Greg

It would hardly have been worth it. Branch’s signing bonus was a fraction over $1 million, and Branch had played out four years of his contract. That Pats, at most, could have recovered ~$200,000.

It’s also clear that you don’t quite understand what the very nature of what collective bargaining agreement is. Of course a CBA overrides parts of federal contract law — or rather, more accurately, it preempts them. That’s the whole point — it establishes a legal structure entirely alien to the natural laws that govern labor. The draft, the franchise tag, limits as to the lengths of rookie contracts, etc, all of these things are constructs of the CBA, in which both parties have given up certain legal rights to establish an agreement that is the first arbiter in all contractual disputes.

And this CBA clearly elucidates the various penalties a team is allowed to levy against players under contract who do not report. (And yes, this does include guidelines for when a team can go to court to recoup a players’ signing bonus.) A franchise can no more decide to bypass these procedures than a player can decide to sue the team to get out of the the franchise tag.

So just come off it, Greg: you clearly were caught making stuff up about the Patriots’ getting a court order to compel Branch to report, and you’re trying to cover it up with nothing but bluster and cheap rhetoric. You keep asking me for proof of things, but have yourself provided zero evidence to back up your own wild claims.

As for your hilarious attempt at condescension at the end of your post about my making progress — please, go back to my very first response to your nitpicking about Warren’s option bonus. Read the first sentence. It says “My bad.” I readily admitted to lumping all the guaranteed money into the signing bonus. So clearly, between the two of us, I’m not the one who has a problem admitting when he’s made a mistake. You, on the other hand, seem to think that if you come up with as many different ways to insist I’m wrong as you can, eventually it will be true.

It won’t. You’re wrong, I’m right, and you haven’t offered a single shred of evidence that suggests otherwise.

But here’s the thing — I don’t really care. It’s still entirely irrelevant to the point of my initial post, which is that Warren was extending a contract that would pay him $20 million to Branch’s $3 million, and that this needs to be taken into consideration when we praise Warren for giving a “hometown discount,” and condemn Branch for being greedy.

Your entire farce about the Patriots blowing up the CBA to compel Branch to show up and play — an idea so ridiculously impractical in execution that you should be embarrassed to have brought it up in the first place — was nothing more than an attempt on your part to duck my point.

It’s possible, and there’s an argument in terms of services Branch could provide being similar to an artist being commissioned for a painting that he/she refuses to do. Or a high powered lawyer being hired and then farming out work to an underling or associate when the client wanted THAT lawyer. Those kinds of situations in personal services can result in specific performance but it’d be very rare I think.

Courts in general aren’t particularly enamored with the idea of forcing people to work, or preventing people from working. It’s why noncompete agreements are usually torn apart. I’d like to see a team try to make the arguments, but I don’t think it’d fly.