The NFL owners and players cancelled their negotiations on a new CBA today, and with a March 3rd expiration of the current CBA looming large, fans are obviously starting to feel a little pessimistic. If we get to March 3rd without a new CBA it’s seems likely that, in the words of Peter King, “football games will be lost”.
I find the whole situation to be pretty disturbing so I’ve avoided commenting on it. Of course negotiations of this nature, when so much money is involved, are always difficult. These entities are on a level of trying to make billions into trillions while most of us are just worrying about thousands.
Frankly what bothers me the most has been the rhetoric coming from the NFL and owners. Orwellian terms like “Enhanced season”. Ironically for me it’s real propaganda that has been coming out of Goodell’s NFL for the past year.
Last summer, when fans would logically ask why negotiations hadn’t already started we were told that they needed the hard deadline of March 3rd to make things get done. Well here we are three weeks from that deadline, and there’s no more progress today than we had last summer. We’ve known for over a year where the two sides stand on the issues.
How do you push for 18 games and still say you’re concerned about the players health? How can you continue to say fans are for the “enhanced season” when there’s clearly a great majority of knowledgeable fans that I see every day who are dead against it? I have yet to see a fan argue for an 18 game season. I really wish the NFL would stop speaking for the fans and let the fans speak for themselves.
I believe the fans are clearly on the players side. At least the fans that are paying attention. Fans who aren’t paying attention see two more opportunities to get drunk and watch football and say “hells yeah”.
The real issue isn’t about the rich owners versus the rich players like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. The real issue is about the average NFL player whose career lasts just a few seasons. It’s about the people who put their well-being in jeopardy every Sunday and will never have a million dollar contract. It’s about being responsible and taking care of the people who put life and limb at risk for our entertainment. That should be priority number one!
What has been apparent for the last couple years since Roger Goodell took over is that his goal as commissioner is to take the NFL to another level. He made the draft a primetime event, they’re want to make a game in London a yearly event. They want to take the NFL brand worldwide, and now it seems like they don’t care if it’s at the expense of the players or the fans.
You can agree or disagree with that philosophy. This is American capitalism, and they have the right to grow their business however they see fit. But such a philosophy is not without risk.
You’re betting that fans will still want to attend regular season football games in mid-January. You’re betting that the rest of the world has the same taste for violent sport that Americans have. You’re betting that the teams that play for the Super Bowl in mid-to-late February won’t just be the teams that won the battle of attrition.
In the age of HD, and a coming age of 3-D television, and the current difficult economic times that are a reality for many of the fans, I think the NFL is about to leave a lot of us behind.
Given the choice of watching a meaningless regular season game on January 20th with weather in the teens, at a cost of over $100 per ticket, $50 for parking and whatever else you have to pay for beer, or watching the game in HD or even 3D, from the comfort of my own couch, with my car freely parked in my driveway and a store bough twelve pack for $10, well… the choice is pretty clear.
We can only hope that negotiations resume quickly, because a lockout is not in anyone’s interest. But the old adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” remains true and the NFL seems hell bent on fixing what isn’t broken.
The only thing that truly appears broken to me is how the NFL treats their players and fans, on whose backs the NFL dynasty was built.