NFL free agency finances, and the NFLPA’s George Atallah joins to talk salary cap, CBA, vaccines, and much more
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2021
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
First, Robert and Lindsay break down the overall financial landscape, and realities of a depressed salary cap, heading into the free agency period, and how some of the uncertainty about the cap will impact players and teams heading into the 2021 season.
Then, Lindsay is joined by Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs for the NFLPA, George Atallah, to discuss how the 2021 TV deals will affect next season’s salary cap, and its potential impact on free agency, the biggest takeaways and lessons learned from the 2020 pandemic season, players’ top priorities in the next CBA, what role vaccines could play in the 2021 season, if players could have more of a formal role in teams’ hiring processes, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the athletic football show. |
| 0:14.3 | Welcome. |
| 0:15.3 | The Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:16.7 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:17.7 | Really cool show for you guys today. |
| 0:19.7 | Lindsay actually talked to George Atala, who is the assistant. |
| 0:24.2 | What's his title? |
| 0:25.5 | I asked him, I was like, what do you want to be called? |
| 0:27.3 | And he's like, just say I'm with the Players Association. |
| 0:29.8 | So he basically handles all like external affairs. |
| 0:33.1 | His background, he's like a, he used to be like a fixer in D.C. |
| 0:37.4 | So he has his hands in everything that's going on with the NFLPA. So yeah, so I talked to him for about 40 minutes about everything that's going on with free agency, the mini CBA is what happened last year. So it was a really fun conversation and should be a really good primer for what's, what's going to happen here over the next month or so in the NFL. |
| 0:55.0 | So that is coming a little bit later in the show. |
| 0:57.3 | Before that, though, Lindsay and I are going to take you through just the financial landscape |
| 1:01.9 | that is in place right now as we walk into free agency. |
| 1:05.5 | I felt like we wanted to use this week to kind of set the stage for what this free agency |
| 1:10.1 | period might look like. |
| 1:11.6 | Yesterday's show, we talked to Sheel about the top 50 guys, just doing it from the player's side. |
| 1:16.3 | Now we want to talk about just what the overall setup is for how teams might approach this |
| 1:21.6 | and how this year is different. Obviously, you know, the cap is going to be down compared to |
| 1:25.7 | other years, but there are some other differences as well, and we really want to kind of dig into those. |
| 1:29.9 | So let's get started here, Lindsay. |
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