You don’t flip the car keys to a kid as soon as he turns 16. He’s got to go through driver’s ed.
NFL rookies go through their own version of driver’s education this week in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. at the annual Rookie Symposium. It’s an intensive four-day seminar that runs through tomorrow and is designed to educate all 256 members of the 2009 draft class in the rules of the NFL road. Four 16-hour days of meetings cover a wide variety of topics, including financial management, the personal conduct code, the league’s banned-substance policy and how to deal with the media. Attendance is something the National Football League Players’ Association takes very seriously -- rookies have been fined for not showing up.
It can also create some offseason headlines -- and headaches -- for the NFL hierarchy. A fight broke out between two rookies last season, one of whom was defensive back Aqib Talib. Tennessee running back Lendale White raised eyebrows when he asked this question during a session dealing with homophobia. And a few years back, Baltimore quarterback Troy Smith challenged NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, asking Goodell why he chooses to focus on all the negative things the players do, and then pressed the commissioner when Smith believed Goodell didn’t sufficiently answer his question.
According to Patriots’ Vice President of Media Relations Stacey James, no New England players are scheduled to act in an advisory capacity this year. But it’s a program many Patriots’ veterans have helped out with in the past. Defensive lineman Richard Seymour spoke to the first-year players in 2002 -- after his rookie season -- and talked about the sort of rookie hazing players should expect. In a story he later related to reporters, he talked a night where the rookies had to take the veterans out to dinner. Seymour, a first-round pick in 2001, had to fork over $15,000.
“That was when I decided to put myself on a budget,” Seymour later said.
Hosted by the NFL and NFLPA, this year’s speakers include Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin, second-year players Dustin Keller and Chris Long, as well as other current and former players like Nnamdi Asomugha, Jerome Bettis, Cris Carter, Harold Carmichael, Len Dawson, Kevin Mawae and Marcellus Wiley.
The rookies can also get a chance to show what they’ve learned. Last year, the rookies from each team participated in the “Ultimate Rookie Challenge,” a trivia contest at the end of the symposium that featured questions on the materials they learned. The seven New England rookies -- led by quarterback Kevin O’Connell -- scored the highest. For their efforts, they all walked away with a 32-inch TV. In addition, O’Connell (who finished finishing fourth overall out of the 252 rookies) was also awarded an iPod for his personal performance on the exam. (UPDATE: This year's rookie class managed to make it back-to-back -- word out of Florida Wednesday morning was that the Patriots' rookies won the challenge again this year.)
Patriots making their dollars go further
The results of an extraordinary study unveiled this week reveal the Patriots spent $8.14 million a win between 2004 and 2008, the best dollar to win ratio in the NFL over that span.
The numbers, which were compiled by Jason La Canfora of NFL.com, first looked at the “committed cash” each NFL team spent between 2004 and 2008 -- the amount of actual money (not salary cap figures) spent on players in that period of time. In that study, the Patriots ranked roughly in the middle of the pack -- they were 10th overall with $513.31 million spent. (The Cowboys spent the most with $566.89 million, while the Buccaneers spent the least with $449 million.)
La Canfora then took a look at how many wins each team had in that span -- New England had 63 wins -- to reach the final result. Other teams under $10 million per win were no surprise: the group includes the Colts (63 wins, $532.77 in committed cash, $8.44 million a win), Chargers (54 wins, $485.46 million in committed cash, $8.99 million a win) and Steelers (56 wins, $516.69 million in committed cash, $9.22 million a win).
On the other end of the spectrum of the dollar to win ratio? The Raiders were the worst with 20 wins and $513.21 million in committed cash, which resulted in an astounding $25.66 million per win. The only other team that ended up paying more than $20 million a win were the Lions, who won 21 games in that stretch and doled out $505.04 million, which yielded $24.04 million a win.
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