Baseball's GM of GMs wouldn't last a week in frivolous NFL free agency

We don't know if Billy Beane likes football. He has never shown much interest in it, given that it interferes with soccer season, but that doesn't mean he doesn't enjoy a good beer and a brat on Sunday mornings like the rest of us.

We're not sure if A's GM Billy Beane likes the NFL, but we are sure he wouldn't fit in it. (US Presswire)

But we can surmise one thing about the Oakland Athletics general manager/part owner/Moneyball protagonist. He would last about four hours as an NFL general manager. Tops.

Not because he isn't smart, and not because he couldn't adapt. But his prime fixation -- finding an undervalued market force and exploiting it to his benefit -- is largely wasted in the NFL. There, the operating theory is, "See something you like, and hurl money at it until it chokes off the target's avenue of escape."

No cleverness, no foresight, no "market forces" claptrap. Spend until you cramp up, and if it doesn't work, do it again next year.

The free-agent signing period that just began last week has shown this to be as true as ever. Extraordinary contracts are being signed by profoundly modest talents, and even after you allow for the fact that most NFL contracts can be voided pretty easily by the teams, you're still talking about budget by shovel.

The logic is simple -- "We need a defensive tackle who can do the following three things. That guy is one of them. Quick, buy him before someone else comes along."

And it reminds us that, in the NFL, there are 32 teams that act like the Yankees and Red Sox, and do so because there are 32 teams who are flush with cash at all times. Billy Beane couldn't hang in this environment. Nor, we suspect, would he want to.

This doesn't make him right and, say, Bill Polian wrong. It's just that the principles espoused in Moneyball don't really work in an economy where everyone spends like its Oscar Night in Hollywood every year. The rules of shopping are just different.

For one, most contracts aren't guaranteed in the NFL, so you can atone for your mistakes last year by making new and more expensive ones this year. In baseball, you're on the hook for every dime.

For two, there are more striking market disparities between cities in baseball because the national network and cable packages are so much less lucrative, plus there is not nearly the level of revenue sharing in baseball that there is in football. In other words, you can't lose money in football unless you are actively trying to do so.

For three, you don't have to be a billionaire to buy a major league team, though it helps. In football, you have to be a billionaire just to think about it, and the only exception to that rule is if your mom or dad left you the team as a going-away present, as Georgia Frontiere just did with the St. Louis Rams.

For four, the minor leagues don't exist in the NFL. They do, but they're called colleges, and there's only one supply source for all 32 teams. You can't sign a kid when he's 17 and hold his rights the way it's done in baseball, so development is done on the job, as soon as you become an employee.

And for five, the pricing and spending structure of the NFL is not nearly as conducive to the subtleties in which Beane and like thinkers prefer to dabble. NFL owners are manic acquisitors by nature, so their world view is, "You need one, buy one." The few exceptions, like Ralph Wilson in Buffalo or Dan Rooney in Pittsburgh, grew up in an earlier time and are rapidly becoming anachronisms amidst the planet-eaters they have voted into their exclusive club.

They don't want or need creativity. They want daily results, and do poorly with ideas like, "What do you mean we didn't get the guy?"

All of which explains why the pro football free-agent period is essentially ants on a dessert cart, spending as fast as possible to get the jump on the other guy whose mandate is spending as fast as possible. It might be more frantic, but it is a lot less fun, because the cost of a mistake is so much less. Sure, it's a bad idea to give $18 million guaranteed to a journeyman run-stopper, but the back end of the contract can disappear on a whim, and you can use the money you saved to get next year's journeyman run-stopper.

So no, Billy Beane wouldn't have any fun as an NFL guy. The joys of minding your owner's money don't translate nearly so well for an owner who has so much that he doesn't have to mind it himself.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.