- why NFL superstars are never truly free

Last week Johnson lamented his inability to jump ship to a football dynasty the way the NBA superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant were able to do with the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors. He decried the unfairness of enduring losing while not having the power to get himself to the Patriots or Broncos or some other championship-ready franchise.

“I was stuck in my contract with Detroit and they told me they would not release my contract, so I would have go come back to them,” said Johnson, who retired last year at 31 while still in his prime. “I didn’t see the chance for them to win a Super Bowl at the time and for the work I was putting in, it wasn’t worth my time to keep on beating my head against the wall and not getting anywhere. It’s the definition of insanity.”

For much of Johnson’s time with the Lions he put up Hall of Fame statistics for a franchise that was the league’s standard for heartbreak. While Detroit eventually built themselves into playoff contenders they did so with a young quarterback still learning the NFL and a powerful but undisciplined defensive front. The only way Johnson was going to hold a Super Bowl trophy was if he snatched it from Bill Belichick’s hands.From the sounds of his comments he would have rather gone to New England and played for Belichick instead.

Football is a sport where coaches demand control which traditionally has made players compliant, perpetually in fear of being cut either for performance or injury. The league’s concrete salary cap lacks the veteran exemptions and luxury tax options you see in other sports because the owners do not want to be trapped into overloaded contracts, with players whose careers are cut short by injury far more often than their counterparts in the NBA or MLB. Player deals are almost never guaranteed and the partial guarantees they receive count against the salary cap for the life of his contract, even if the player has long been released.

The best hope Johnson or Sherman or any other player has in gaining any measure of freedom from the NFL is to sue. This is the only way the players have won anything from the league. Gene Upshaw, the former head of the players’ association, loved to talk about the lawsuit built around running back Freeman McNeil that eventually won the players free agency in 1992, saying it was the only way to break the owners’ grip on players’ careers.

Upshaw once told Bob St John, the biographer of powerful Dallas Cowboys owner Tex Schramm, that Schramm told him during the 1987 players’ strike that the union would never win free agency. “Don’t you see? You’re the cattle, we’re the ranchers,” Upshaw said quoting Schramm.

In explaining the union’s aggressive litigiousness, Upshaw told me in 2007, a year before his death: “We have a duty to protect our rights and defend our player rights.”

Johnson had another right. He had the right to walk away from a failing team halfway through a $132m contract. On Monday, the Lions invited Johnson to training camp, possibly in the hope he might want to play again, especially after Detroit squeaked into the playoffs for the second time in four years – a dynasty by Lions standards. If he does want to be on the field again that will be his best chance. Who knows if he does? What he won’t be doing is getting together with a handful of great players and building a dream team. The NFL isn’t built for that.

Johnson is right. Football superstars can’t chase the rings – not if they also want to get paid what they are worth. It goes against our very nature to see someone quit because he can’t get himself to a better situation. But that’s the NFL.

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