More saber rattling in the CBA negotiations.
I can’t imagine that there’s any winning for either side if they actually take this to the point of killing off a season. Somebody please tell me they aren’t this stupid.
Are they any smarter than the NHL group? 
It seems to me that the NFL is so popular they could much more easily withstand a lost season than other sports. For fans there will still be college FB. It seems way too early to be claiming there will be no pro FB next year when the season is still 9 months away.
There have been work stoppages in the NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball, and, of course, the NFL. Why should anyone think it wouldn’t happen again?
The flip side being that they have more to lose.
The NHL, the way it was going, had franchises than were HAPPY to skip a season. The NFL has no teams in that position.
I don’t know RickJay. I think that right now Buffalo and Detroit would be happy not to have to play for a year. May be the best season they have had in a while!
On the serious side, the players have more to lose by missing a year then the owners do. Especially veterens who only have a limited time left to set records or get that last big payout before the body gives out. A 31 year old who has invested the past twenty+ years of his life getting to be the best player he can be really can’t afford to be missing a year of playing time. The owners risk money, the players are risking careers.
The whole situation is absurd, from the players looking for yet more money to the owners pleading poverty. I typically side with the owners, and in the end I probably will again because I have always held the opinion that the players don’t have a job without a team to play on and the owners will always be able to find people willing to play so they hold all the cards.
Nevertheless, I think they’re both stupid. They are collectively going to risk killing the cash cow and interest in the sport, and they are doing so at a time when unemployment is high and people are having trouble footing the bill for tickets under the best of circumstances. They obviously haven’t learned anything from baseball or the NHL and what happened after they lost their seasons.
Of course, the NBA is about to do the same thing. I can’t find any way to care about that, though. My interest in basketball died long ago when it turned into show-off, ball-hogging, ego driven street ball. It had arguably happened long ago, but it really manifested itself in the 1990s and I simply can’t stand it anymore. The NFL is still enough of a team sport that the egomaniacs are tolerable. But I digress.
As sad as it sounds, I suspect the Redskins would have a better season in 2011 WITH a full-season work stoppage than if a labor agreement was reached.
What other teams could be in the same position?
I think it is beyond dispute that both owners and players are certainly capable of season killing stupidity. The question is whether they will actually do it. And I think they might. I certainly hope not, because I love the NFL even more than college football. Time will tell.
It’s not the players forcing the issue, it’s the owners. They decided to opt out of the CBA they overwhelmingly approved a couple years earlier.
So a bunch of these guys overspent, not they want to punish everyone. I will give them credit for not forcing the tax payers to foot the bill for these stadiums (for the most part), but their fiscal mismanagement should not be misinterpreted as a money grab by the NFLPA. The only time the players have publicly floated the idea of getting more money was after the owners insisted upon an 18-game season. It’s not unreasonable to ask for more money for more work.
Furthermore, when specific players asked Goodell and others to outline what the owners want, he declined to answer.
Bottom line is that the owners are full of shit. They want to privatize the rewards and socialize the risks. It’s bad enough that long career in the NFL will virtually ensure that you will greatly reduce your lifespan and damage your longtime health, but to make it seem like both sides have equally valid complaints is insulting.
The players are the product. This isn’t a normal business where you can find several people to to that job at that level. These are arguably the best collection of athletes in the world. They have such unique and specialized skills that replacing them is impossible. Far more people would watch their favorite NFL team play in different jerseys, than to watch replacement players in their usual uniforms.
Most of the money the NFL makes comes form TV contracts and merchandising. The owners are just money men. In many ways, I wish the NFLPA would just get some huge bank to loan them enough money to start their own player-owned league.
Welcome to America. The owners are stunningly rich and want to extend the season even longer, and also reconcile that with their public display of watching out for future concussions and overall player health.
I know the owners will get over, because, well, they always do, but I hope they get taken to the cleaners.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the current contract carry through to March? So would a lockout do anything other than cancel training? Even the pre-season doesn’t start until August. So that means neither side will be feeling any real pressure to negotiate for months.
Would a lockout really screw up the draft? I’d assume that nobody is signing draft picks until there’s a new CBA.
And then there’s the OTAs leading up to training camp, plus the camp itself. Guys can’t just sign a deal on Friday and go play football. It takes time to evaluate players and make the roster cuts.
If I had a vote, I would vote against an 18 game season. There just doesn’t seem to be any need for it. 16 games is brutal. 2 more means more injuries, more wear and tear on the players.
The NFL brass has said there will definitely be a draft, irrespective of contract negotiation status. You’re right about draftees not necessarily signing, but a rookie pay scale will probably be put into place with a new CBA, that might make kids sign before their dollar amount is dictated.
Yeah. I think 18 games looks OK on paper: drop down to 2 preseason games (I think owners want 3), 2 byes, expanded rosters, non-season-ending injured reserve option. But a player would get halfway through reading the proposal and think about the ankle that’s still bothering him or his last concussion… It’s too much battery.
I’ve even heard that owners don’t want to pay any extra for the 2 extra games. Not sure if I can believe that, though.
Remember how well that philosophy worked out during the strike year? Do you remember the scab teams?
It isn’t true that the owners can replace the players. You can’t replace prime rib with hamburger and tell the customer it’s the same thing. People aren’t paying to see “football players,” they are paying to see the best of the best. To draw another analogy, it’s like relacing Bruce Springsteen and U2 on a bill with Gallagher’s brother and a local bar band and expecting the audience to pay the same prices and not notice any difference.
The draft is considered the last event on the season calendar. While the draft will proceed, signing of players will not until the new cba is in place.
No, you know what’s insulting? Green Bay, the only publicly owned team in the league, in a year where they sold out Lambeau Field every game, all 73,928 seats, had a profit of $9.8 million. That’s it.
Now, we may assume that they are not representative of the rest of the league. Even if we assume that, we may safely assume that other teams that are subject to blackout every week (Jacksonville, Tampa, Detroit, et al., article about it here), are in a much more dire financial position.
So, what should be done about this? The NFL and the owners are not a charity, they are in it to make money. It doesn’t take a genius to see that if one of the most popular teams in the league with an enviable reputation second to none makes less than their own starting quarterback per year there’s a problem. The owners want to rectify this, and the players are content to keep things as they are. Where I come from, that is called cutting off your nose to spite your face. But that’s just me.
Are they paying to see “the best of the best” when they go to a college game? Surely not. Yet the games sell out.
The owners, if they go the replacement route, may lose money this year and the next if the players don’t come back, but there are boatloads of college graduates who would be more than willing to play professional football. The game will recover from a year or two of sub-par football. It will not recover for a long time from the loss of an entire season. Besides, you know as well as I do that the players will come back. They make too much money and have too much at stake to lose an entire year of their already short careers. Not to mention the fact that their own players’ union doesn’t care about them after they retire. The players need to get paid while they can, and everybody, including the owners, know it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the owners are being stupid and shortsighted as well, but I think they have firmer ground to stand on than the players do.
Oh, you think they’ll lose a little money with replacement players? Try a 20% drop in TV ratings for the first week alone. That’s what happened in 1987, the last time replacement players played. And for each of the three weeks those guys were playing, the TV ratings dropped. It’s not out of the question that by the end of a replacement season, you could be looking at a 40-50% decline in ratings.
And TV revenues, not sold-out stadiums, are where the money is in the NFL. A ratings hit like that would result in a permanent decline in network contract revenue, IMHO.
Ford bought the Lions for 4.5 Million. they are valued at 800 million now. Every time we build them a new stadium the team value rockets. The taxpayers and the players don’t see any of that money. The discussion is about operating revenue which they won’t open to the players union for audit.
Football would get hurt by a lockout. Baseball got lucky and the busting of Ruth’s HR record created big interest. Football has nothing like that going for them. If a whole season was gone, many would change their lives around to accommodate it. Then some would not change it back.
I’d have more of an opinion on this if I knew precisely what the owners were asking for.
Obviously they want to reduce the top percentage of revenues that players are entitled to, but who knows how far they want to reduce it. I have to assume the profit trends are roughly the same as what Green Bay is reporting, but how much of that is the fault of ownership? If it’s because of stadium costs, then maybe they shouldn’t have built and renovated their stadiums at the height of a construction boom. If it’s because of the economy, maybe the players will be amenable to a short-term CBA that allows the owners to cut player salaries for 3 seasons or so.
An 18 game schedule would be ridiculous, unless they’re planning to eliminate 2 preseason games, or add another bye week. It’s incredibly hypocritical to act like player safety is a priority while demanding they play 2 extra games.
As Gregg Easterbrook commonly mentions in his columns, the NFL would do well to remember that there’s nothing written in stone that guarantees that they must be the most popular sports league in America. Don’t take the fans for granted.