Though it seems there won’t be a direct salary cap impact from the NFL owing nearly $5 billion after losing the Sunday Ticket lawsuit, that hefty bill still could greatly hurt the league. As we noted, each team could be forced to pay out over $440 million to make up or the damages.
Reacting to the news on Twitter/X Sunday, Senior Bowl Director Jim Nagy weighed in on how teams could be impacted.
Unfortunately, I think it’s going to cost a lot of people their jobs, including scouts. Each owner will be on hook for almost $500M so you know they’re going to look to trim staff.
— Jim Nagy (@JimNagy_SB) June 30, 2024
To be clear, should this problem become reality, it won’t occur for some time. The NFL has already confirmed they’re appealing the verdict and the case will remain gunked up in the court system for years. If the verdict is reversed on appeal, the NFL will win the lawsuit and won’t pay a dime.
But should the bill ever come due, each team will be on the hook. And Nagy thinks to mitigate those heft losses, teams will cut operation budgets. That could come at the expense of scouts, especially for teams with larger departments. While that might be true, a lower level scout making $50,000 a year (bottom-rung gigs don’t bring in the big bucks) is a drop in the bucket to a $440 million payout.
Still, Nagy’s point is well-taken. Teams aren’t in the business of losing hundreds of millions of dollars and just taking it on the chin. That could lead them to slashing budgets elsewhere. It also will have them brainstorming ways to raise more money. That will likely start with sponsorships. Get ready for every mustard bottle and staircase to be branded. NFL jerseys will look like NASCAR’s.
And if the lawsuit loss leads teams to offering their own subscription packages, an individual Pittsburgh Steelers streaming service, that’s another way to increase revenue.
Art Rooney II and the Steelers are among the “poorer” organizations, even if they’re still worth more money than most can even imagine. This 2024 list, while certainly not scientific, lists Rooney 30th on the NFL’s list of richest owners, only ahead of the Cincinnati Bengals’ Mike Brown and the shareholder-controlled Green Bay Packers.
Without getting into the weeds of specifics, it’ll be interesting to see how teams could handle those types of payouts. Would they be able to pay chunks at a time? It’s the NFL who owes the money. They could pony up those funds to the plantiffs right away and ask teams to pay back $40 million a year until their portion of the obligation is satisfied. That would be at least one way to slightly soothe some angry owners.
But none of that is guaranteed to happen. The NFL has lost the battle. The war isn’t over. They’ll fight this to the Supreme Court. Because whatever they’re spending on high-priced lawyers is still cheaper than the nearly $5 billion they’ll owe otherwise.
