So it's better to let A Rod freeroll than the Yankees?

Cap hit punishments in the NFL for whatever teams run bad enough to get stuck with this dog fighter or that mass murderer strikes me as arbitrary

Makes no sense at all. Remember the source?

Didn't teams pass on him due to him being shady? Not sure "run bad" is the right phrase.

and what a noble goal that is. he should be commended.

I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, but I don't think it would be acceptable that baseball teams could sign PED users and ride their success until they get banned, then suffer absolutely zero consequence other than that their cheating player is now gone. What reason do teams have not to encourage PED use among their mediocre players in that scenario? It's a complete freeroll that encourages PED use.

WRT to Hernandez, I find it really hard to believe that NE had no idea that Hernandez was a risky pick outside of marijuana use. Teams get to spend a lot of time talking to people and researching their players before they draft them, and it's not as if BB et al didn't see/coach/talk to Hernandez on an almost daily basis before giving him a new contract.

And even if the Hernandez situation, and certainly the Vick dog fighting thing are arbitrary, a lot of these problems aren't arbitrary at all. Some athletes have a 10x more visible history of drugs/crime/whatever than Hernandez, and the teams that deal with them should be held accountable on some level.

There is quite a difference between "kinda shady scumbag" guy and "known serial murderer" afaik.

I'm not sure life is something that Aaron Hernandez is about at all anymore.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl...-charges-2012/

From a football management perspective, the Patriots may benefit from today's news. When Hernandez signed a $40 million contract extension in August 2012, his contract reportedly contained language assuring there were no circumstances that would prevent him from meeting his contractual obligations. If Hernandez had already murdered two people by that point, he would have signed the contract in bad faith. The Patriots now have a compelling argument that they owe him no money on the deal and thus should receive associated salary cap relief from the NFL. The team can also demand that Hernandez reimburse the team.

Congrats to AH for achieving "double-wide receiver" status!

LOL'd IRL.

always knew aaron wasnt getting enough credit.

Thanks cobrakai - that's what I was thinking of. The Patriots were basically SOL on the portion of the already paid bonus if Hernandez's only murders occurred post-extension. That language gives them a possible out for the new charges.

There's a precedent for that with injuries. If a player (like Jonathan Fanene) signs his contract and withholds injury information, any signing bonus can be recouped and salary cap space restored. I know the Falcons recouped cap space after Vick, but I'm not sure if that was a different circumstance than Hernandez.

To give you an idea on how slowly this can move - looks like the Falcons finally got cap relief from Vick in 2012 - six years after they cut him.

Again the AH thing may be different circumstances, I don't really know.

ITT ppl argue that serial killers more entitled to contact $$$ than NFL teams.

I didn't see anyone say that, I think perhaps you are a bit confused.

..........

I think they are saying that a team should forfeit the cap hit if they take a risk on a scumbag and he turns out to be a scumbag. The context of the discussion was about the cap hit, not on Aaron Hernandez's personal bank account. That should be clear when the first two sentences are:

Are you joking? I haven't said one thing intimating that the players should be paid in lieu of the teams. You're the one clearly making a massive assumption here.

So by your definitions:

scumbag = serial murderer

........

Interesting you decided to not quote the post that he is responding to anymore.

The Butcher of Bristol

I don't see how you jump to this conclusion.

Lots of things can go wrong with someone. If they drafted AHERN and he went away for distributing tons of drugs they should also eat the cap hit. The actual charge doesn't really matter much.

Although, I will say that if he had the wording in his contract that he promised there was nothing he has done that would cause him to not fulfill his contract it may be an interesting case.

So now we have Aaron Hernandez - 3, OJ Simpson - 2, Ray Lewis - 1. Does anyone have 4?

All I ever heard about AH when he was drafted was that he liked to smoke pot. Maybe some of the other stuff about violence was in the media back then (and I'm sure the Pats had more info) but I didn't hear anything about those troubles until the day the news broke on the murder.

I remember this Boston radio guy Felger crowing about how good AH was and how the Pats should draft all the pot smokers!