If there’s one site I love as much as BSO and PFT, it’s Fox Sports, but only for Jason Whitlock.  I love his style and some of his ideas.  I don’t always agree with him, but sometimes I think he’s a genius.  I was reading his NFL Truths column and he mentioned that the quality of pro sports would be better if winning games meant more money for the players.  It’s so crazy an idea that it makes perfect sense.  I wish I had read his blueprint on it when he first published it.  Since I didn’t, I figured I’d make up my own ideas about this.  Think about it for a second; imagine how good the NFL would be if players and teams knew they would get more bank for each win.

In my system, they wouldn’t be paid badly, but they wouldn’t have such outlandish salaries.  I want to deal with the NFL because it’s my favorite league, and since they don’t offer 100% guaranteed contracts, it is easy to build on that.  First, you can easily establish a salary scale based on position, with salary escalators built in based on performance.  The escalators would be based on what position you play (like passing yards for a QB).  Owners would potentially save a lot of money with a system like this.  Let’s dive into it, shall we?

If a player currently makes about $5 Million a year, that salary can be cut to about $1.5 – $2 Million a year.  Over 16 regular season games, there can be a win bonus of about $15,000 – $250,000 per win based on what position you play.  I agree with Jason that you can’t have everyone making the same amount of bonus because everyone doesn’t contribute the same amount for every win.  But with a system like this, every player from special teamers to the starting QB will have a lot more to gain by winning.  The fans, however, would be the biggest winners.  There would be a lot less players quitting on plays, dogging it, or not giving their best effort to win every game.  There would be no meaningless games, not even after you wrap up your division or home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.  The sting of losing is compounded by the sting of not getting your winning bonus.

The owners benefit would of course be an increased profit margin.  They could take responsibility for paying this winning bonus individually, or pool money together and share the responsibility among all of the owners.  The latter would be a better idea as it would reduce the temptation to only field a mediocre team so you can avoid paying too much in winning bonuses.  There would have to be a penalty system, a fine if you will, in case an owner gets greedy and doesn’t want to have a team with the best players on the field just so they can keep more money from revenues.  If it’s determined that an owner is purposely putting an inferior team together, they will be fined heavily, which is again a win for the fans.  No matter how much they get paid, at the end of the day, professional athletes want to win.  When on the field, I’m sure they are thinking about winning more than they are thinking about their paycheck.  There are exceptions of course, but these athletes have been competitive from a very young age.  Losing doesn’t taste too good, as any Detroit Lion.  And to fans, lack of effort from the owners all the way down to the players tastes even worse.  To know that your team lost is one thing, but to think that they didn’t try hard enough is another.

If we incentivize players, the product on the field will improve vastly.  To address the issue that would arise from players who would miss out on performance bonuses due to injury, there would be an injury pay scale too that’s based on the win bonus.  If your team wins, you’d get a percentage of your projected stats if you were to play as well as a percentage of your position’s win bonus.  It wouldn’t be 100% of the actual performance bonus, but it would be better than 0% of it.  I’ve heard a lot of people say that college sports is better than pro sports only because the players are playing for the love of the game and the love of winning.  I’ve always said that’s half nonsense.  Yes, they play for the love of the game, but they are also playing for a shot at the pros.  They are playing for a shot at making millions.  They are risking injury, sometimes life-threatening, for a shot at earning a salary for their hard work and sacrifice.  If players were paid more money based on their team winning games, the hunger would stay alive and grow while they are in the pros.

I’m not saying that professional athletes aren’t hungry to win.  But I am saying that they can get complacent when they are in a losing environment.  If I were on a team that had a losing atmosphere and was used to losing, eventually I’d succumb to that attitude and be comforted by the fact that I collect a fat check every week whether I win or lose.  Imagine how angry you’d be if you knew that you perhaps just let $100,000.00 slip through your fingers because you lost a game.  Now, imagine how much more angry you’d be if you knew that  you lost $100,000.00 because your coach or GM decided it’d be better for your starters to rest than it is for your team to win…. Maybe coaches’ salaries should be more strongly tied to the amount of games their teams win too.