Edited sentence: A new CBA (collective bargaining agreement) was reached between the NFL and the NFLPA on March 8, 2006, which extends the current agreement through 2013.Critics of the salary cap note that the driving reason for the cap was to maximize the profitability of the NFL teams, and limit the power of NFL players to command the high salaries they are said to deserve in exchange for bringing in large numbers of paying fans to the stadiums.Escalating player salaries throughout the 1980s and the advent of free agency in 1992 led to the NFL's adoption of a salary cap in 1994, a maximum amount of money each team can pay its players in aggregate.Exhibition game minimum is $10,000.For the 2004 season, the NFL's salary cap was $80.582 million, an increase of $5.5 million from 2003.Furthermore, they attribute NFL competitive parity instead to the league's extensive revenue sharing policies.Proponents of the salary cap note that it prevents a well-financed team in a major city from simply spending giant amounts of money to secure the very best players in every position and thus dominating the entire sport.The cap for 2006 was expected to be set at $94.5 million, but due to the new deal it instead was set at $102 million.The cap for the 2005 season was set at $85.5 million, and at $102 million for 2006 instead of the previously estimated $94.5 million.The cap is determined via a complicated formula based on the revenue that all NFL teams receive during the previous year.The minimum salary for an NFL player is $260,000 in his first year, and rises after that based on the number of years in service.These concerns, among others, led in part to modified salary cap adoption in the National Basketball Association in 1984 and the National Hockey League in 2005.These numbers are of course exceeded dramatically by the best players in each position.These numbers are set by contract between the NFL and the players' union, the National Football League Players' Association.They claim fans end up paying higher ticket prices to help pay for escalating player salaries.They point to the relative parity of competition that exists in the NFL as of 2005 compared to Major League Baseball as evidence that the NFL salary cap preserves competitive balance.This has been seen as a problem in American baseball, long dominated since the advent of free agency by large market teams