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I was recently listening to ESPN Radio on my way home from Pittsburgh and it happened to be on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. I've never been fond of him. I respect him, I understand his appeal and he grasps my attention, I just almost never agree with him. The problem it seems is if you do disagree with him than you are completely wrong. My biggest gripe with him is his arguments never seem too though out. It just seems like he has an idea that pops into his head, he convinces himself on why it's a good idea, and then he's a good enough talker to convince masses of other people. I'm not convinced. Cowherd's debate was on the salary cap and how he thinks all sports should have a free enterprise with no salary caps. He claimed that the best teams will always be the best because athletes want to go there and that having a salary cap in baseball want make an even playing field and things would be much of the same. Well I can prove that both those arguments are false, but that's not the real issue. The issue with salary caps isn't to make every team equal and everyone have a chance to win, it's about giving the lesser teams a chance to continue to win.
I don't plan on seeing the Pittsburgh Pirates become MLB champions anytime soon. They continually trade away their best players and get prospects back in return. That's the problem with no salary cap though, you can't hold on to top players if your team isn't that good. The real dilemma for small market teams is to try and build up a team that be a playoff contender and maybe win a championship for several years or do you go after the big players to make a run for only one year. The salary cap isn't going to make the Pirates good immediately. It's not going to allow them to bring in big name players. What it would do though is allow the team to build, become solid, and then be able to keep the players that help build the deep from mediocrity to great.
College athletics of course don't have salary caps. What they do have is scholarship limits. Now according to Cowherd it's always going to be the best teams who get the best athletes and nothing is going to change. The best college programs are going to continue to be successful because of many different factors. There's notoriety, tradition, caliber of coaches, and many other reasons why they get recruits over other schools. What the scholarship limits provide is a chance for the lesser schools to grab quality talent and build up their programs. Nobody would ever think that Gonzaga would be an annual powerhouse in basketball and that Boise State would be a yearly contender in football, but they are. As college programs continue to grow and build their base they increase all the factors that the established schools already have. The difference now is that the scholarship limits allow them to get the talent in there in the first place to help them build.
The last argument that came about is that all the top players would always go to the biggest cities and teams anyway. The claim was that the Yankees would always get the best player and the Lakers would too. Now baseball we can't really look at, but the other sports are a different story. The landscape in the NBA currently looks like the best players will always go to the most notorious teams, but this really isn't the case. Were any big names flocking to Boston when it was just Paul Pierce? Is anybody really trying to go to the Knicks? Players want to get paid and they want to go to a winner. Players will somewhat look at what team they're going to, but if the Milwaukee Bucks had a couple star players than other players would look to go there.
Basically all the arguments sum up why a salary cap is necessary in all sports. It's not about making all the teams equal, but it's about giving an equal chance for teams to become good. People aren't sick of tired of the same teams being powerhouses every year; people are sick of the same teams being losers every year. Most of this, at least in baseball, is that teams can not sustain their rosters for more than a year or two without a salary cap. We need salary caps. Salary caps aren't going to diminish the sport; it will only make them better. Instead of having teams that win based mostly on having the best players it will take everything into affect and teams will win based on coaching, teamwork, and ownership. So let's encourage the use of salary caps because with them then it finally is about having the whole team win, including coaches and owners, and not just about having the roster win.
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