Brown votes against supplemental sharing plan

PHOENIX – NFL owners voted 30-2 this morning – with the Bengals and Jacksonville Jaguars voting no – to adopt a four-year supplemental revenue sharing plan and terms of how teams qualify for it.

The plan is intended to help the NFL maintain competitive balance among teams located in big markets and small markets alike.

The amount of money the Bengals will receive and when has not been determined, Bengals president Mike Brown said after a meeting at the Arizona Biltmore.

A list of “qualifiers” will reduce how much teams will receive.

One qualifier is playing in a stadium that is less than 10 years old. Brown said the Bengals are hit with a 44 percent reduction in revenue sharing because Paul Brown Stadium is entering its eighth year of operation.

“The qualifiers are a reduction in the subsidy, and in our case, this program will reduce any subsidy we would receive under the new program by exactly 44 percent,” he said. “Why that number is so exact … I don’t know. But that’s how it works out.”

The plan is retroactive to 2006 and will continue through 2009, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said. The vote last March in Dallas to extend the league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union called for additional revenue sharing.

“Nobody is happy,” McNair said. “Some (teams) think they are giving too much. Some (teams) think they are receiving too little. So, I guess, maybe it’s a good deal that way.”

The top 15 revenue-producing teams – almost all of them in the NFL’s largest markets, such as Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Houston and Boston – will pay into the pool. Teams such as the Bengals, Buffalo, Jacksonville and Minnesota – which ranks last in the team revenue – are among the 17 that will receive money.

New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft called the agreement important and said owners must unify after becoming fractured last year during talks to extend the labor agreement.

The issue is complicated, and more details will be available later today when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or one of his spokesmen addresses the media.

Essentially, there is an undeniable growing rift in team revenue between teams in large and small markets in the NFL. The cause is increased unshared revenue streams generated by large-market teams with new stadiums – such as Washington, New England and Philadelphia.

The growing gap in revenue threatens the competitive balance that has helped the NFL grow into the nation’s top spectator sport with revenues around $6 billion.

Shared revenue is the major reason teams in small markets such as Cincinnati, Green Bay, Jacksonville, Kansas City and Buffalo have been able to compete with teams in large cities such as New York. Major League Baseball, by comparison, does not have extensive revenue sharing – and teams in many small markets – including Cincinnati – face a competitive disadvantage because if limited payroll.

Brown said last month that the Bengals might not be able to compete well into the future unless core issues of revenue disparity were addressed.

With his no vote and comments today, he said the measure is a short-term solution.

“I don’t favor it. It’s a stop-gap solution,” Brown said this morning. “We have deeper problems than qualifiers. We have problems with subsidies in the league.”

Brown said teams in the NFL have been subsidized through stadium loans and grants to teams.