Bruce Dowbiggin
Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Running Backs (Pt.2)
We were watching the NFL on U.S. Thanksgiving Day with a posse of passionate Detroit Lions fans. In between their efforts to convince us to return as Lions fans after our nasty divorce with the team a few years ago, they excitedly talked about the team’s dynamic running backs David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs.
Montgomery is Thunder and Gibbs is Lightning as the Lions head toward what might be their first Super Bowl appearance. Ever. As in, not a sniff of a title since they played the NFL championship game in 1957. But we digress. Montgomery, who has 11 TDs, is signed at a comfortable $5.056 M per year on a two-year contract. Gibbs, who has 10 TDs, is on the second year of his rookie deal that averages $4,461,283 a year.
Naturally, the Lions fans want Gibbs signed to a deal so they don’t lose him when he’s a free agent in 2027. But here’s where it gets tricky. In a previous NFL, when RBs were prime attractions, Gibbs would be among the NFL’s top money earners when he’s free to take offers. It doesn’t work that way anymore. The days of Walter Payton and Barry Sanders are over. Even with a slight resurgence in the NFL’s running game in 2024 RBs are still values as penny stocks.
Last July we looked at the reality of two star backs coming off rookie deals. “Las Vegas Raiders RB Josh Jacobs looked at the reality of being a running back in today’s NFL and caught the 6 AM flight out of Vegas. New York Giants RB Saquon Barkley looked at the reality of being a running back in today’s NFL and signed a one-year deal for $10.1 million. The incentives in the deal will be very challenging for Barkley. He said he had an “epiphany”. Or maybe a chat with his banker.
Same situation. Different response. As players coming off their rookie-capped contracts both Jacobs and Barkley found a market that valued running backs just above place kickers on the economic totem pole. Prone to injury and undercut by a steady stream of star running backs emerging from the Draft, veteran running backs across the league now found themselves squeezed on short-term deals for what constitutes pocket change for quarterbacks.”
In the offseason Barkley ditched the Giants for a three-year deal with the Eagles that earns him $13 M with a lowly $3.8 M cap hit. The man who could well be the NFL MVP is 13th on the Eagles salary cap, squeezed between Milton Williams and kicker Jake Elliott. He’s hoping this breakthrough season will recoup the money the Giants declined to pay him coming off is rookie deal.
Jacobs, meanwhile, has become the Green Bay Packers MVOP playing for $ 12 M in the first year of a four-season contract. But the two of them are small fry next to QB Patrick Mahomes’ $450 M contract, Joe Burrows’ and Trevor Lawrence’s $275 M deal or Deshaun Watson’s guaranteed $230 M to stink it up in Cleveland. To say nothing of the $140.6 M going to Tampa Bay’s LT Tristan Wirfs or the $140 M deals for WRs Davante Adams of TB and Minnesota’s Justin Jefferson. How come?
It is, of course, all a matter of sports caponomics . (For more on the evolution of salary caps in sports leagues read our book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps are Killing Pro Sports and Why the Free Market Could Save Them. brucedowbigginbooks.ca)
Scarcity drives value, and the most scarce commodity is not excellent running backs. It’s excellent quarterbacks. Scarcity is why left offensive tackles make more than guards and centres. It’s why cornerbacks make more than middle linebackers. It’s why these positions are drafted in the first round while running backs and others slide to the later rounds. Gibbs’ first-round selection by Detroit was widely seen as too early for the position and, thus, a cap mistake.
As we remarked in Cap In Hand, the NFL knew it was a two-tier league back in 1987 when it busted a strike by the NFL Players Association for free agency. “There had been no new CBA since the 1982 agreement expired in 1987. To drain the NFLPA’s bank account, the NFL had previously created a “Quarterback Club” marketing arm separate from other players. While the league’s top QBs and select others were handsomely compensated with bonuses and percentages of sales, the move denied significant marketing revenues to the rest of the players and the union.”
End of strike. You’d think that with agents advising RBs and the market establishing value running backs would put pride aside. Nah. Running back Le’Veon Bell described the process when he turned down guaranteed wealth in Pittsburgh in 2022. “My franchise tag was $14.5M, and I walked away from it,” Bell said on the AP Pro Football Podcast. “It’s a respect thing. You told me you were going to do this for me but you didn’t… I could’ve just ignored it, went inside the locker room and had been playing.
“But that wouldn’t have made me happy, and I’m sure inside the locker room, everybody would’ve felt it, and, as a team, we wouldn’t have been good. I feel that’s the same with Saquon. He’s trying to be the best he can, but obviously deep down, he’s not happy, because he wanted to be compensated. He still wants his teammates to be good, so he showed up.”
Bell’s own gamble didn’t work out, as he’s drifted from the Jets to the Ravens to the Buccaneers. Now he’s training to be a boxer. From leading man to bit player. He’ll never make up the money he’s lost by choosing to be a glamourous-but-unappreciated RB. But ask yourself, at what other position in what other league would the three best players at a single position be allowed to switch team from 2023-24?.
That’s what happened last winter when top candidates for 2024 OPOY— Barkley, Jacobs and Derrick Henry— all departed their former teams for slightly better paydays on the Eagles, Packers and Ravens. Doesn’t seem to make sense. Till you see 49ers star RB Christian McCaffrey injured again Sunday night in Buffalo with a PCL tear. Then you understand why teams are unwilling to take a longterm gamble on the man carrying the rock.
And why we’ll stay fans of the Buffalo Bills and their QB $258 Million QB Josh Allen for the time being.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
The Limping Loonie: Are Canada’s Pro Sports Team In Trouble Again?
With the Canada/ U.S. Tariff War going from talking conflict to hot trade war on Feb. 1 there are numerous predictions as to what might happen if the dispute drags on. As the sides in the Ukraine War will tell you very few of the outcomes so far were foreseen by the sides when the shooting started. That’s the nature of these conflicts.
One immediate byproduct seems to be the continued descent toward 60 cents by the Canadian dollar. If Trudeau and his anointed successor Mark Carney are true to character it will also involve billions in cheques going out the door— a la Covid— to those citizens “harmed” by the Liberals stumbling into a highly predictable and easily avoidable trade war. If past is prologue, vast amounts of that money will disappear as bad actors find a way to access the funds. While Canada’s GDP collapses some more.
For the moment, however, let us concentrate on what Justin Trudeau’s ineptitude might be costing Canadian professional sports teams in American-based leagues. On the purely trivial level it means that your beer at the park/ arena will be Canadian suds exclusively. Not cheaper or better. Just Canadian. Owners will stock luxury boxes with Canadian wine, etc. A road trip to see the Canucks in L.A. or the Canadiens in NYC will balloon, too.
But on a more serious level the showdown between Donald Trump and Trudeau could well return Canadian teams in the NHL to the bad-old days of the early 21st century. Despite efforts then to create a Canadian fund to save teams, two clubs— Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques— were forced to sell because of a dollar that bottomed out around 62 cents U.S. Winnipeg went to Phoenix/ Quebec City went to Colorado as a result
In Montreal the MLB Expos also moved— to Washington— after 37 years, because no one in Quebec would/ could pony up the money to make up for the declining dollar or repair the disastrous Olympic Stadium. Expos fans then had the cruel fate of watching Washington win the 2019 World Series after the Expos had never gotten that far. (Nordiques fans saw Colorado win two Stanley Cups after escaping Quebec.)
Why were these teams forced to move? Because while teams collect revenues locally in Canadian dollars almost all their payroll and other costs are paid in American dollars. So when you see the Toronto Blue Jays facing a possible US $500 million price tag to keep star Vladimir Guerrero you’re really talking about raising $750,000 million in CDN revenues to meet the demand. Multiply those jumps over a 25-man roster and you’re talking a huge jump in payroll— or being consigned to after-ran status.
While no one is about to hold a tag day for Toronto it will make the Jays’ job of competing in a division with the big-spending New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox that much harder. With a national market of almost 40 million now to exploit they still have resources. But will American players want to play in Canada during a hot trade war between the nations? Now that yahoos fed by a doltish CDN media have started booing the Star Spangled Banner in Ottawa and Vancouver before games do you think that will encourage American stars on teams there to stick around?
But the NHL is where the biggest losses will be seen. Already there have been concerns about the Jets.2 surviving in Winnipeg. Last week it was revealed that after years spent coming back from Covid revenue shortages, the NHL is going to raise its salary cap from today’s US $88 million to as much as an estimated US $115 million in three or four years. The news that players will no longer have escrow payments held back to compensate owners for revenue shortages was greeted with cheers by players and their agent.
The boost in the cap will likely mean that today’s US$14 million peak (Leon Draisaitl) will also advance to somewhere just beneath US$20 million a season. And while that figure is a few years off, teams will have to start negotiating today with their stars with that figure in mind if they wish to retain them.
The test case will be superstar Connor McDavid who is due for a new contract after 2025-26. For the small-market Edmonton Oilers that will mean creating a template that buys him out of estimated salary later by boosting his salary before the cap arrives at its peak. With Draisaitl already pulling down top dollar the Oilers’ resources will be stretched thin to accommodate McDavid— while still paying the rest of the roster.
Could the drop in the dollar produce another Gretzky-like trade for Edmonton when the Oilers were forced to dump the greatest scorer in NHL history to L.A. because his worth exceeded the Oilers’ ability to pay? We chronicle the trade in depth in our new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey.
The fate of hockey stars will be only a small piece of any future U.S. trade deals. But they will be highly visible to Canada’s hockey fans. Not being able to satisfy them is a political price no pelican wants to face. But given the current intransigence by Justin Trudeau scrambling to stay in office it is far from improbable.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Liberals Hail Mary: To You From Failing Hands
In case you missed it, the Hubris party has halted the business of Canada for three months in the heart of the biggest existential crisis since NAFTA. The reason? Justin Trudeau called timeout to allow banker/ green advocate Mark Carney to slide into his chair before the next election becomes Bull Run.
Who is Carney? In September Justin Trudeau appointed him a “special advisor” to the Liberals. He then asked for— and received— $10 B for Brookfield, the private hedge fund of which he was chairman, so that he might sprinkle it on the Green Agenda. There’s more, but this tells you why Libs think he’s ideal.
In his introduction to a nation that didn’t know Mark Carney was a solution to anything, Carney insisted that Canadians want new ideas, new energy, new purpose. (In his defence his opponent Chrystia Freeland is mumbling the same contrition.) And who were the architects of the malaise requiring such an overhaul?
The Liberals themselves. Okay, the NDP rates blame for polishing the Liberal apple in a minority government. But Canadians have long ago consigned Jagmeet Singh to a deserved obscurity. Yes, the denials choir at the Toronto Star and CBC are trying to harpoon Pierre Polievre for ruining the Parliament that Liberals prorogued. While the Flora MacDonald Marching Society cites Donald Trump’s tariffs for the crisis. Deny, deny, deny.
It’s not working. Consult the polls. Even the staunchest supporters of Canada’s self-appointed national party are fed up with PMJT and his legacy. In fact it is stunning to see how wobbly the Liberal platform is under Carney. All the massaged polls and handshakes with Olympic heroes on the Rideau Canal cannot disguise that their legacy issues are now DOA. As we wrote last week the challenges come on a many fronts.
Trump’s tariff challenge/ 51st state tease is the most public challenge— and the one the Liberals believe they can whipsaw to their favour. #OrangeManBad simply tore away the PMO’s artifice of postmodern Canada. By threatening tariffs and gleefully laughing about Canada joining America he exposed an entitled political elite unwilling to admit that the world has changed.
By stirring Canada to some united economic response against his audacious measures Trump has shown Canadians how little they have in common. Ontario and Quebec want Alberta to put on the hair shirt. Alberta wants Quebec to pay its fair share. etc. Trump’s new Commerce secretary says it would be an easy ask to avoid tariffs. But Trudeau/ Doug Ford would rather posture and preen. Canadians, after years of sitting in first-class but paying for economy, now find themselves exposed to the world. As we said in 2018, Canada is an ingrate nation living off Trump’s America.
The destruction of Liberal DEI legacy doesn’t stop with tariffs. The PMO pretends that they can still use the Climate inquisition to hammer Canadians. But Trump has moved the West away from the Al Gore/ King Charles doomsday consensus. By taking America out of the UN Net Zero scheme he’s produced a landslide of financial institutions and governments escaping the draconian conditions imposed by this once-mighty body. Trudeau’s precious climate supports are toppling almost as fast as Sir John A. statues.
Trump has forced the high and mighty in banking, investment and government— who’ve been wedded to these principals— to escape his climate wrath. Trump used the election to remind voters of deadlines for catastrophic weather that come and go with only elites getting rich. During the 2024 vote he heard from average people who no longer believe the Greta Thunberg countdown clock to ruination. And he said, Drill, Baby, Drill.
CO2-obsessed Canada, meanwhile, is still dithering on its commitment to what CBC and everyone in Parliament stubbornly call the “climate crisis”. Carney talks about moving away from the sacred tablets of climate change, but only to find a new green euphemism for draining the public purse.
Another sacred cow of Trudeau’s Disaster Run has been his stewardship of Covid 19— a talking point he brags about openly but whose Emergency Measures Act are condemned by the courts and public opinion. Again, Trudeau’s flank has been protected by purchased media and a smothering censorship program.
But now Alberta’s Covid Task Force has ripped the province’s actions in the two-plus years of virus, vaccine and vexation. The Davidson Report demonstrates how The Science was used to defend government overreach while health officials used faulty data to deceive the public about the reality of Covid. (The criticisms apply to the federal response just as easily.)
One example cited in the Task Force report was one we wrote about continuously from 2020-2023. Namely the media’s daily positive CPR tests that purported to show massive numbers of infected Canadians. The truth was 80 to 90 percent of the “results” were false positives or samples too small to be transmitted or make the carrier ill. Even when they knew in 2020 no one bothered to let citizens in on the scam.
Want more? Another sink hole beneath the Libs is the Rez Schools “murdered babies” libel they used to cast Canadians as genocidal. Trudeau sought to criminalize any doubt on their veracity. Turns out that the money allocated for exhumation of alleged graves of victims has turned up nothing. Instead the “$12M spent to find purported 215 children’s graves at an Indian Residential School was instead spent on publicists & consultants with no graves found to date. “
There’s more. Environment minister Stephen Gilbeault was found guilty of violating federal rules in siphoning $254 M to a company he owns. While Conservative MPs continue to call for the release of “green slush fund” documents, Trudeau continues to defend his minister by burying the records. Then there is the $187 B in infrastructure grants supervised by former Lib cabinet minister Catherine McKenna that is unaccounted for.
Wait, there’s more. On the celebrated immigration front nearly 50,000 international students failed to show up at their designated colleges and universities in Canada during March and April 2024, according to government data.; No one can trace them. And let’s not forget the government’s seeming impassivity to the crowds of pro-Hamas fanatics crowding Canadian streets each week calling fore the death of Canadian Jews and anyone else trying to stop the intifada.
We could go on, but this seems like weak sauce on which to launch a new leader of the Liberals. But they’re going to try. And with Singh’s flip-flop, now refusing to bring down the government, it will have a puncher’s chance in the Liberal heartland. Expect them to try stretching the mandate till the fall and later while spitting out more federal aid money, a la Covid, to compensate Canadians for this stupidity.
The only question then, who volunteers to bell the cat? Can you say Convoy.2?
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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