Huh, Roger Goodell sent out an e-mail to all of the players, laying out the latest offer.
Not sure if you are talking to me, but your logic here makes absolutely no sense. If you honestly think the NFL product has little to do with the players, then player salaries wouldn’t be going up right now. Part of the reason they are is increased competition amongst owners for players who are, or are perceived to be valuable. Why pay Manning and Brady a bunch of money if you can replace them with the Jamarcus Russell, and not suffer economically? And that’s a less extreme example than if you were to replace an NFL star with a non-professional. If the talent level and the players weren’t the draw, then the entire structure of the NFL would look completely different. There wouldn’t even be a union. The whole reason a union can exist is because the employees can collectively leverage their value to the enterprise, or can use their numbers to make it hard logistically to replace them. Replacing 1700 people is not difficult. The union’s power comes from the relative scarcity of talented athletes at that level, and their indispensability.
The players aren’t interchangeable cogs like fast-food employees. If they were, they would be paid that way. Furthermore, if franchises are so important, and fans are so fickle, how do you explain the success of the Colts, Ravens, and Texans? Those teams either moved, or were created. All have been financially successful and/or competitive. If it’s so hard to create wealth and loyalty via branding, then why have those teams been able to do so? Branding is the easy part; finding talent, and being able to produce a good product is the hard part. That’s why minor league baseball and the NBADL (or the MLS for that matter) will never be as popular as their professional equivalents. It’s not because the Trenton Thunder lack branding and fan loyalty, its because they have relatively shitty players.
This bears no relevance to the hypothetical presented. A more talented TEAM may lose to slightly less talented one, but having a overall dearth of talent is a problem. Just because the most talented team on paper doesn’t always win is entirely unrelated to a situation involving an entire league full of less talented scabs, and its relative marketability.
Um, no. Are you aware of how logic works? Again, your analogy makes no sense at all. Talent obviously does not ensure individual or team success, but nobody has suggested it does. The point was that an NFL full of less talented players is far less enjoyable and watchable than one with superlative ones. The foundation of a successful professional league rests upon the implicit promise that you are presenting competition between elite professionals; people considered to be the best in their respective field. All other things being equal, there is no league in the world that I am aware of that is more successful than a competing league with more talented players. It just doesn’t happen. Your contention that an NFL with scabs would be more successful than a more talented player owned league doesn’t mesh with the lessons of history.
:dubious:
Now hold on, the Texans have never produced a good football product. They have one season with a winning record (9-7 in 2009) in 9 seasons of play, with nary a playoff appearance. If the Texans have financial success, it isn’t due to their players or coaches.
Let’s say that you are personally tasked with taking the current players and creating a new league. You start today. Go.
First you’ll have to find 30 billionaires who want to own a professional football team. Now remember, you’re starting this league to escape the financial tyranny of the current owners, so you’ll have to find 30 individuals who have lots of money who don’t actually care about maximizing the amount of money they make. Since we all know that rich people get rich by not thinking about profit, that should be easy!
You need 30, or very close to 30, by the way. If you don’t have at least close to the number of actual NFL teams, you’re eliminating the jobs of hundreds of players. Not much point starting a new league to further the interests of the players if you’re going to start by unemploying half of them.
Now you’ve got your billionaires, who are willing to work together and forego their own financial interests in order to work according to the players’ dictates. All you have to do now is assign each one to a city, which they will surely do with minimal argument or debate, because with New York available who wouldn’t want to play in Tampa Bay?
Each one will then have to interview and hire a few people: general managers and coaches and trainers… also PR people, HR people, lawyers, accountants, someone to create and proof your marketing materials, groundskeepers, ushers, security guards, parking attendants, vendors, and scouts. That’ll take no time at all.
You’ll have to find somewhere for each team to play. There’s no way you’re getting new stadiums, so you’ll have to play in existing venues. The NFL stadiums are not going to be an option - the scab teams are playing there, remember - so you’ll be settling for college fields where the facilities may not be as nice, and definitively won’t be your space; the school’s own team will have first priority when it comes to use of the facilities, and the decoration and labeling on the stadium will belong to the school. No fancy sponsorship deal for your billionaires to supplement their income. But hey, you have altruistic billionaires, and I’m sure the colleges will lease you their fields on the cheap.
Want to “play in a handful of stadiums?” How’s that going to work? 30 teams spread out among six stadiums? Your attendance will be nonexistent, because you’d be drawing from an incredibly narrow geographic pool and relying on the same people to attend games for every team.
But anyway, you’re almost there. Now you just have to plan and conduct a dispersal draft. Someone is getting pick #1 and someone is getting pick #30, but the difference between the best player in the sport and the 30th best is minimal, right? And how hard can it be to hold a little dispersal draft? Millions of fantasy football players do it every year, right? Of course, in fantasy, your players don’t hold out. Every player will hold out for maximum dollars - using the leverage of returning to the NFL to maximum advantage - and your billionaires will be cash-strapped almost immediately.
Fortunately, while all this was going on, you negotiated a deal with the cable networks to show your games. I’m sure they can afford to pay you enough to cover your costs, which will include only elevated player salaries (you didn’t think the players were going to do this and take a pay cut, right?), salaries for all of the ancillary employees mentioned above, rental fees on your stadiums, and equipment costs (you have to make 60+ brand new uniforms for every team, by the way. But that’s free, right?).
Think you can get this all done between now and September? No? Because I guarantee the NFL will have full rosters and be playing games that count by then. In a few weeks, the best college players will be drafted to NFL teams and they’ll sign there, because they don’t even know if your league will exist in September. A fair number of veteran players will simply retire. Others - maybe not the glory boys, who can afford to take a whole year off, but solid players who have homes and families for which they need to pay - will defect to the NFL and play as “scabs” rather than wait for you to get your enterprise off the ground.
But you finally get around to your first game. Whoops! No one is in the stands! You forgot to budget for the massive amount of marketing you’ll need to do, to make sure people know that you exist and that you’re playing games and that they’re airing on Comcast and Cablevision. People aren’t even seeing your materials, because while they click on e-mails they get from the “San Francisco 49ers” they think the “San Francisco Bridges” are a lacrosse team or possibly a UPN drama and they delete them unread. The NFL sold tickets, though - to people who’ve been waiting on lists for season tickets for literal generations, to people they reach through already-established mailing lists and marketing methods that are in place and tested and work.
After your first Sunday slate of games, up against the NFL, your own highlights get carried as the last thing on the local sports news for each relevant city. NFL highlights get carried on the NFLs own dedicated cable network and on the biggest and most powerful sports media organization in the country. Guys who finish watching NFL games can also flick around and find, somewhere, a special on the rich history of the Pittsburgh Steelers or a replay of the 1991 Super Bowl; guys who finish watching your games can watch Family Guy.
And suddenly, your real problem comes into relief. There’s a reason that the Jerry Seinfeld joke about rooting for laundry is funny: because it’s true. I’m a Giants’ fan, so I root for Eli Manning and Justin Tuck and Hakeem Nicks. But that rooting has a context, a history. It comes in the context of watching Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor and Mark Bavaro. There are rivalries, that propel my interest, with the Eagles and the Redskins and the Cowboys. Emotional associations accompany those uniforms, those logos. The giant star at the center of the field in Dallas has meaning - to Dallas fans, and to right-thinking people who hate the Cowboys. There are records: 208 touchdowns, 18,355 yards, 50 TD passes, 17-0, 0-16. There’s the Catch and the Drive and the Fumble and the Miracle at the Meadowlands and David Tyree and the Immaculate Reception and the Ice Bowl. There’s Lambeau Field. There are debates: is Eli better than Phil? Is Peyton better than Unitas? Could any of them carry Montana’s jock? Every one of these things underlie every single NFL game.
You have none of these things. You are starting from scratch. Two guys in South Jersey live across the street from one another. One’s a lifelong Eagles fan; one’s a lifelong Giants fan. Every Sunday they get together and watch the games - they argue, they debate, they watch commercials paid for by corporations that keep football teams in business. The Giants guy has an LT jersey he bought with his dad when he was 15; the Eagles guy has a giant blow-up doll of an Eagles player in his front yard. This Sunday they have a choice: watch Giants-Eagles, live from the Meadowlands, on Fox, with the same broadcasters to whom they’ve been listening for ten years, continuing a rivalry and a tradition that has helped define their entire lives … or watch your New York Knights play the Philadelphia Batteries, on Comcast SportsNet, playing up in Syracuse at the Carrier Dome, where at first they won’t even know which team is wearing which uniform.
They’ll watch the NFL. And guess what? Some of your players will feel this way, too. Maybe Tom Brady and Bill Belichek decide that they can live with Bob Kraft’s tyranny, and go play/coach for New England. Maybe Greg Jennings has never really been a union guy, and the Packers just drafted Cam Newton and Greg doesn’t really want to play for the Seattle Cappucinos when he could instead be the successor to Don Hutson.
You’re hemorrhaging money. Without the infrastructure, history, and context that the owners bring the NFL, you cannot compete with them for fans, you can’t compete with them for players, and you can’t compete with them for money. Hell, no one really even knows which team Chris Johnson ended up on - it’s hard enough to keep track of player movement when each team only rotates out 10-15 players every year; who’s going to be able to track it if every player on every team is suddenly different. But they’ll still know that the Packers play at Lambeau Field, and that they’re building a statue of Walter Payton outside Soldier Field, and hey, the NFL Network is running daily “Meet the…” specials where they outline the new roster of each team.
And… you’re done. Within five years, with the April draft, the NFL has refreshed its rosters and no one really knows or cares that Eli Manning, who recently returned to the NFL to be the backup for the Giants, played three years for the Minnesota Frozen Lakes.
That’s why the owners, collectively, are more important than the players. They bring infrastructure, history, and context that turns interested observers into fans who will part with significant money to consume the product that they players create.
Just a nit…there are 32 NFL teams currently. Of course, 30 might just be rounding. 
Best team name ever. I’m sure that they can get a sponsorship from Duracell.
Ouchie.
You don’t need any billionaires to start a league. As you said, the whole point is to avoid being subject to the whims of egocentric billionaires. Currently, the players themselves represent nearly the entire value of the business. Businesses that are currently worth billions of dollars. The Jets, for example, have no business without players. As such, their collective talent represents a commodity that can be leveraged to borrow the required start-up costs from a bank. Remember, most of the money the NFL makes comes not from the value added by owners in the form of good stewardship, better stadiums, or merchandising, but from TV deals. Broadcasters don’t care about anything other than putting out a product that people will watch. Based on the fact that the players essentially control the product, they should be able to get that money without a problem.
Many of the biggest stadiums in the country are college stadiums. Most of them larger schools have stadiums that rival NFL ones. Also, the logos can be changed quickly. They do it all the time. They change an arena from a hockey rink to a basketball court in a few hours, you think they can’t remove logos?
You forget, most of the money is made broadcasting the event. You don’t need the extra money to cover costs. Eventually you can build your own stadiums, or buy the ones left abandoned by NFL teams. Either way, its something that is not a deal breaker.
You would keep the teams and contracts the same for now.
More nonsensical rambling. You realize no NFL team currently loses money. The money is obviously there, so the logistics are only a matter of allocating resources effectively. Would it be easy? No, but you act as if nobody has even broken off from a dominant company before. Particularly when the employees ARE the product, it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Why do you think there are so many hedge funds today? It’s largely because talented employees figured they’d do better on their own. To a large extent, that has proved to be true. So much so that the former banks they worked for often “rehire” them at greatly increased salaries and perks. It’s also a large reason why there are so many cable channels, movie producers, and movie stars. Read about Pixar, the creation of the Sony Playstation, or Tyler Perry some day. You will see that when the “owners” start to get lazy, corrupt, and greedy, talented people will find a way to use their talents in another way.
Oh. Oh. That you think this is even more awesome than when I thought you thought what I thought you thought before. So basically, your idea is that the 600 millionaires who make up the NFLPA are going to just do it themselves? Like in one of those 1950s movie musicals? “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show! T.O. can do marketing, and Peyton over there will sew the uniforms, and ooh! Maurice Jones-Drew kicks ass at fantasy football, so he’ll be the general manager!”
I’m curious: freed from the tyranny of 30 billionaires, how exactly do those 600 millionaires make their decisions? Is it a democratic vote? What happens when James Harrison says, “hey, ownership in the NFL was bullshit; those late hit penalties on quarterbacks make a mockery of the game. In the Players Commune League, we can hit quarterbacks any time we want?” And when Peyton says, “shit, that sounds like a bad deal for me. I think maybe I’ll go take this $15M from the Colts and play in the NFL?” Who will make personnel decisions? Who will design and test the team names and logos? Who will assemble a mailing list, and publicize the availability of tickets? Remember, the NFL has already-existing brand recognition to leverage; people who want Giants tickets know the Giants exist and know, generally, how to go about getting tickets. You have a much bigger job: telling people that your New York Knights exist, and that they’ll be playing (at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, so come on, New York metropolitan area, come drive six hours north into the middle of nowhere to see a team in which you have no emotional investment!). Bigger job = more money.
How are you envisioning that bank loan process going? Four or five or fifty of the players will wander into a bank somewhere with no business plan and put their own money and homes on the line as collateral?
And how much money, exactly, do you think Comcast and Cablevision are going to pay for the broadcasting rights to these games, which again, may not draw viewers at all? Do you think that Comcast and Cablevision have the money to outbid Fox and CBS and ESPN for the games, and they just have thus far chosen not to? The reason that the networks that hold the rights to NFL football hold those rights is because they have and paid the money needed to get them. It’s a lot of money.
And please, the players do not represent the entire value of the business. Every player in the NFL is replaceable, evidenced by the fact that every player in the NFL is replaced. Without the New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, and Green Bay Packers, Eli Manning, Tony Romo, and Aaron Rodgers would not be millionaires. Without Eli Manning, Tony Romo, and Aaron Rodgers, the Giants, Cowboys, and Packers would… draft outstanding college quarterbacks and put them on their legendary fields and keep on keeping on.
Why would they? You act as if the college athletic departments are just going to line up to help the Players Commune League out of the goodness of their hearts. College football and the NFL are financially intertwined, and the interest of the former definitely includes the strength of the latter. Many colleges will simply decline to lease to you, but the ones who will will want money. Lots and lots and lots of money. And by the way, they have a game on Saturday and they’re using the practice facility for their own team all week, so find your own place to practice and what the field looks like on Sunday is your problem, not theirs.
First: the comical assumption that the NFL teams will abandon their stadiums - the NFL will continue to exist for as long as it wants to; there are teenage and collegiate athletes right now whose dream it has been since childhood to play for the Bears or the Niners or the Saints, and they’re not going to just transfer that dream over to the Knights or the Batteries or the Frozen Lakes. Human beings have a ton invested in their teams and very little in the players who play for those teams. This is why, when a football team changes personnel - even changing to very BAD personnel - their fans keep watching and rooting. Because they’re rooting for the laundry, and the owners own the laundry.
Who is “you?” In reality you’re talking about 600 people with wildly divergent interests and opinions. Do you genuinely believe that even a sizable majority of those 600 will agree that the above is the best solution? Hell, the entire impetus for your fantasy league is dissatisfaction with the status quo; players will want raises, they’ll want to be free to choose their new team if a dispersal draft is not planned. And if 200 of them don’t like your plan and defect back to the NFL, you’re even more screwed then before.
The resources exist in part because of the history, context, and infrastructure of the NFL. They exist because people go to the stadium, buy game jerseys, and watch a product with which they have been made familiar on TV. You propose to start from scratch on all those things, and think your revenue stream will instantly be equivalent to the NFL’s revenues? Come on. You’ll lose money at first, and who is bearing that loss, in your model? The individual players?
No. I act as if no one has ever broken off (with sustainable success) from a major professional sports league in the United States before.
This is so bizarrely irrelevant to the situation at hand that I don’t know how to address it. Hedge funds? Really? That strikes you as similar in any way to running a professional sports franchise?
Your examples, frankly, are dumb and prove nothing like the point you want to prove. Partly because the market in which those companies function is a market that allows for multiple participants. The people involved in Pixar were tremendously talented, smart people. They initially worked as part of Lucasfilm. Then Steve Jobs bought the company. Then Disney did. At what point did Pixar do anything like what you are trying to suggest? And, just as importantly, what became of Lucasfilm, and Steve Jobs, when Pixar left? Did they collapse, as you predict the NFL will do?
No, they continued and they flourished, as the NFL would if all the players left. The difference is, Pixar can exist alongside Lucasfilm and Disney and so on because there is a market big enough to consume all of their products. There is not sufficient room in the market to accommodate two 32-team professional football leagues, so the league that owns the laundry that people already love would win.
Starting a business of any kind is not some unique skill that nobody but the current 32 owners of NFL teams possesses. Of course they would hire people.
They are already unionized, so their ability to collectively make decisions is not really in question. Of course there will be competing interests, but without the owners take a huge cuts, you can fulfill far more of the desires of the players. Again, are you unaware that there are employee owned and/or public companies that don’t degrade to chaos because they have multiple participants?
Clearly, they would have to collectively employ business representatives to lobby on their behalf. Again, what exactly is your point? That Drew Brees can’t personally convince Wachovia to give him a billion dollars? Probably not, but we both know that was not suggested by anyone.
Oh, you mean networks like NBC, that recently was bought by Comcast? Comcast is worth more than all the networks. ESPN, a cable network, makes a lot of their money from cable providers like Comcast. They can demand a premium because they carry NFL games. The cessation of the NFL games as they currently exist would not only mean the new “player’s league” would be affordable for Cable companies and others, but they would lower their carrying costs for channels like ESPN.
As is every team. Do you think the NFL suffers if the Dallas Cowboys move to LA? The branding is created all the time, as evidenced by the numerous expansion teams in every sports. Its clearly a symbiotic relationship, but the reason why the brands have loyalty is because they put out a great product. Their product would be questionable if they were to use scabs. Besides, if players are so expendable, why bother paying them so much now? Why not just put some really good flag football players out there? They would probably work for free too. Why do you think that wouldn’t work?
They would pay them. :dubious:
The NFL has abandoned stadiums. RFK Stadium is not unique in that regard.
Their dream is to play at the highest level possible. That is currently the NFL. If that were to stop being the case, people would adapt.
I clearly stated that it won’t happen for a number of reasons. However, you are arguing against the viability of the idea; that a player owned league couldn’t compete. I vehemently disagree.
True, but you ignore that those same criteria would exact an even worse punishment on an inferior NFL.
Has anybody ever tried?
Hedge funds are analogous because their relative ubiquity stems partly from people breaking away from the their employers because they didn’t feel they were adequately compensated. The employers thought their branding meant more than their ability to make money, and many of them lost that bet. They thought someone couldn’t possible do what Solomon Brothers does without their infrastructure and branding. They were wrong. Similarly, Jerry Jones thinks Tony Romo and the current Cowboys players can’t create and package a product better than the one he can. I think he’s wrong.
No they did not collapse. I don’t think I have said the NFL will necessarily collapse. I just said that the players are more important that the owners. The relevance (again) is that Pixar became well known as a subsidiary of Disney. When they had a disagreement over money, Disney didn’t play ball, so Pixar left. The players can do the same. The point is that talent is what creates successful venture, not empty branding.
Let’s say next season, the NFL changed all the team names and logos. Would people stop watching? Why or why not? Even assuming you are correct that two leagues can’t co-exist, you haven’t actually explained why you think the NFL scab league would be the survivor beyond putting forth absurd strawmen, and raving about how people love their teams. Yes, I get it, Drew Brees can’t sell jerseys well, or draw up a contract, but that’s not really the issue.
The issue is why you think branding ever trumps the perception of quality. If Coke changed their recipe (maybe they’d call it new coke) people wouldn’t just continue to drink it because they like cola in a red can. People wouldn’t keep reading the New York Times if they fired all their experienced writers, and hired unqualified amateurs. Quality matters far more than branding. It doesn’t matter if the brand is the a soda company, or an NFL team. The logistics of creating a new employee league in a few months is obviously problematic, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s clearly possible, and would likely be more successful long term if they had superior talent.
Not any more.
But is that positive or negative?
The events and percpetions that muzt exist for the arrival and success of the BPFL (brickbacon’s ProfessionalFootball League) strain the limits of reality so much as to be worthless. From the unlikelihood of obtaining the massive financial backing necessary to start it, to the belief that the NFL wouldn’t be able to compete on quality of games, to the assumption that future players would ignore the NFL, to the misunxerstanding of fandom, the basis for brick’s points are, to me, unrealistic.
With free agency, limited longevity, and lack of solidarity, NFL playerswill never be able to create a new league. The NFL has survived the loss of Johnny U., Joe Montana, Jim Brown, and every other player. Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Ray Lewis could drop off the face of the earth, and the NFL would go on, raking in the money. Players are, by their very nature, replacable. The NFL isn’t. Which is why the owners usually win these standoffs, and why every other challenger to the current NFL has failed.
There aren’t too many “abandoned NFL stadiums” around that would still be in usable shape, I don’t think. They tend to get torn down when the team moves out.
I don’t think that they could (a) get going quickly enough, and (b) maintain sufficient unity of purpose, to make an impact. I certainly don’t think it’d be feasible for the 2011 season. I’d personally be surprised if the entire 2011 NFL season gets cancelled; once players start missing paychecks, I think you’d start seeing many of them breaking ranks.
Not, AFAIK, in any major U.S. professional sport. All of the rival pro football leagues were started by owners, not players.
While, certainly, you can’t have NFL football without players, the question becomes, can you have it without these players. The 1987 replacement-players experience suggests, to me, that you probably can’t, at least not on a sustained level. In the short term, with 2011 draftees added into the free-agent mix? I don’t know.
But most stadiums are technically owned by the municipalities, aren’t they? (I think FexEd Field for the Redskins is a rare exception). So BrickBacon’s Football League doesn’t have to build their own stadium, just sign a lease to play in the same stadiums they’d play in if they were in the NFL.
Since we’re continuing with the hypotheticals, football would be absolutely fine with replacement players as long as they are permanent replacements. Few got behind the “scabs” in 1987 because everybody knew that the regular players were coming back. If there is no such possibility the replacements will be embraced and the game will go on as usual. The first few years will be down years but it’ll come back better than ever, especially once the talent levels come back up from 90%. Then it all starts over, because for the next 50 years the players will be trying to get fat raises that far outstrip increases in revenue just like the ones they replaced.
There seems to be a pretty giant assumption that draftees would still choose to go the nfl in the event the players start a new league. I would think that they would most likely side mostly with the players.
I disagree. They’d side with who would pay them more. That’s long been the case with upstart leagues, and it’s typically why they fail. In this case the NFL can afford to pay more hands down, so the drafted players would fall right in line. Sure, some of them would do the solidarity thing with the players, but they would come to regret that stance in fairly short order when they realize that their fellow draftees who went with the NFL are fat and happy.
No you don’t.
You don’t need 30 of them, and you don’t need billionaires. If the NFL was dead set on enforcing a lockout you could start your league with, say, 20 teams; get the major media markets and pass over the Jacksonvilles and Green Bays. Yes, you’d unemploy a third of the league, but you wouldn’t be unemploying the third that anyone cares about. You need 20-24 ownership groups with enough dough to cover salaries and costs for a few years, but you don’t need them to pay the outrageous zillion-dollar expansion fees the NFL charges.
This isn’t impossible; it’s hard, but not impossible.
The risk is in the NFL calling off the lockout. If that happens before your league has had a few years to play, you’re dead. And of course, if the New Pro Football League started drawings fans, the NFL would call off the lockout. The problem is not that the business model won’t work, the problem is game theory. The NFL’s rational reaction to a competing league is to end the lockout just before the competing league reaches a tipping point of popularity.
I could not disagree more with this hypothesis.
Heh, it’s not just the Players vs. the Owners now.
A fan in Cleveland has sued the NFL and all 32 teams that the lockout violates his PSL agreement.