New NFL Contracts Make Misbehaving Players Pay Teams

By MIKE FREEMAN

Tired of paying signing bonuses equal to smalltown budgets and losing
their investments for reasons such as drug abuse, National Football League
teams have recently taken steps to try to insure that players live up to
their contracts. As a result, the signing bonus money is becoming a sort of
goodbehavior insurance.

Addendums that teams are putting into contracts address a variety of
issues, such as refusing to report to training camp, failure to practice or
play, and the most controversial one, failing a drug test. If the clause is
violated, even by a player who has had no prior troubles, then a team can
take back the signing bonus.

Fail a drug test or abuse alcohol and you could lose your signing bonus
either part or all of it. Go skydiving, the same could happen. Refuse to
report to camp in the third year of a fouryear deal because you want to
renegotiate, and you could lose big signing bonus bucks if you signed an
addendum agreeing not to do that.

As far as drugs, NFL contracts have sometimes been structured differently
for a player who has a history of drug use one who has failed a drug
test, for example.

That still happens, but a relatively new approach has teams taking a sort
of preemptive strike against drug use, almost guaranteeing they get their
money's worth out of a player by putting the stipulation on signing bonuses
into the contracts of players who have never even had a drug problem.

"I think these contracts do have an effect on players and helps to keep
them focused," said Andrew Wasynczuk, New England's vice president of
business operations. "This is fairly new, but I think it works. The money
is there for the player. All the player has to do is live up to the
contract."

Wasynczuk said that while all teams are not adding socalled "behavior
clauses" to contracts, some agents believe that these clauses will become
standard in almost all contracts within several years.

"A club that has been burned before, especially with drug use by a player,
will do those sorts of contracts," said Giants general manager George
Young. "As far as players who don't do drugs and are asked to sign these
types of contracts, if I am a player and I don't use drugs, why would I be
upset? If a team is giving me money, shouldn't that team have a right to
protect itself? It's not like you put in there if you get a speeding ticket
you lose the money."

New England has done several of these addendums within the last few months,
and they have been allencompassing rather than having a single focus such
as drug use. But agents say that other teams have focused specifically on
drugs in recent months, even for players with no known drug history.

Some teams, agents say, also insert these clauses when they suspect a
player of drug use. And where does this suspicion come from if a player has
never failed a drug test? Listen to this story from a prominent agent.

"I get a call from a general manager who tells me that I need to keep an
eye on my client," said the agent, who asked not to be identified. "He says
that my client was at a nightclub and he was hanging around a cocaine
dealer. He wasn't using cocaine, just hanging out with this dealer.

"I of course ask him how does he know this. He tells me the league has
these exFBI guys or cops watching certain hot spots in many cities where
there is an NFL team, and if a player is hanging around questionable
people, the league lets the team know. That is why now you may have some
teams wanting these clauses built into the contracts, even if a player may
not have actually done anything wrong. They have all this information about
players, and now they want to do something with that information. It's a
form of insurance I guess."

The National Football League Players' Association has said little on the
subject; agents mostly hate the idea. "There's probably mixed reaction from
agents and the union," Wasynczuk said. "But all we're looking for is
responsible behavior."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company