When the Ravens were in Tampa, Fla., for the Super Bowl in January 2001, owner Art Modell surprised the players with daily gifts. They would return from practices to find video recorders, CD players and bags of workout clothes in their hotel rooms - largesse intended as Modell's thank-you to those who had made his dream come true.

Pat Moriarty, the Ravens' director of football administration, smiled when he heard about the gifts. But he also cringed.

"The league is always looking for situations where teams are compensating players without calling it compensation," said Moriarty, a former banker and college and pro football player who manages the salary cap for the Ravens. "That clearly wasn't the case here. These were just gifts. My initial reaction was, 'Wow, this is so nice.' But I knew it would count against the cap."

Sure enough, when Moriarty phoned the offices of the NFL management council in New York, where a staff of number-crunchers oversees the cap, he was told the gifts would count as salary. The Ravens now had that much less to spend on players.

Welcome to the National Fiscal, er, Football League, where the salary cap - a set of dry economic guidelines couched in a labor document - carries as much weight in America's favorite spectator sport as blocking, tackling, scouting and coaching.

"It governs everything; it's the last thing I think about when I go to bed and the first thing I think about when I wake up," New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi said.

"I don't know of any change that has come along and affected pro football as much," said Ozzie Newsome, the Ravens' senior vice president of football operations.

In effect since the 1994 season, the cap is a simple enough canon in theory. The league's 32 teams put their revenues together and set a maximum "cap" and minimum amount each team can use for player salaries. The cap for the 2002 season is $71.1 million. The idea is to level the league's playing fields by avoiding baseball's vast payroll disparities.

It is hard to argue with the results. Major upsets are a weekly occurrence. The past three Super Bowl winners, including the Ravens, were coming off seasons in which they didn't make the playoffs.

Once ruled by dynasties such as Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers and Chuck Noll's Pittsburgh Steelers, the NFL has become America's least predictable major sports league and easily its most popular.

"It's clear we have competitive balance, and most of us think that's good," said Harold Henderson, executive director of the management council, the NFL's office of operations.

Cap is living creature

But the cap's basic premise is all that's simple about it. As important as it is, only a few people understand it. Behind-the-scenes economic wonks such as Moriarty who now populate front offices grasp it down to the last decimal point; they're known as "capologists" in league vernacular. The management council staffers who police and interpret the cap also know it. But most players don't, and many of the fans who gripe about cap mismanagement on talk shows couldn't pass a beginner's test.

The cap is a multi-faceted and ever-changing code, viewed as a living creature by those who work with it.

"I tell [Giants head coach] Jim Fassel that the cap wakes up every day and crawls around its office like an octopus; it certainly has a life of its own," Accorsi said.

In a physical sense, it exists as densely worded articles within the 290-plus pages of the collective bargaining agreement that the league and the players union signed in 1993, creating labor peace after years of acrimony. Copies of the CBA can be found on the desk of any capologist, personnel executive or agent. Moriarty and Newsome refer to their paperback editions so often they don't even bother to shelve them.

"I need it all the time. I had to pull it out just a few minutes ago," Newsome said on a recent weekday morning. "There's no way I can remember it all. I'm not that good."

The original collective bargaining agreement has been extended three times and repeatedly amended as teams and agents devise new ways of paying players and the league and union react to trends. In the most recent change, minimum-salaried veterans were turned into cap bargains, encouraging teams to keep them. The union was concerned that teams were discarding too many such players.

"The cap is a lot like the [income] tax code in the sense that the original document is not nearly as thick as the various revisions, exceptions and side-letter agreements that have piled up over the years," Moriarty said.

"What started out as a little monster in your closet is now taking up six rooms in your house," said Jim Miller, a former Baltimore Evening Sun sportswriter who managed the cap for the New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears before retiring from football after last season.

The Ravens' capologist

The complexities arise in deciding how salaries, signing bonuses, incentive clauses and other forms of compensation are calculated. Personnel decision-makers such as Newsome and Accorsi usually are well-versed in the basics and some nuances, but teams still employ capologists such as Moriarty, who played fullback at Georgia Tech and lasted a season with his hometown Cleveland Browns in 1979 before earning a master's degree in business administration and becoming a banker.

Moriarty, 47, worked for 11 years as a corporate credit analyst before joining Ravens owner Art Modell's franchise in 1993. His role is misunderstood by many; the fact that he handles cap management and contract negotiations doesn't mean he decides which players stay and go. Newsome and Ravens coach Brian Billick make those calls. Moriarty merely supports them with research - lots of research - and provides numerical frameworks. He also deals with the agents.

"I come to Ozzie and say, 'OK, here is where I believe this player's market value lies.' And then we'll sit down and scrimmage a little bit," Moriarty said. "We'll come to an understanding of what we believe the value is. Then I go out and try to negotiate a deal."

Capologists shake their heads when they hear themselves blamed for a personnel loss. Miller recalled being lambasted on talk shows in New Orleans after the Saints released popular kicker Morten Andersen in 1994.

"Salary cap people are given way too much credit for making decisions," Miller said. "In the case of Andersen, I went to Jim Mora, who was our coach then, and I said, 'We can get rid of this defensive lineman or Andersen, the dollar amount is the same.' Mora made the choice to get rid of Andersen. You would have thought I'd kidnapped the Lindbergh baby."

The most essential tool for capologists is a Web site operated by the management council that can be accessed with a password. Every player contract is archived and every team's latest salary total - cap number - is updated every evening. A search function links to the collective bargaining agreement and the myriad revisions and side letters so everyone can see the latest rules and interpretations.

"The salary cap is entirely computer-based," Henderson said. "When we first started it, we faxed the totals out every day to every team. Then we required teams to go buy computers. There were teams that didn't have computers and complained that we were forcing them into an expense."

Moriarty said he checks the Ravens' cap number on the Web site every day, likening the habit to checking the stock market or a bank account online.

"You'd better look every day," Miller said, "because there could be wrinkles or an adjustment by virtue of some rule interpretation or an incentive that a player hit that you forgot about, and all of a sudden, you have a lot less available money than you thought."

When questions arise, a call is placed to the management council offices in New York. Peter Ruocco, the management council's senior vice president of labor relations, oversees the cap along with Ed Tighe, senior director of labor relations. Vincent Marino, senior manager of labor operations, and colleague Chris Olson handle most of the calls from capologists, general managers and agents. A team of lawyers backs them up.

"I'll call New York with a proposed deal that includes, say, a new way of handling a bonus or an incentive," Moriarty said, "and I'll say, 'From a salary cap standpoint, these are the numbers I'm coming up with. Do you come up with the same?' They either concur or say, 'No, we read it differently for the following reason.' "

These largely unknown staffers wield considerable influence as the league's ultimate economic arbiters. The management council reviews, and either accept or rejects, every contract.

"These are smart, ambitious young people who master the cap," Henderson said. "We hire a lot of them right out of college. It's an entry-level job that doesn't pay very much. They spend a year or two just reading contracts to get the feel of the landscape."

Young, high-tech culture

Some eventually are hired by teams as capologists. The Giants, Packers and San Diego Chargers are among the teams that have hired their capologists straight from the management council.

"There now exists a whole generation of young people in the league who grew up with the cap," Accorsi said. "It's really a new culture; a young, high-tech, computer-oriented culture. My generation grew up with the waiver system governing player movement. The cap is not the favorite part of the job. You deal with it because it's there, but it has sent a half-dozen of my best friends to retirement."

On the league end, a large part of the job involves policing the cap and making judgments. The case of Modell's Super Bowl gifts illustrates the cap's all-encompassing nature. Virtually every move any team makes must be weighed for consequences.

"We could say, 'OK, Ray Lewis, we're going to produce a five-minute radio show ourselves and give you a million dollars to do it.' The cap police would find that and say, 'No, you're cheating,' " Ravens spokesman Kevin Byrne said.

A handful of teams get slapped on the wrist every year for inadvertent errors or failure to report moves that might have cap consequences. The penalty, usually a fine, is seldom made public.

The fine for going over the cap is $2 million, but there is a safeguard against that happening: Henderson said the management council simply wouldn't approve a contract that would push a team over the cap.

In any case, most team officials agree there's no use trying to cut corners. Any tomfoolery almost certainly would be picked up by the independent auditors who comb the teams' books once a year.

The San Francisco 49ers got caught trying to extend their dynasty in the late 1990s. With Carmen Policy and Dwight Clark calling the shots, the Niners allegedly signed several key players to minimum-salary contracts and then funneled extra money to them outside of football. They claimed innocence, but after the league investigated, Policy, Clark and the team had to pay fines and the team lost several draft picks. Policy is now president of the Cleveland Browns; Clark left football after three seasons with the Browns as director of operations.

The Steelers lost a third-round draft pick and had to pay a fine for trying to circumvent the cap in 1999.

"We investigate any suspicious circumstances," Henderson said, "and there obviously are any number of them. If an owner includes his quarterback in an IPO [stock offering] that immediately makes 10 times the investment, I'd say we have a salary cap issue."

The cap was born at the end of a protracted labor dispute. The players, stuck with a limited form of free agency in which teams were able to protect 37 players, were suing to gain more freedom. The league was seeking a form of salary restraint after watching the NBA successfully institute a salary cap in the 1980s. The case was in court, on appeal. In a negotiated settlement, the players were awarded free agency and the league was allowed to institute a salary cap.

Billick was an assistant coach in Minnesota at the time. "Our bean counter went through it and we had a meeting," he recalled. "The guy was an excellent administrator, good with numbers, didn't know if [footballs] are stuffed or pumped. He said, 'Well, it looks like we're going to be needing a bunch of these $175,000 guys and not these million-dollar guys.' "

Slowly, through trial and error, teams learned to balance football and finances, with each finding the levels of daring and prudence it could stand.

"We all learned on the job at the same time," Moriarty said. "There isn't a Salary Cap 101 class you go to. You basically just read the CBA and start to live with it, find the loopholes and make your choices."

The 49ers and Dallas Cowboys were the league powers when the cap was installed, and they were initially hailed for finding new room under the cap - and continuing to win - by renegotiating contracts and deferring payments, essentially putting salaries on a credit card due later. They combined to win three Super Bowls but eventually collapsed when their credit card payments came due.

No beating the cap

"Early on, people thought the 49ers and Cowboys had shown how you could beat the cap," Henderson said. "But it became clear there was no such thing as beating the cap. Eventually, it catches up to you."

These days, the Philadelphia Eagles receive high marks for their cap management. They consistently field a winning team while leaving themselves room to maneuver.

"The Eagles are doing the best job," Accorsi said.

Newsome disagreed, pointing out that the Eagles haven't won a Super Bowl. "There are some good organizations, some guys who are very creative," Newsome said. "But you're good because you bring home a Super Bowl trophy."

Regardless, almost a decade after its inception, the cap, in concert with free agency, has reinvented the NFL. The overarching principle is that you're going to lose key players; with salaries rising due to free agency, there simply isn't enough money under the cap to pay everyone. That has ended the era of the dynasty.

"That great Steelers team of the 1970s won four Super Bowls. But their run would have been limited to two years with the cap," Accorsi said. "If they'd paid to sign Mean Joe Greene, they would have had to let L.C. Greenwood go. If they'd paid to keep Jack Lambert, they would have had to let Jack Ham go. On offense, I don't see any way they could have signed [Terry] Bradshaw and Franco [Harris].

"The cap forces you to make choices like that. You have to accept that going in."

The increased player movement has given the league a more collegiate feel. "That's why you see more and more NFL coaches coming straight from the college ranks," Billick said. "It's very much like a college environment here now. You're looking at 20 to 30 percent [personnel] turnover a year, and close to 100 percent over five years. That affects the way you coach, the way you communicate, everything."

Gone are the days when talent is the primary factor in personnel decisions. Now, economic factors are just as important.

"Before, you'd be at a staff meeting and a guy would say, 'I need a guard.' You'd ask, 'OK, do you need a pulling guard, a pass protection guard or a backup guard?' " Billick said. "Now you ask, 'Do you need a $1 million guard, a $2 million guard or a $3 million guard?' "

The cap is pro football's king of the jungle. It wins and loses games. As the Ravens know, it determines whether a team can rebuild or reload.

"The cap has become its own cottage industry," Ravens president David Modell said. "It's a statisticians' dream. It changes every year and you have to stay on top of it. But of course, that's why you have a guy who sits there all day and studies it. You have to have that guy. And they're amazing.

"Remember in second grade when you wondered how in God's name those word problems in math would have an impact on your ability to earn a living? You know, 'If you have a quarter and you buy three apples for five cents apiece and two apples for four cents apiece, how much change would you get?' Well, now we know the people for whom those questions were important. Those were questions for a salary cap guy."

Five cap facts

1. The NFL's economic year runs roughly from early March to late February. Salaries in multi-year contracts kick into effect at the beginning of March, which is why teams rush to cut players in late February to get under the cap.

2. If a cost-cutting team falls short of the cap's minimum salary total, the players on the team receive the difference.

3. During the offseason, when teams sign free agents and bring as many as 80 players to training camp, only the top 51 salaries count against the team's cap. During the season, the salaries of all players on the 53-man roster count.

4. Some incentive clauses in contracts are treated as wishful thinking in calculating cap dollars. The management council judges the money in each incentive clause as likely to be earned (LTBE) or not likely to be earned (NLTBE). The former is added to the cap beforehand, as if there is no doubt; the latter, only if the incentive is reached.

5. In 1994, the first year of the salary cap era, the maximum was $34.6 million. This year, it is $71.1 million.

- John Eisenberg