Injuries cost owners a lot of money. Injured players get paid their full contract and cannot be cut. Teams must pay their replacements additional money, sometimes just the difference between a practice squad contract and a league minimum contract but that’s still $325k+ per injury, and in the case of the Bears backup QB situation it cost them $3M+ on Todd fucking Collins. Perhaps more pressing, injuries to premiere players lead to losing and loss of fan interest which costs the owners money at the gate and on TV. Owners hate paying guys on the IR millions of dollars for no production, and it does effect their bottom line.
Players obviously don’t want to be injured but for some players injuries are financial windfalls for them. Players who are injured cannot be cut and as a result they get paid a salary they might not get if they are fringe players or older players who would normally be cap casualties. Back to the Bears example, an injury was pretty damn beneficial to Todd Collins.
And if a player got injured and as a result wasn’t able to drive himself home after the game, and his car being driven by a distant cousin of the owner as a favor was attacked by Palestinian terrorists and destroyed, then that injury would be good for the player and bad for the owner.
But as I was pretty clear, in general an increase in injuries will affect the players more in a negative fashion than the owners. I don’t remember the last owner to end up in a wheel chair because of owning a football team.
You’re just pissed because you have to deal with Dan Snyder. In most NFL cities teams are in trouble because of ticket prices driven by player costs. Do you think all these broadcast blackouts are what owners want? Don’t you think that teams outside of New York, Washington, Dallas and Chicago pay very close attention to what the market will bear? You can’t see the forest for the trees.
Peyton Manning and Dwight Freeney are probably making more money than Jim Irsay. Aaron Rodgers and Charles Woodson are definitely making more money than the Green Bay Packers Trust. Jay Cutler and Julius Peppers earn more than each of the McCaskeys (though combined the McCaskeys earn marginally more).
Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder are making out like bandits because they are gouging their clueless fan bases and have the largest stadiums in the league. The Cowboys average ticket price is $160, the Bears are $88, the Colts are $82. They are the exception, not the rule.
It also means that teams have more opportunities to pull away. You’d expect teams to pull away more often than they catch up, since most of the time the team trying to pull away is better than the team trying to catch up.
Compare a 16 game season to some ridiculous number like a 1600 game season. After 15 games, you’d expect the Pats and Jets to be within a game of each other relatively often. After 1599 games, you’d expect this to essentially never happen. It’s more likely to have meaningless games at the end of longer seasons.
Financially the opposite it true. And that’s all these guys care about. Keep up with the propaganda. Yeah, a broken leg hurts. Getting paid $5M/year doesn’t. If they don’t want to break legs they can have my job. Boo fucking hoo.
Keep equating NFL players to coal miners and dig your own grave in this debate.
Like I said. The 4 team divisions have a much bigger impact on this. For every team that pulls away there’s going to be a team that plays it’s way in. With a 16 game schedule the Packers were a cunt hair from being left out of the postseason all together. In an 18 game schedule they very likely would have won their division and had home field advantage.
Agreed, but that wasn’t the point. The issue is the characterization of the players as downtrodden “labor” and the owners as fat cats rolling in money. It’s fiction. The McCaskey’s are “billionaires”, collectively worth about $1.1B, only because they’ve been doing this for nearly a century. Year over year they’re earning about what their best players are. I’m not seeing the huge injustice here.
I agree that the division realignment had a bigger impact. That doesn’t change the fact that extending the schedule has an impact as well.
Green Bay this year is a relatively unusual case. More often, a very good team such as GB will be ahead late in the season, and their late wins will be them pulling away, rather than catching up.
Meh. It’s a useful correction to the “grown men saying millions of dollars to play a kids game isn’t enough” thing (cite: any sports talk radio show anywhere ever).
Because it’s a job they can do year over year. (If indeed you even want to refer to it as a job.) As opposed to an average of 4 years for players.
The bottom line is the owners want to take more of the pie, and at the same time increase the amount of work done by the players. In any other industry, anyone but the most anti-worker right winger would be immediately on the side of the workforce.
And there we have what it comes down to. Jealousy.
Why not save your jealousy for the mega-rich? It isn’t the players who are getting handouts from Joe Taxpayer, it’s the owners. Or is it that somehow they deserve their stupendous wealth, while the players don’t deserve their high wealth?
It’s obvious on it’s face: more games = larger absolute leads within divisions and for seeding at the end of the season = more games at the end of the season featuring teams who have nothing to play for. Just look at baseball and it’s 162 game season. Last year, in a sport wherein the teams are bunched much more closely together in terms of quality*, and in a year with unusually few blow-out races, the Twins clinched their division with 11 games left to play. When’s the last time an NFL team clinched their division in Week 5? In '08, the Angels clinched their division with 17 games left to go, the equivalent of an entire NFL season and then some. More directly on point, most MLB playoff teams have already clinched their specific playoff berth prior to the their last few games.
Sure, I would assume that’s correct, and I don’t think the issue amounts to all that big of a deal. But it’s still fair to point out as a negative that going to an 18-game season would lead to, on average, probably one or two extra games each year featuring teams that have already clinched their playoff seeds and will not make a serious effort to win.
In fairness, while the players may want (in a “perfect world” sort of way) to reduce the off-season workouts and such, their case is accurately stated as: “We’re happy with the existing agreement and would like to continue to work under the previously agreed-upon terms.” Since their explicit desire is to keep both the level of work and the level of pay the same, I really don’t think we can say that they “are fighting to work less for the same pay.”
I mean no offense, but I think you’re stretching a little here. There are a lot of different, ambiguous factors (the question itself is pretty nebulous), plenty of ways in which the fans’ interests align more closely with one side or the other, and the issue you detail is a rather minor example that, as **Omni **pointed out, cuts both ways.
Definitely a possibility, but I think the level of confidence in that “probably” is necessarily pretty low. I mean, if Freeney’s actual take-home pay, averaged over the life of however long his contract winds up lasting, turns out to be $12M-$15M a year (which is at least ballpark), how much really are you willing to wager that Jim Irsay profits less than that amount, from all sources, through his ownership of the Colts over the past two years?
The real concern, I imagine, isn’t so much that the owners aren’t making enough money now, but that there’s no reason sports franchises have to keep on becoming more and more profitable. The NBA, for instance, has serious money problems that didn’t exist for them 5 or so years ago, and if the NFL’s revenues continue to grow at a diminished rate – let alone shrink – the league actually will be in the kind of financial trouble that would be hard to dig out of without substantially reduced player costs.
*=> The best baseball teams each year win about 60% of their games, the worst about 40% (as opposed to the NFL, where the numbers are more like 80+% and 20%), and it’s not just a matter of sample size.
I’m not willing to accept that as a given. I think it’s more likely that teams will be able to tank exactly as many games with an 18 game schedule as they do under a 16 game schedule. The last game, and rarely the last two, are going to be meaningless regardless of the length of the schedule.
The MLB plays 162 games and this year the largest lead at the end of the season was 9 games, less than 6% of the overall schedule, they averaged 4.8 games or about 3% of the total across all 6 divisions. In 2009 the max was again 9 games, though the total average was closer to 6 games or 3.8% of the schedule.
In the NFL last year the maximum lead was 3 games and the average lead was 1.12 games, a maximum of 18% and an average of 7% of the schedule. In 2009 it was a whopping 2.4 games or 15%. In 2008 it was identical to 2010. 1.12 games and 7%.
Seems to me that it’s more likely that more games with lessen the size of the leads and that a larger sample size will allow more teams to regress to the middle. There’s a reason why the best record in the NFL is usually the highest winning percentage of all the sports and it’s a small sample size. Better teams don’t tend to pull farther away, they tend to regress to the middle.
Just to dig back further. The NFL in 1977 with a 14 game schedule had an average margin of victory of 1.33 games, 9.5% of the schedule. In 1976 it was 1.83 games or 13% of the schedule. In 1975 is was an INSANE 3.16 games, or 22.6% of the schedule. That year the Rams won their division by 7 games, and the Vikings and Raiders each won by 5 games in a 14 game schedule.
Tell me exactly why we should think 18 games would mean more meaningless games? It seems pretty obvious that a long schedule will make luck less a factor and would lead to MORE competitive division races.
Well, it kinda depends. The value and profitability of professional sports franchises has simply exploded over the past 30 or so years. That trend can’t persist indefinitely, but the continued profitability of NFL franchises under the current labor agreement seems to require that is does (to one extent or another). Probably. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on.
Besides, the NFL isn’t “any other industry.” It doesn’t *necessarily *make sense to assume the same rules and norms should apply here as in a more typical labor dispute.
This is where you’ve overlooked something: the *proportional *size of the leads doesn’t matter for our purposes, only the *absolute *size, because that’s what leads to the distasteful games in question. The argument was that (1) a longer season would lead to more games featuring teams who who’ve clinched their playoff seed and aren’t trying hard to win, and that (2) this is a bad thing. Both things are true. That there are (IMO) other arguments in favor of a longer schedule that greatly outweigh this concern doesn’t stop it from being legitimate.
I posted the above comments before I saw this response. But some responses.
As you note, those 11 game and 17 game amounts are the proportional equivalents of 1 NFL game or less. The MLB actually has a much more competitive end of the season than the NFL does. Of course, “clinching the playoffs” is a bit of an inexact comparison because they have a smaller percentage of teams in the playoffs.
Your estimate is completely out of left field. As I pointed out in looking back to the end of the 14 game schedule that the divisions were won by a significantly larger number of games than with a 16 game schedule. I suspect that trend would hold in an 18 game schedule. Larger sample sizes would mean less disparity, not more.
But they are asking for less work, that’s fundamentally true. I agree that it’s a negotiating ploy and that they’d be happy with the status quo, the NFLs asking for an 18 game schedule can also be construed as a negotiating ploy. From a hourly work standpoint an 18 game schedule is the exact same amount of time commitment as a 16 game schedule since they’ll reduce the preseason games. Players will spend as much time in practice and the same time on airplanes. Yes they’ll play harder for 60 minutes of game time, but the owners aren’t asking for more time out of their lives. The players are specifically arguing to spend more time away from team facilities doing whatever they please. Owners are in effect arguing for a better quality of work in existing time commitment.
It’s like an auto worker being asked to put out a better car with fewer defects in their 40 hour week. Not asking them to work 12% more hours.
Tough to say for sure. I wouldn’t put a ton of confidence in it. It depends how different the Colts books are from the Packers. I chose them because they are in vaguely similar markets with somewhat similar local populations. If their new profits are similar to the Packers then it’s definitively true. Irsay owns 90% of the team and the stadium he plays in is owned wholly by the state of Indiana. I have no idea who gets the concessions and who gets the naming rights money, but I’m struggling to see where he’d get vastly more money than the Packers who have a similar stadium ownership situation.
Agreed, and the haves and have-not’s situation that the NFL owners are developing plays a role in that problem. I think it’s important to point out that these owners aren’t all Jerry Jones gouging his fan base for $100M+ a year. It’s been said many times, but generally speaking sports team’s owners don’t make huge money on them, they are pet projects. They build paper value of course, but very few of them are big profit generating machines. If they were so profitable why did Dan Rooney have so much trouble buying up enough shares to retain majority ownership in their team. It’s not as if the Steelers are mismanaged.
Well, the MLB and NFL aren’t an apples to apples comparison. Proportionality is the only way to compare them meaningfully.
I see you ignored my point about the results of a 14 games NFL schedule.
You footnote in your earlier post sum it up. More games played, larger sample sizes, are apt to mean that teams win a smaller percentage of their games, not a higher one. That reduction in percentage means that teams in the NFL will probably be more closely grouped and will play more meaningful games, not fewer.
You assumptions aren’t grounded in reality as far as I can tell. You’re just assuming off hand that the Patriots would have been 16-2 this year and the Jets still would have been an 11 win team leading to more meaningless games. In realty the Patriots given more games probably would have had a lower winning percentage.