If you’ve been living under a rock for the last nine months, you’d be interested to know that there is a pretty good chance that we could be witnessing a fractured NFL season next fall. The league’s collective bargaining agreement with it’is set to expire in March, and there are no signs that a new CBA will be in place when the 32 teams are scheduled to open training camp this summer. A lockout by the owners seems eminent…and I’m cool with that. Let me explain why.
The players deserve to get paid. No pro sports league constrains wages like the NFL, who uses a hard salary cap, a draft, a rookie wage scale. Couple that with job insecurity and ever-increasing risk of permanent bodily harm and you’ve got a rather oppressed labor force. But these are the arguments you’ve already heard.
The 2,000 or so professional football players in or just outside of the league at any one time are an elite bunch. Nobody else on the planet can could do what they do as well as they can. They’ve been scrutinized and analyzed more than any other job applicant outside of the federal government, because the rigors of their trade are so demanding. And time after time, these young men deliver on what is asked of them, unless one of them is named “T.J. Houshmandazeh.”
People whine about professional athletes making millions of dollars while people in other jobs do with far less, but measure the scarcity 8 million teachers against 2,000 professional football players and tell me which deserves better compensation in an open market.
And now the owners want to slash player payouts by 18 percent? That’s insane. You might argue that football is too American to be stifled by labor negotiations, but the only thing more American than football is greed, and it seems poetic that the latter could wipe out the former. Unfortunately, most football players focus on being football players, and little else, making the chances of a lengthy lockout unlikely.
The owners need a wake-up call. Let’s be clear about the intentions of the owners: the financial health of the NFL is not in jeopardy. The owners are claiming that, under the current CBA, that costs have exceeded revenues by $200 million. That’s a dubious figure since labor costs are tied to revenues, but never mind about that. They’re not threatening to lockout because they’re losing money, but because they’re making less money…or so they say.
How is that possible? It’s not like the owners are spending market prices on anything else. They get their stadiums subsidized. They get their facilities subsidized. They have companies bidding for the opportunity to outfit their teams. And whatever they can’t have purchased for them, they go without, often to the detriment of their operation.
Have we established by now that the owners are just a gaggle of greasy little heathens that would f_ck their mothers for an extra dollar? They negotiated a monopoly with DirecTV and then took the cable companies that wouldn’t carry NFL Network to court. And now they’re asking the players to take a smaller check while playing two more games. That’s classic NFL hypocrisy, the exact sort of broken logic that needs to be challenged.
We, as fans, will find something else to do. Everyone wants to cry about what they’ll do on Sunday . But we spent all of this money as fans and we don’t deserve to be treated like this! Yes, you do. Your blind devotion to your team–regardless of how they play–prohibits ownership from changing anything. If you’re going to keep buying tickets, television packages and apparel, why should they?
Believe me, you will find something else to do with your time. You will find other topics of awkward conversation with your wives’ friends’ husbands. You will find something else to put on TV when you fall asleep on your couch. Ninety percent of us will find better ways to spend our time, and if you suck at fantasy football like I do, you’ll actually save a bit of coin.
The game will be improved when it does come back. As far as what happens post-lockout, I think we’ll get 19 weeks of regular-season football when this is all over. Eventually, the owners and the players will reach some sort of comprimise, and let me start with the obvious one. If the owners want 18 games and the players want 16 games…then just play 17 games. Add another bye week, as the players suggested. Over a third of the league will have played in at least 17 games anyway, counting playoffs. That’s not rocket surgery.
But the issue with being an NFL player is that the bulk of your skills don’t translate into other walks of life. And it’s not like the players could start a league of their own any better than a cage full of pandas could start their own zoo. Those players will be at the mercy of the owners, as they always have been. And even though each of them is living the dream of playing football for a living, each of them must eventually wake up and prepare for life after playtime is over. But now it’s the owners that need a wake-up call, and only the deafening silence of a quiet autumn Sunday will make that happen.
