Yeah, but it wasn't for salary cap violations in the way you would think. Most people think of it as having given Denver some sort of competitive advantage - in other words, they cheated the cap, so they were able to sign X more players.

It really was all about Pat Bowlen's cash. He had made arrangements with a few players - John Elway and Terrell Davis, the most notable - to defer some of the cash he would normally pay them in their weekly checks, with interest, into the future. The deferred payments did not affect the salary cap, per se, because they were for salaries that fully counted against the cap. The Broncos were getting a new stadium (Invesco), and Bowlen had to pay for a chunk of that stadium. The arrangement allowed Bowlen to use his available cash for the stadium, and then pay the players their deferred cash once the stadium issue was settled, and the new stadium was generating more cash than Mile High Stadium had been generating.

It's Bowlen's business, right? As long as it doesn't affect the competitive balance of the league, he should be able to do with his money as he pleases. Well, the NFL doesn't allow deferred compensation with its teams in the way Bowlen was trying to do it, and they are right in not allowing it. The worry around the NFL is that you get an aggressive owner who thinks, "I can mortgage my team's financial future by deferring these cash payments. It'll all work out in the end." When it doesn't work out, the league is put in the tough position of either suffering the embarrassment of letting a team fold, or having a cash call among all the owners to help an insolvent team pay its bills. The NFL's rule, as it pertains to cash, is basically to avoid "credit card spending." The salary cap is in place to force competitive balance (i.e. MLB's Yankees vs. the rest of baseball = BAD, VERY BAD!), but it is also in place to force owners to run their businesses wisely.

Deferred salary is something that happens every year on nearly every team in MLB. An example of where this could get ugly is the Arizona Diamondbacks. They have salary that is deferred as much as 25 years into the future. On at least two or three occasions in the last three years, they have had to make cash calls to their shareholders, just to be able to budget for the season.

So, back to the Broncos - they had an agreement with the players involved to defer the cash payments. The NFL warned them about it, and asked them to comply. They didn't comply in a way that the NFL was comfortable, and the NFL nailed them for it - twice (the first time was a $1 million fine, and the second time was with a draft pick).

Sorry for the long explanation. But I hear the thing about "cheating" all the time, and it makes me crazy. It had nothing to do with cheating.

as a part of contract signings with the donkeys it states in their contracts you must sell your soul to mr. 666

I don't think so. I believe that when Shanahan died and was resurrected he actually became Satan incarnate. Hey, just my opinion.:shrug:

Let's hear the story on how he split a kidney. Hell, I understand, rupture, puncture, bruise, lacerate and even failure but to "split" a kidney.

Please explain.

It was split in the process of pulling over 100 orphans out of a burning building. On the way to the hospital, he asked the ambulance driver to stop for a minute so he could put a rather large donation into a Salvation Army bucket.

Another little-known fact about Mike Shanahan - you remember that kid Drew Rosenhaus supposedly saved from drowning? It was actually Mike Shanahan that saved him. He didn't want the credit for it, because he is, by nature, very humble. Rosenhaus was right there and saw Shanahan save the kid, and saw it as a media opportunity.

It's all true, man. I have more stories, if you ever want to hear them.

There were two aspects to the Broncos salary-cap shenanigans. You mentioned one. The other one was the following, from the NFL.COM news story:

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/7687802
"The investigation also uncovered an undisclosed 1997 commitment by the Broncos not to waive a player prior to a certain date. That commitment had the effect of converting the player's roster bonus into a guarantee, which affected the timing of the salary cap treatment of a portion of the bonus."

Guaranteed roster-bonus money is treated the same as salary bonus money as far as the cap calculations are concerned, so it's theoretically possible that the roster bonus money should have been prorated over the length of the contract, which could have had implications for the Broncos total salary cap figure in 1997 or adjacent seasons. However, I do not know if it did have such implications (because the NFL and the Broncos have been tight-lipped to the general public). The net effect that this indiscretion would have had on the Broncos during their outstanding 1996-98 run would depend on what the roster bonus was and who it was for (and, therefore, whether it was likely to be earned).

Interesting. Nice find - I hadn't seen that one before. I'd love to know who the player was.

Thanks for the effort on finding it.

I think Shanahan just felt more "comfortable" with Johnny boy...

http://www.chiefshuddle.com/funny/goodfriends.jpg

Okay, how much do you know about the salary cap system? I have been deeply reflective of the issue you mentioned above, and I can't see why the NFL would care about such an issue. Obviously, there is a reason for it - I am just not getting it.

Tell me what I am missing. A roster bonus has to count against some given year's cap. When you waive a player, his signing bonus accelerates against the cap for the year that you waive him, and his roster bonus has already counted against the cap, assuming he's passed the trigger date for the bonus. So, if you promise to waive him later, essentially guaranteeing him his roster bonus, what difference would it make? You have to pay for the bonus, from a perspective of the salary cap, at some point. Why would it matter if you kept the player around longer so that you could defer the cap hit for his roster bonus? It's not like you could sign an extra player in the interim, because the player to whom you have made the promise would be taking up the salary cap space until you waived him.

Does that make sense? Any insight?

The pope visited the STL Dome in 1999. :hmmm:


I think he definitely made a deal wit da debil one day that he was quietly stocking the shelves at his grocery store.

"All I want is 3 years of MVP ball...

I'll even pass up the hot chicks and marry a crazed religious ugly woman with a buzz cut...

Come on, you did it for Namath."

I think you have the rat confused with Rich Scanlon.

Background? I know who Rich Scanlon is, but I don't get the reference. Is he a teller of tall tales?

It's an inside-joke on this bulletin board, whose origins (if I understand correctly) have something to do with a vigorous debate about his purported abilities. He's now the hero in a lot of tall tales.

I don't know too much about the salary cap. Here's what I figured out by poking around on the internet a little bit today.

A roster bonus does not have to count against some year's cap. Whether it would count or not depends in part on whether or not it is likely to be earned. There are pre-season roster bonuses and regular-season roster bonuses. Roster bonuses that are "not likely to be earned" count against the current year when they are fulfilled. Roster bonuses that are guaranteed do have to count and they are treated as signing bonuses, which means they are to be prorated over the length of the contract.

So, depending on what the roster bonus in question is and when the agreement was made between the player and the Broncos that converted it into a guaranteed bonus, it might should have been counted in 1996 or on March 1, 1997, (as a prorated amount). In Spring, 1997, the Broncos were doing some serious salary-cap maneuvering.

http://www.profootballtalk.com/agent1.htm
The current Collective Bargaining Agreement (a bandwidth-unfriendly PDF document) is available at the NFLPA site. That's the document that spells out the details of the salary cap, but it's kind of hard to figure it all out unless one has a lot of time. ;)

http://www.nflpa.org/Members/main.as...e=CBA+Complete

Seriously, I'm impressed at your research and interpretive skills. I need to think through the scenarios outlined in the portions you cut and pasted to fully get it. I understand why teams hire salary cap experts. It's a mess, with a lot of room for interpretation. The whole LTBE and NLTBE issue seems especially subjective. There just seem to be unlimited scenarios, with a given player, that could create anomalies - so how do you peg incentives that are fair to either the player or the team (or in this case, the team's competitors, as it pertains to the salary cap)?

As for the CBA, I decided once about a year ago that I was going to set out to better understand it - so I started reading it. As you can imagine, I didn't get very far. It's not exactly, can't-put-it-down, high-suspense reading.

Thanks for the response. It's interesting, and great food for thought.