Contracts, salary caps. Why do our favorite teams make some of the moves they do?

It's usually the money. It's time for the Business of Sports with Andrew Brand.

Hey, welcome in another edition of the Business of Sports with Andrew Brand. I'm getting a lot of questions this week with the start of the new league year upon us in the NFL, the business

of football really coming strong, all these questions about the salary cap and how do you account

for it? And what about room? And everybody's got room at 177 million. And what does that mean? And how do

they calculate that? And I just thought maybe it's time for a little cap 101 on this podcast

by pop or demand. Let's give the people what they want. You know, I did this for 10 years. I went

up against it for 10 years as an age, and I'll tell you a little bit about it. You know, the salary

cap was something that was invented, if you will, as part of a negotiation. The Reggie White versus NFL lawsuit back in 1993 was really codified into the first real,

as I call it CBA, real collective bargaining agreement in sports that created the idea

of free agency as a concept.

And it was a change.

It was an exchange for the NFL between a salary cap and free agency.

You boil these whole CBA down to four words back then. The NFL got a cap. In other words,

an artificial restriction on what was going to be paid to these players. What did the players get?

Well, they got a lot of things.

But basically, they got free agency.

For the first time in the history of NFL, there was actually unfettered free agency after

four years in the league.

And this was something that resulted, as it always does, at the beginning in dramatically

higher salaries, the first big free agent was a guy who went to Green Bay,

Wisconsin, of all places. Reggie White. And the standard fare from ownership, certainly in all

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