So, most pro sports contracts come with incentives in them, like bonus money if a running back reaches 1500 yards, stuff like that. I guess this makes some sense in baseball, since baseball is only sort of a team sport, but I just don’t get these kind of incentives in sports like football and basketball. At least, not from the owner’s perspective.
Frankly, if the team you own wins the Super Bowl, the individual stats are irrelevant. Conversely, if you finish 2-14, they’re irrelevant then, too. In fact, one could make an argument that individual stats are almost completely irrelevant to owners. What owners want, and should reward, is winning. Players should be rewarded for individual sacrifices which help the team win, not accumulating personal stats. There’s enough reward in prospects for later contracts that players should be motivated to generate individual stats–what many of them need more motivation for is helping the team win. Block. Dive for loose balls. That kind of thing. Owners should put incentives on winning, because that’s what matters.
So, why don’t they do this? Anyone?
Because no self-respecting agent would let his client’s income contigent on something so beyond the player’s control. True, players exist as part of a team and a running back’s numbers may depend as much on his offensive line as on his skill, but personal statistics are still in some basic sense “personal” in a way that a team’s won/loss record isn’t.
Plus I suspect very few athletes want to publicly admit that they’re more interested in money than in winning, however obvious that already might be. I imagine that directly Incentivizing winning would be regarded as somehow tarnishing the façade of “wanting a championship more than anything.”
Or something like that. I think it’s a good idea, and I’m surprised someone like Kraft isn’t doing it already.
In addition to these being the results of negotiations, the answer is
obvious: more often than not (this is implicit — I haven’t done the research to prove it) individual performances add up to team performances, particularly at the skill positions. The idea is that if your RB has 1,500 yards then your offense will be good. That leads to playoff
berths and that means bonus dollars for teams, better ticket sales,
which leads to higher concession revenue, greater demand for tickets and
luxury boxes, which mean higher prices and all the other financial plums
that come with having a hot product.
So by structuring a contract in this way, such a team is hedging its bet on a guy. If he performs well then he gets paid well, ostensibly out of higher team local revenue. If he doesn’t perform well, then nothing is lost. Note that the Clinton Portises of the world do not sign such contracts, Musa Smiths do (and sometimes Ricky Williams).
Perhaps a Portis gets a little something extra for Pro Bowls, 1,500
yards etc, but it’s not the core of his deal. These things are the
result of negotiations that have gone on long term without an agreement
and are a way to bridge the performance gap i.e. what a team thinks
performance will be and pay for and what the player thinks performance
will be and wants to get paid.
For the skill positions, it makes some sense in some instances, particularly if the player is coming off of a serious injury. It makes the market for these players more liquid as most teams in the salary cap era do not want to be sidled with a big guaranteed contract to a player with health question marks. Incentives give an injured player an opportunity to make a roster at low risk to the team. The payoff for both can be huge.
As for blocks, fumble recoveries, etc, those are hard to capture in
stats or are too random. You can’t count big blocks because you can’t
define them well in a legal document such as an incentive clause and
then every block that is considered big by one side or the other winds
up in arbitration. Time consuming and expensive. Plus big blocks are
often the result of a combination of blocks amongst two or more lineman
and maybe a fullback. Who then gets credit for the big block?
Fumble recoveries are too random and not an essential part of a job description. If they happen, great but nobody looks at a linebacker and
says “he should be averaging three to four fumble recoveries a year”.
Great players with a nose for the ball will come up with a few takeaways
a year in most years, but it’s not in their job description or expected
of them in certain instances the way sacks, tackles and tackles for a
loss are. Those random types of things are gravy, whereas rushing yards
are THE measure of a running back’s performance and worth to the team.
First, I’m not fully convinced that individual statistical performances necessarily lead to team performances. Your later points that things like blocking and a nose for the ball and such are hard to quantify is EXACTLY the kind of thing which would support my original argument. These kinds of things clearly really affect football games, but are hard to quantify. So, why bother?
If you’re an owner, you can quantify what you want, which is wins. The wins yields the extra revenue you mentioned, so bonuses based on wins are tied to income which comes from winning. Why not link them directly, rather than relying on other statistics which may or may not be closely linked to winning?
Take, for example, Randy Moss when he was with the Vikings. Yeah, some gaudy statistics, but he obviously took a lot of plays off if they weren’t going his way. This “play for my own stats” mentality is exactly the kind of thing you want players NOT to do. So, reward them for doing things which help the team win, rather than only things which pad their individual statistics.
I see. I thought you were saying that since those things (blocks, recoveries) are more important to winning, they should be the criteria for compensation.
So fine, bonuses for everyone for winning.
Does everyone make base salary then? If the team wins even though Randy Moss is on it, does he still get the bonuses?
Not everyone would have to make the same base salary, no, but rather than incentivizing individual performances, incentivize what the team owner actually want, which is wins. Of course you could still pay, say, Antonio Gates more than, say, Jerame Tuman, but you’d give them both bonuses for wins, not for yards or passes caught or blocks or whatever.
And maybe Randy Moss wouldn’t be such a problem if his contract included bonuses for team wins rather than bonuses for individual performance.