It would be stupid for the NFLPA to negotiate a rookie wage scale without pairing it with some salary spending policy that guarantees that the money they give up in the rookie contracts is spent elsewhere on the veterans.
Otherwise the owners will just spend less on the rookies and keep spending the same amount on the veterans. These guys are business sharks, that's how they got to be the kind of billionaires that could own football teams. Last time Drew Rosenhaus weighed in on the issue I believe he noted that something like half the league were operating underneath what would have been the salary FLOOR this year, let alone the salary cap. Now he puts a dollar figure on the amount of money in new deals that is being saved by the owners. This "uncapped" season has been a billion dollar windfall for NFL owners.
And you trust these guys to pay the veterans the money that they're saving on the rookies? Bull **** on toast. You need something with teeth to guarantee it, and the language has to be sealed up tighter than a shark's butthole so they can't find a way around it.
Rookie wages are one of the only areas of the business where the players actually had leverage over the owners. Year after year, owners are bent over a barrel on top 5 pick contracts, having to give way more money than they would like. Think of those rookie contracts as an annually rising tent pole that raises the roof of the rest of the tent every time it rises up a few more inches. Whenever a truly talented player hits free agency or needs a new contract, he can point at rookie wages and say I want to make more than that guy, that guy hasn't even played in this league yet and I'm an All Pro. Jared Allen got his contract in Minnesota that way.
If you're going to sacrifice that tent pole, then you damn well better find another mechanism that will make owners feel bent over the barrel by some systemic "problem". You can't trust owners to pay their fair share of the money, and you can't trust the players not to work with individual teams to help them cheat the system, because players have been raised to be loyal to the team. Look at this standard practice of manipulating a veteran's contract incentives to where he has a higher salary cap number than his actual salary for the year. Teams will approach a veteran and ask him a favor, they have salary cap space left over that they didn't spend this year and they want to carry it forward for future years, ostensibly so that they could spend more in future years to win a championship. Veterans that the team trusts and that trust the team, comply. The team inserts incentives into the contract that are considered to be "Likely To Be Earned" by some application of fine print in the current CBA, but everyone knows that this incentive is not very likely to be earned at all. Because of its technical LTBE designation, the incentive counts on the current year's salary cap. Your payroll was $125 million of a $130 million salary cap, now it's $129 million of a $130 million salary cap. The next year, the salary cap naturally rises to $132 million or some such by virtue of the revenue percentage language, but because that incentive that was counted last year never got earned or paid, the team gets a credit...and so this particular team's salary cap is now $136 million.
That seemed like such a smart idea at the time, these teams are shifting cap space off to future years so that they can SPEND that money if the right opportunity came up, that'll help them win a championship, right? Right? Wrong.
Teams have a salary floor in addition to a salary cap. The floor is 80% of the cap. If your team's salary cap is now $136 million because of the incentive manipulation, you MUST have at least $108.8 million on payroll this year. And so, what do you do? Well, you can do the same thing all over again. You can approach a veteran you trust, stick in some language for an incentive that he won't earn, therefore beefing up your salary payroll figure up to a level that overstates how much cash you're actually dishing out. But, this is a dangerous thing to keep doing year after year. You'll keep pumping your salary floor up in future years to unnatural levels, necessitating that you keep doing this, and then you could run into a problem trying to get veterans to do this for you.
That is, unless you have an "uncapped" (unfloored) year on the horizon. If you have an "uncapped" year on the horizon, you get to flush all over those carried-forward cap credits down the toilet, spend as little as you want, and start fresh.
And thusly, you've successfully subverted the spirit of the CBA which demanded that you pay a certain percentage of your revenues to the players.
This is the kind of loophole that the NFLPA needs to concentrate on closing, before they can think about giving the owners a concession by instituting a rookie wage scale.