Wow, a salary cap violation is the reason our players were so freakin good. Hey, the secret to our success is out. This guy is a moron.

The deferred payments still counted against the cap, The player just agreed not to be “paid” at the current time, instead being paid later w/ interest on his paycheck. And of course the signing/roster bonus being basically gaurenteed, was recorded the following year instead of the current year as a gaurenteed bonus would of been, or something lieke that.
Basically just a lot of investigation because someone COUGH Al Davis COUCH complained, moaned, etc untill the leage checked into every single thing the broncos had done in the 90s. Every team ever investigated like that would have stuff founf that was a “violation”.

This is type of the media, media types and media hopefuls: be contraversial, self-righteous and loud. I won’t dignify that garbage with a view or a comment. As British Bronco linked above, this myth has been dispelled before.

It was posted by dabriza on Jun 17, 2008 12:05 PM MDT 52 comments

The Colts fan Big Blue Shoe started talking smack and got a Smackdown about the subject.

NO!

HELL NO!!

that had issues. The league changed some of the rules to prevent these issues, but don’t blame the Broncos for looking hard into the whole accounting, every team that wanted to win was doing similar things. It is the stingy owners (Raiders, Steelers, Cardinals) that were bitching about it.

Some people think that an accountant is a person who does taxes, for example, and I have very little to do with taxes for my company. We have a corporate tax department, as most big companies do, and they deal with all that. In the strictest sense, accounting is the practice of determining and presenting your most accurate financial position, either at a point in time, or over a period of time. In other words, it’s getting to what your position looks like on paper. It is related to cash flow, but only in a tangential way. If you think of a business taking depreciation expense on a piece of equipment, no cash was expended to match that expense. It’s something that happened from an accounting perspective, but not a treasury perspective.

Doing salary cap math is a very specialized form of accounting, in that you have specifically delineated accounting rules to follow, and there is a periodicity concern (meaning the league year.) It’s not about Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP,) but it is still an accounting exercise.

This situation with the Broncos in the 90s was a treasury issue, not an accounting issue. It centered on timing of cash inflows and outflows, at a time when there was a substantial amount of outflow activity, in the manner of capital expenditures on the new stadium. It actually had nothing at all to do with the salary cap. It had to do with the way cash was disbursed from the organization to the players, and the deferrals the players took were too team-friendly, per the letter of the CBA law. The Broncos organization had a good relationship with its players, and they agreed to take the deferrals, but those provisions of the CBA were intended to protect players from bad owners.

The CBA was violated, but the salary cap was not. Of course, the MSM gets this wrong, because accounting can be a little complicated to people who aren’t trained in it. Add to that the fact that the MSM gets many, many simple things wrong, and it’s expected. The “Broncos cheated” meme somehow continues, through people like BBS, who despite his education/evisceration on this from HT, no doubt still believes he has it right. It’s sort of like how so many people think that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. Only problem is, he never said that. He said he “took the initiative in creating the internet,” which is 100% true.

“In all fairness, it’s something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is — and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a “futures group” — the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ‘80s began to actually happen." – Newt Gingrich (who doesn’t often come to the aid of slandered Democrats)

Just an example of how one little distinction changes the whole meaning of the story. Gore has had that urban legend dog him for a decade now, and it’s completely wrong. The Broncos did not benefit on the field from their violations of the CBA, but it’s sufficiently nuanced enough of a distinction to leave room for morons to claim that they did. Just pat them on the head, and let them go on their merry, idiotic ways.