Winner Take All in the NFL

Abstract

In an earlier paper, Kowalewski and Leeds showed that free agency and the salary cap brought profound changes to the level and nature of players’ salaries in the National Football League (NFL). Their study is limited, however, by the fact that—unlike most other professional athletes—football players are evaluated by position-specific statistics. The authors improve on their earlier work by performing quantile regressions on data for specific positions to show how free agency and the salary cap affected compensation. They show that the new bargaining regime greatly increased the reward to performance.