Nah. The escrow rule is fine. The problem lies with cash-poor owners getting priced out on players and the leagues very strict ownership rules. Those are the things that need to be changed.

The salary cap era has existed for 30 years now. Every 10 years, QB contracts have doubled in value and guaranteed money on these contracts have skyrocketed. Aikman had a 44M/8 deal with 8M gtd at signing in 1994. Michael Vick signed a 130M/10 with 37M gtd at signing in 2004. Rodgers signed a 110M/5 with 54M gtd at signing in 2013. Last year, we saw Russ sign 242M/5 with 124M gtd at signing. Watson signed 230M/4 fully guaranteed. If contracts with huge guaranteed amounts of money is a problem today for the cash poor owners, what happens in 10 years when contracts double again?

Forget these top contracts. Consider a fringe franchise QB like Danny Dimes. He just got 160M/4 with 81M gtd at signing. A guy of his caliber in 10 years is gonna get 320M/4 with 162M gtd at signing. It's the same partially guaranteed contract they've been handing out for 30 years now. The cash-poor owners will simply be priced out.

This is how the league has been trending. Whether fully guaranteed contracts happen or not, the existence of cash-poor owners owning teams is eventually going to cause contracts to get shorter. Either the NFL needs to force out those owners or they need to relax the ownership rules to allow for other streams of revenue. It was on the agenda for this past weeks owners meetings, but the owners have already been talking about relaxing ownership rules by allowing private equity firms and institutional investors to buy stakes into clubs.