Captivating performance

Sporting News, The, Sept 5, 1994 by Paul Attner

Last fall, executives of the San Francisco 49ers prepared potential 1994 rosters for Coach George Seifert. He was shocked, reaching the conclusion that he would be left with a team that might be competitive in the World League. But these internal projections reflected the dominant thinking around the NFL. That is, free-spending franchises such as the 49ers would be so restricted by the soon-to-be instituted salary cap that instead of being a major player in the free-agent market, they would be humbled by the extensive changes.

"After being the hunter for so many years, our greatest fear A becoming the hunted," 49ers President Carmen Policy says. "We feared that in February, teams would come in and start picking, players we no longer could afford. I could see our beautiful and very effective chess pieces falling off the board and all you would be left with is pawns. And you can't protect your king with pawns."

So the 49ers scrambled to find a way to satisfy three goals: to retain the nucleus of their team, to reduce a nearly $50-million payroll to the cap maximum of $34.6 million, and to find a way to make bids for elite free agents so they could challenge Dallas for NFL supremacy. Although Policy is a close friend of 49ers Owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., he realized his pal would never accept a long-term rebuilding effort, not after so many years of highly successful teams. Mess this up, Policy thought, and he would be out of a job.

Now, eight months after their initial trepidation, the 49ers a awaiting the start of the 1994 season with great anticipation. Instead of crumbling before the free-agency/salary-cap monster, they've emerged as the clear-cut winner in the race to master the new system. With the addition of free agents Richard Dent, Ken Norton, Rickey Jackson and Gary Plummer, they've strengthened their defense so much that they now could knock off those cocky Cowboys, a team, Policy admits, the 49ers are "possessed" about overcoming.

Yet the 49ers not only dropped under the salary cap but were able to tie up most of the team's core for at least another four years. All it took to pull off this coup was about $10 million of unbudgeted extra capital from DeBartolo and some imaginative front-office thinking.

But in this strange new world of the NFL, not every club solved the mysteries of the emerging system as quickly as the 49ers. Instead of embracing the changes, many teams fought them, so much so that Commissioner Paul Tagliabue finally banned criticism of his beloved cap. His counterpart Gene Upshaw of the NFL Players Association, also was none too pleased by what he was hearing from his membership.

Players were astounded by the ramifications. Teams no longer could afford high-salaried reserves, so many veterans near the end of their careers were cut or asked to rework their contracts, usually taking a substantial pay reduction. High-profile players such as Phil Simms and Art Monk were released; Simms retired and Monk signed with the Jets. A Pro Bowl player such as Jackson could find no takers at his $1-million asking price. No question, the NFL's internal workings have not been affected this severely since 1970, when the merger with the AFL took place. This is no cliche: For once, you will need a program to identify all the roster switches brought about this season by the cap and free agency. That's because 156 veteran free agents have changed teams since the end of last season.

"In two years, a lot of this will work out," Giants General Manager George Young says. "You won't see so much movement, and disparity of money will even out. The distribution is way off right now. It's like the food of the world. There's enough to feed everybody, but we don't have the distribution to do it."

But for now, this new way of doing business has created turmoil throughout the league. Here is an inside look at how one team - the 49ers - mastered the system so effectively that its success might well propel it into the Super Bowl, shifting the balance of power within the NFL away from Dallas.

When Carmen Policy traveled to Youngstown, O., late last November, he knew Edward DeBartolo would not agree immediately to the ideas proposed by 49ers administrators. The DeBartolo Corp. was experiencing difficult financial times, and company officials had to decide whether to make part of the business public through a stock offering. DeBartolo, formerly one of the most involved owners in the NFL, had been spending increasingly less time on team matters. But Policy knew he needed DeBartolo's approval before the 49ers could deal with the realities of the cap.

Policy told DeBartolo he thought the club could negate the initial impact of free agency and the cap. If the 49ers could rework the contracts of some star players before the end of December, they could take advantage of a league ruling that said 1993 salaries would not count against the cap. So the goal was to sign these players to reorganized contracts that would give them additional money in 1993 but reduce figures previously agreed to for 1994 to 1996 and beyond, when the cap would be in effect. That way, the 1994 payroll could be cut substantially and the 49ers' best players would be prevented from moving to other teams as free agents. But money to cover the new 1993 output had not been budgeted, which meant DeBartolo would need to come up with anywhere from $10 million to $13 million when he could ill afford it