Jerry Jones predicts ‘many cap implications’ from Sunday Ticket verdict

In the wake of last month’s antitrust judgment against the NFL in the Sunday Ticket case (which, if upheld, would be for $14.1 billion), the NFL said the liability would have no direct impact on the salary cap. Recently, Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal it was reported that several owners considering shifting some financial responsibility on players.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, the only person to testify live in court during the trial, said Saturday that the verdict will have an impact on spending limits for individual teams.

Via David Harris of the team’s official website, Jones said he expects “many consequences for the cap”due to a class action lawsuit.

“You have to consider that,” Jones said. “It doesn’t make me mad, but it’s a fact. I think I know better than anyone what the ceiling is going to be in four years.”

To what extent the Sunday Ticket verdict potentially affects the cap, it’s impossible to say how much, because the final outcome of the case could still be zero or close to zero. And because the case is set to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (after moving on to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit), it could be three or four years before the dispute reaches a final conclusion.

That reality allows Jones’s comments to be interpreted in one very specific, narrow way. If he foresees “a lot of consequences” for the cap, and if he knows what that will be “four years from now,” Jones likely expects the league to start settling the amount owed before it becomes official.

The union would have to agree, of course. As explained recently, the NFL Players Association could make a number of arguments against Sunday Ticket’s impact on the cap, since the board, not the players, should be the one turning television rights into revenue.

The league’s hammer could come from the NFLPA saying it will disband Sunday Ticket in favor of a model that avoids antitrust issues — and that, in turn, hurts revenue. The NFLPA could call management’s bluff, or it could play ball with the league’s efforts to start taking money from shared revenue and stashing it away for a rainy day that could turn out to be a monsoon.

That’s really the potential message hidden in Jones’s comments. The NFL could have decided to start planning for the $14.1 billion payout not by telling teams to start figuring out how to raise $440 million each once the appeals are exhausted, but by creating a global fund to pay it all back. Then, if the NFL wins its case, all the money would go back into the cap.

In the meantime, it would continue to be a mess. A significant slowdown in cap growth as more cash is funneled into the Sunday Ticket fund.

Again, the union would have to agree to this approach. The goal would be to convince the owners to do so.

If nothing else, burden-sharing would encourage the NFLPA to support the league’s position that Sunday Ticket did not violate antitrust laws. The problem with siding with the league explicitly is the possibility that the precedent set by the case could theoretically generate rules and reasoning that would negatively impact the players if/when another reason arose to shut down the union and sue the league for antitrust violations committed against its workforce.