What do you want to see in a new CBA?

- Salary Cap/Floor. This is important to keep balance in the league. Granted the non-capped year gives teams more way to retain players (two tags, etc), but this will keep cheap teams from dumping all their decent players for money.

- Rookie slotted pay scale. Make them prove it. Every rookie gets a 3 year deal. Hell, the first deal shouldn't even require an agent. Let them keep it all. 3 years is enough time to prove yourself and get a full contract.

- Dump 2 preseason games, add two regular season, and extend the size of the roster to 60 players to count for attrition. Even without the extra games, recently rosters have been too bare late in the season.

- Plus a lot of other things people mentioned.

I think we all are on the same page saying kinda the same stuff but here's mine....

1) A Rookie CAP. Let the Rookie prove himself for 2-3 yrs before giving him so much $$.

2) Some sort of soft salary CAP, meaning if a team goes over the limit they pay a monitary fine (like baseball) which goes into the kitty to be distributed to the smaller market teams.

I know the players want more of the pie which I'm not sure how you adjust for that but in the end it's a business and the owners are trying to make money not just provide entertainment. I mean what if you owned a business and all your workers said we are going to stop working unless you pay us more. I know many of bosses that would say "don't let the good door hit you where the good lord split you". However the players are Unionized so who knows. I just think with out the hard CAP teams will be able to sign or give better value to their players instead of having to tell a player they are not going to pay them and lose them to another team.

Plus prior to the CAP players were team players not money players. The Darrel Green's out there played cause they loved the team and the team was able to keep them. Then the CAP came along and players started jumping all over the place looking for the money or anyone who could pay them. The "Team" mentality is lost to the money.

No cap. No floor. If you want to luxury tax the big spenders, go right ahead. I doubt they care.

I don't know if I'd like to have players be under team control for 6 seasons like they are in baseball, but maybe after this year, I'll support that idea as well. The difference is that in baseball, you can develop a player slowly before his major league clock starts at an advanced age. In football, a guy is pretty much as talented as he is going to get when he arrives in the league, at that point, it's about trying to develop useful skills before he gets costly.

Rookie cap or pay scale is the most urgent need. Other than that...don't really care.

- Salary Cap/Floor. This is important to keep balance in the league. Granted the non-capped year gives teams more way to retain players (two tags, etc), but this will keep cheap teams from dumping all their decent players for money.

- Rookie slotted pay scale. Make them prove it. Every rookie gets a 3 year deal. Hell, the first deal shouldn't even require an agent. Let them keep it all. 3 years is enough time to prove yourself and get a full contract.

- Dump 2 preseason games, add two regular season, and extend the size of the roster to 60 players to count for attrition. Even without the extra games, recently rosters have been too bare late in the season.

- Plus a lot of other things people mentioned.

I agree with all of your points, although I don't necessarily think 2 regular season games need to be added. I think one neutral site game should be sufficient. Also, i agree with increasing the roster to 60 players, but I don't think there should be a practice squad or smaller gameday rosters. Each team should have a 60-player roster and all 60 players should be able to play on Sundays.

Other things i'd like to see:

-Get rid of the franchise tag completely. If it stays, it should only be for 1 year, at the average of the top 5 players at any position in the league.

-Set short contract-term limits. contracts longer than 4 years should not be allowed, period. all too often, players will hold out 1-2 years after signing 6-8 year contract because they're playing at a higher level than their current contract dictates. its a distraction that the league doesnt need. capping contracts at 4 years should ensure that contracts remain appropriate for a players performance.

Keep the franchise tag in essentially the same form but change one key detail. Use current year salaries of players rather than last year. The franchise tag was meant to keep the big name guys from hightailing it. But because the salaries have gotten disparate within position groups we are now seeing kickers getting tagged. Ridiculous. Janikowski gets a insane deal but none of the other kickers can take advantage of his contract moving the market because the teams can just tag them and use last year's salaries for the averages.

These two don't go together. The owner's might shut the league down before they accepted a pay floor without a pay cap.

Thats where revenue sharing and luxury tax would come in. That money would be distributed to the smaller market teams like Arizona, Cincinnati, and Green Bay for the sake of spending money on players. In researching baseball I've seen that the language of their CBA says that the money they recieve from revenue sharing must "be used to improve the product on the field." The language is so vague that some owners actually just pocket the money for themselves. By forcing them to spend the money on players you have a base for a pay floor.

God knows that if theres no pay floor then you'd see the Bengals and Cardinals free fall to the bottom of the NFL with $10 million pay rolls. Heck they've actually tried that with the most recent CBA.

Also baseball apparently has just as much if not more parity then baseball:
MLB on par with NFL when it comes to competitive balance - ESPN (http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/hotstove09/insider/news/story?id=4866336&action=login&appRedirect=http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/hotstove09/insider/news/story%3fid%3d4866336)

One more point. Another argument you hear is that the NFL salary cap system creates more competitive balance (or "fairness") because it's easier for bad teams to turn around their losing ways and make the playoffs.

Is this true? Not really.

Let's define a "bad" team as a franchise that has had at least two consecutive losing years. How often does that team make the playoffs? One final set of factoids from the decade:

Baseball: Eight of 80 playoff teams (10 percent)
NFL: 15 of 120 playoff teams (12.5 percent)

Pretty much the same rate (and remember, the NFL allows more playoff teams).

Some of the beliefs about NFL parity are just that -- myths. Pundits often cite the 2001 New England Patriots, who won the Super Bowl after going 5-11 in 2000 (Bill Belichick's first season as the team's coach). While the 2000 Patriots weren't a strong team, this was hardly a franchise down in the dumps. They had finished 8-8 in 1999 and had made the playoffs the three seasons before that.

(And for those who argue that baseball's competitive balance has taken a turn for the worse, five of those eight "bad to good" teams have come in the past four seasons -- the 2006 Tigers; the 2007 Cubs, Diamondbacks and Rockies; and the 2008 Rays. The NFL has seen only three such turnarounds in that span -- the 2008 Dolphins and Falcons and the 2009 Bengals.)

Let's begin with some pairs of factoids for the decade, from the MLB and NFL seasons from 2000 to 2009.

Number of World Series champions: 8
Number of Super Bowl champions: 6 (7 if the Saints win)

Number of teams to reach the World Series: 14
Number of teams to reach the Super Bowl: 15

Number of teams to reach the league championship series: 21
Number of teams to reach a conference title game: 21

Number of teams not to make MLB playoffs: 7
Number of teams not to make NFL playoffs: 3
MLB obviously has less playoff spots making it difficult to even make the playoffs.

anyone that wants to compare that half assed salary cap they have in baseball needs to have their head examined. unless your ready for the same teams in the playoffs year after year. the whole infra structure of MLB needs trashed

anyone that wants to compare that half assed salary cap they have in baseball needs to have their head examined. unless your ready for the same teams in the playoffs year after year. the whole infra structure of MLB needs trashed

The numbers say otherwise. The difference is in baseball if a team sucks you have to watch it for a 162 games. In football if a team sucks you only see it 16 times a year. Plus with the NFL draft teams get contributions from rookies much quicker then they would in baseball.

1) Rookie pay scale
2) Much better benefits for retired players

two issues which are both long overdue and very important imo, espesically the retired players issue