Will there be a 2011 season? This is the longest NFL lockout ever. How frigin depressing…
I’m hoping they do a double elimination tournament (one for each conference) and then do a best of 3 Super Bowl. Or maybe do it only twice, but with aggregate scores.
Well, considering this is the only lockout since the NFL/AFL merger, you could also argue it’s the shortest and only lockout in modern NFL history (the '82 and '87 strikes are clearly strikes and not lockouts).
I haven’t heard anybody seriously entertain the notion that we will lose the entire season. There’s just too much money at risk. The better question is how many games we miss. Unless the two sides come to an agreement this month or early in July, the chances of missing at least a few games shoots up.
At this point, it’s anybody’s guess, but I’m thinking there’ll be somewhere between a 9 game and full 16 game season. I can’t see either the players or the owners willingly give up billions of dollars to earn manhood points.
Is the double elimination tournament idea serious or a whoosh? There wouldn’t be much fan support for something like that, and none of the owners, coaches, players, or TV networks would go for it, either. And that’s beyond the fact that it would kill the single biggest sports day in the world (at least in terms of economics).
I just hope they play…period.
I’d love to agree with this, but remember that not too long ago MLB lost a World Series (1994) and the NHL lost an entire season (2004-05).
I admit that I’m not following the situation all that closely and can’t say for sure how relevant the above examples are. But, point being, never underestimate the stubbornness of rich people, even if it seems to be against their best interests.
The NHL example is more apt than I would like. The NFL hired Bob Batterman after they saw the bang up job he did with the NHLs lost season. The NFL thought he could play a similar brand of hardball with their players. After the NFL hired him, it really was just a matter of time before we saw a lockout.
There is definitely a non-zero probability of losing the entire season, but it’s still not the likeliest event. And with the recent news of the players and owners having secret meetings, there’s some hope that some significant progress can be made towards an agreement.
It also helps that some of the owners are going to be under significant pressure to play some football. There are a lot of cities that are going to re-think public funds going to stadium construction and renovation costs as well as think about lawsuits against the teams themselves should the cities lose the revenue associated with games (food/parking vendors, lost facility fees, lost sales tax revenue, etc), especially for what is essentially an exempted monopoly.
There is talk of an 8 game season. But I heard on one of the sports shows that a better call would be to extend the season into March. Why not?
At this point, I don’t care so much about who “wins” the labor issues. I’m a fan, and I want to see NFL football. I suspect that will happen at some point, but it might end up being “NFL” football with replacement players again. Spare Bears vs The Aints is better than nothing…sorta…and should provide fresh fodder for the blooper collections…
Seriously. People bash baseball for extending the season into November. Except the way the NFL season is set up, the weather would likely IMPROVE the longer they extended the season.
I realize that most fans don’t really care about the details, but there literally cannot be replacement players.
The owners have locked out the players. It’s NOT a strike. It’s the owners stopping the action this time, not the players. That’s why it’s a lockout. It’s management shutting down operations, not the employees. If the owners lift the lockout, the old players can play. Simple as that. The sticking point is that the owners would like a bigger piece of the pie, which would have to come at the expense of the players.
This is a VERY oversimplified explanation, but essentially the players were ok playing under the old terms. The owners were not. So, the owners took the ball away (literally) and made it so no football could be played. If the NFL has any games at all, the current players can play. If there are replacement players at all, they play under the old CBA terms, which is precisely what the owner’s didn’t want in the first place.
It’s bizarre, but the NFL is one of the few organizations where they are actively seeking to make their employees part of a union (and making this a part of their legal strategy), while it’s currently in the players’ best interests not to be unionized.
Bottom line, Billionaires fighting with Millionaires
Oddly, it’s losing preseason games that hurt the owners more than players. Players don’t get anything more than a per-diem until the regular season starts, but the owners make almost as much money off those games as regular season games.