The NFL Lockout is almost a hundred days old and there’s still no resolution in sight. Sure, we’re supposed to be hopeful that not-so-secret, secret talks taking place between the NFLPA and ownership over the last few days will yield a new CBA, but needless to say I’m not holding my breath. I was confident this thing wouldn’t get past March, nobody, or at least I thought, was stupid enough to put an estimated $9 Billion dollars in revenue in jeopardy.
Yet, here we are.
For awhile there, it looked as if the owners were the main culprits behind the threatened demise of the 2011 NFL season; and in a lot of respects they still are. But the players association hasn’t exactly acquitted itself in the court of public opinion either. In the end, I’ve come to hate them both, you both suck, and you’ve both caused this mess.
I want my God damn football season.
That’s the worse part. As these two groups maneuver around board room tables, every now and then taking the time to engage in slap fights and bouts of hair pulling, they can rest assured that I and pretty much every other football fan will gladly line up as they ladle out football come September, or whenever the hell they decide to start the season.
It’s why the NFL’s four network partners would agree to tuck $4 billion in the owner’s pockets, even if there were no season. The NFL is king in this country and they can afford to do whatever the hell they want, because in the end they know you’re hooked. You’re going to come crawling right back. All the angry blowhards who claim they’ll refuse to watch are full of crap and the NFL powers that be know it.
It’s hard to even figure out what the hell the problem is here. The NFL isn’t losing money, in fact its generating more and more every year. This isn’t the NBA or MLB, where teams are teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Roger Goodell has no equivalent of Frank McCourt’s Los Angeles Dogers or Fred Wilpon’s Mets. Even Wayne Weaver can field a mediocre team in the middle of a Jacksonville swamp and people will come.
What owners are griping about isn’t holes in their pockets it’s that their cut of the load has gotten slightly lighter the last few years. We’re talking declining profits here, but that still puts these owners in the black, they’re still making money. Even those who claim their business models are unsustainable are still making a decent amount of money.
The Greenbay Packers, who we’re told are in the worse shape of the thirty-two team NFL, still managed to generate, by their own accounts, a $20 million dollar profit margin in 2010. I could only imagine it’s even better this past year after winning the big one in February. Oh yeah, who owns the Packers? No one, they’re a community owned team. We’re supposed to feel sorry because the municipality of Green Bay could only put $20 mill in its pocket last year?
Must be rough.
If that’s considered poormouth in the NFL how is the rest of the league fairing?
Forbes Magazine puts the average profit margin at somewhere around $31 million per team. Aw, looks like Jerry Jones won’t be able to afford a Lamborghini made of gold this Christmas. No, Private Island for Jim Irsay this year.
Seriously, are we supposed to believe these guys can’t get by on $31 million in profits a year? That the current system is leading to insolvency?
Here’s something else to consider, Bob Kraft bought the Patriots for $172 million in 1994. Today, the franchise is valued at $1.4 Billion.
I think he’s doing alright.
Who knows what the owners are even really making anyways, because these guys won’t open their books. If you were losing money, or at risk of running your business into the ground, you’d show your petulant employees the numbers, right? After all, their livelihood depends on your continued success. At the very least, they could see where you’re coming from. It leads one to believe that the owners are full of shit because they haven’t done it. There is no impending financial crisis in the world of the NFL; they simply want to grab some more cash. And that’s fine, I have no problem with capitalism, just be upfront about it. Don’t be surprised though when people don’t buy your explanations and certainly don’t be surprised when your employees don’t take to kindly to it.
It’s not like these guys didn’t know what they were getting into either. In 2006 they voted 30-2 for the new CBA, with the only two holdouts being the Bengals Mike Brown and the Bills Ralph Wilson, two of the worst owners in all of sports. Now they claim they didn’t realize what they were getting into. Are you kidding me? These guys are billionaires and business owners and couldn’t detect what they claim is a raw deal when it was presented to them? Apparently, Bob Kraft and company were playing checkers while those dynamos Ralph Wilson and Mike Brown were playing chess.
The players, initially, had every right to balk at giving anything back, let alone eighteen percent. All they had to do was sit back and allow the owners to hang themselves in the court of public opinion. Nobody told the owners to sign a document giving the players 57% of playing revenue; but then NLPA DeMaurice Smith and his merry band of men began engaging in some pretty slick PR tactics.
The players offered to accept a new deal splitting all revenue at 50% between players and owners, a perfectly acceptable and almost magnanimous gesture on the face of it. That is until you realize that what they offered was to merely continue playing under the current agreement. When the one billion dollars that owners get to take off the top is factored in, it equates to the players receiving half of all the revenue the league generates. There would have been no change in the economic situation of either side. Even the player run NFLlockout.com lists the average percentage of revenue received by players since 2002 at just slightly above 50%. The NFLPA simply counted on 50 sounding better than 57.
The players then took it upon themselves to take their case to the federal court system in an effort to endlessly litigate their way out of this mess. Sick, more and more tax dollars thrown away on a frivolous argument between billionaires and millionaires.
The players aren’t alone in public theatrics of course. After putting the season in doubt, thirty-one of the leagues owners made sure to demand payments from their season ticket holders. The only holdout, the New York Giants, were lauded for not requiring payment until the season was officially on. How pragmatic, how generous of them, newspaper columnists claimed. Of course this ignores the fact that just the year before the G-men required their loyal ticket holders to pay thousands for personal seat licenses, the payment of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being able to pay the Giants thousands for years to come.
Which brings us back to the main point, they both suck. Both sides have stretched the truth, engaged in negotiations they knew would result in no agreement and continue to hold out until total victory is declared. And we’re stuck in the middle of this tug of war left with no other option than to complain and wait until both sides come to some sort of agreement.
And wait we will, because like the junky on the street corner we need our next fix. And both sides can count on that.
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