When spending every waking moment writing or reading or talking or thinking about football, certain ideas will naturally pop out of the brain.
Most will be bad. A few could be good.
Here’s one that is good (I think), but that will likely never be adopted: Teams should be able to trade cap space.
Adopted two decades ago as a way to achieve competitive balance, the salary cap gives every team a commodity, no different than draft picks or players. With more teams desperately needing cap space and plenty of teams having more than they care to spend, why shouldn’t teams be allowed to trade that commodity to another team in exchange for a player or a draft pick or both?
Fans could complain if a team chooses to stockpile picks in lieu of spending money. But that doesn’t mean a team should be arbitrarily prohibited from doing it if a team thinks it’s in the best interests of the organization. Plenty of decisions create local controversy. That doesn’t mean there should be an arbitrary barrier to making those decisions.
It’s a free-market approach, giving teams the power to try to get better -- and the ability to risk doing worse.
Also, it’s something the players should want. By sending cap space from a team who isn’t using it to a team that needs it badly enough to give something up to get it, more cap space will be used. Which means that more money will land in the hands of the players generally.So what say you, Competition Committee? Should cap space be fully regarded as the commodity that we’ve known for 20 years it is?The rest of you can share your views below.