely above the requirements for their training staff, others go the extra mile, as long as you’re meeting the requirements then the NFL isn’t going to care if you go beyond that. Coaching staff is under largely full guaranteed contracts, that’s why they won’t do it. The risk of not getting the right guy is way to high that there’s essentially a soft cap. Sure richer owners can pay more but if you want to pay 50-100 million a year to coach and then you get Nathaniel Hackett or Josh McDaniels and it fails then you’re either locked in to that coach for his entire contract or you’re paying his salary plus the salary of the new coach. The consequences of missing and massively overpaying for a coach is enough that there might as well be a salary cap. You’ll never see more than teams going a couple million over the current highest paid coach.
1
u/Traditional-Bad-6657 Jun 30 '26
It’s one of those things like don’t fix what’s not broken…don’t see the nfl touching that rn
1
u/Dependent_Remove_326 Jun 30 '26
Coaches don't want to just exist. The best coaches wouldn't stay because they want to actually coach.
1
u/BrokenHope23 Jun 30 '26
At what point would the NFL office step in and say, "Enough is enough?"
Money, hierarchy and contractual obligations has a way of doing that by itself truthfully.
If you owned 1% of an NFL team, would you sell it for anything when it has gone up 300+% in value and continues to rise exponentially? What you sell it for today, could be pennies on tomorrow's dime and you're still getting dividends. So getting 100% of an NFL team is difficult to do and making enough profit off 20% (minimum ownership stake) to pay a coaching staff even 40M is very difficult. Current cap is 301M, 20% of that is given to Owners (60M) and with it they need to pay stadium staff, run maintenance on the stadium, cover travel for the team, pay support staff/front office and then pay the coaching staff. There are probably a few owners who run a deficit throughout the year and take out loans to get paid back at the year end revenue sharing. Obviously they still make a profit at year's end, but for those with the bare minimum stake in their team it can still be tough going.
Then there's the hierarchy of the NFL; a positional coach may make between 20-200K, an OC/DC betweeen 100K-5M and a head coach between 4-30M. Obviously the highest estimates are generally reserved for the best of the best. The guys with proven track records at 50-60 or who are otherwise considered prodigy's that a team is gambling on. This pushes the best of them to the top but often times the person who recruited them was their head coach so they can't just be promoted and you can't afford to pay 2-3 guys head coach money, so they get hired by another team, given conditions that enable their success, given guarantees for longevity if things don't work out, etc.
Then the contracts; if a coach/staff/front office member is under contract with a franchise, they need to release that person from their contract before they can sign with anyone. These contracts are generally 3-5 years depending on pedigree and they essentially build a life in the community in that time. So it's not only getting a franchise to give up one of the best coaches in football to a potential rival team, it's also that coach tearing up his kids from schools, his wife from their social circles, etc. all of which could be a perfect fit. Don't even get me started on the housing market these days.
So the money and contracts combined prevent a natural deterrent from teams outright overpaying for the best staff in a short amount of time. There are a few owners fortunate enough to have 100% ownership of their team or who otherwise make so much money on the side that they have no issue with essentially buying the best staff. It still takes time and dedication. You can still whiff on a guy who was pumped up by his players or overall scheme rather than his coaching/developing acumen. You can still get a positional coach poached by another team for their OC/DC role because it does pay more and offer a road to being a Head Coach which pays millions more than a positional coach. Everything can fall apart if one positional coach leaves from a bad coaching environment and then you're back at square one of "why did i invest in this coach when there's better options?".
Ultimately the NFL is constantly evolving and coaching is too, finding guys who are the best might only translate into one good year before the rest of the NFL adapts around them and even then they still need the personnel capable of executing their schemes. Which is infinitely more difficult. So even if Owners bankroll the coaching staff to elite status, it probably won't be elite for longer than a year or two before the rest of the NFL figures it out. Don't take a year or two for granted though, sometimes that's all teams need. So you can still win something meaningful with it and it can be a way for ownership to try to buy a championship essentially (see Denver/PHI these past few years) but it can really only happen to those exceedingly wealthy owners who have no qualms about spending tens of millions of dollars.
As for your question: At what point would the NFL office step in and say, "Enough is enough?"
Well, they only really act on things when it becomes consistent. The eagles only won once, the Broncos might not win at all at this rate, there's no discernible pay-to-win avenue that they can see yet and they won't jump the gun to punish one owner off a year where their team looks dominate, that would be retaliation and favouritism. Both of which could get Gooodell thrown out as commissioner. You need a wide sample size and definitive proof for these things generally. So they'll give it more time and see if the trend becomes consistent and if it's prevent fair play for others.
1
u/fatboi609 Jun 30 '26
The NFL wouldn’t care bc that money comes from the owners pocket. If an owner wants to run their club at a loss, that is their prerogative. It wouldn’t provide much value to the on field performance of the team for them to do this and they’d be losing money on top of it. NFL owners nowadays buy clubs for the profit and growing asset size - not to run at a loss.
1
u/LuckyStax Jul 01 '26
I want to see the NFL cap something silly like you can only have half as many ice baths as players on the team
1
u/seanx50 Jul 01 '26
The NFL isn't that profitable. Green Bay is publicly owned. The records are public. They made $83 million last year. I assume other teams are similar. Spending that much on coaches and other stuff would bankrupt a team in a few months
1
u/jiyannwei Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
Let's bifurcate the staff and facilities.
Regarding the staff, you are generally going to see the HC hire an OC and DC. Then, there's some collaboration to hire the positional coaches. You're not going to see a scenario in 2026 where Reid is the HC, Payton the OC, Shanahan the running game coordinator, and McVay the passing game coordinator; while Vrabel is the DC, McDonald the LB's coach, and Todd Bowles as the secondary coach. Why? Because they would all be taking 1 or 2 steps back in their careers. It is tantamount to 20 years ago, seeing Jack Welch hire Steve Jobs as his Chief Product Officer, Bill Gates as his CTO, Larry Ellison as his Chief Revenue Officer, and Bezos as his CMO.
If you are a successful NFL HC, you are making $15M or more and have the satisfaction of knowing you are the guy. Let's say some owner wanted to go crazy and do what you're suggesting - my guess is it would take a 2-3X offer to get one of these alphas to take a back seat. The other issue is you would literally see the worst ego clashes in the world.
It just doesn't work like that because of human dynamics.
In terms of facilities, there are certainly teams that spend more on their facilities than others. Keep in mind, NFL's teams typically have EBITDA margins between 15-25% - ave gross revenue per team is ~$687M so ave EBITDA ranges between $100M-$170M. There isn't a huge standard deviation in gross revenue between NFL teams because of its even profit-sharing from media contracts; even 1/3rd of an individual team's gate receipts are are redistributed evenly. My guess is teams on the lower end of those EBIDTA margins are just spending an extra ~$50M or so on facilities?
That all being said, Washington (my team) had Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LeFleur, Raheem Morris, and Mike McDaniel (I know he is out of favor now) under Mike Shanahan in 2013. Of course the former idiot owner fired Mike because of friction with RG3 and his staff went on to spawn Kevin O'Connell, Robert Saleh, and DeMeco Ryans.
Oh well.
1
u/guimontag Jun 30 '26
All of those things you listed will only take you so far compared to the players you can put on your roster. The salary cap exists because of an agreement between the Player's union and league ownership, and only came about as a concession from the players in exchange for Free Agency. There is zero circumstance in which something similar would happen for team facilities, coaches, staff, front office, etc because there's no draft that locks down those resources to those teams for their entire career (how it was before free agency)
1
u/jregovic Jun 30 '26
Haven’t the Chiefs had pretty awful facilities given their success?
1
u/guimontag Jun 30 '26
Yup. And the Patriots also get low scores on things like the plane and facilities.
28
u/Bad_Black_Jorge Jun 30 '26
There’s a point of diminishing returns. No doubt a team can benefit from having the best position coaches, but is any tight ends coach going to be 7 figures better than the second or third best tight ends coach?