An Independent Patriots Blog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPslaXwfHqU
Logan Mankins presented by Bill Belichick, #39 in the NFL Top 100
Well this certainly won’t make anyone feel any better about potentially losing Mankins. I’m just ready for his situation to be resolved. We’re going on two years of Mad Mankins now. Someone just give him his money, preferably the Patriots, and if not, an NFC West team.
https://www.patspropaganda.com/logan-mankins-presented-by-bill-belichick-39-in/
As you might’ve noticed I’ve yet to post anything on the latest news of Judge Nelson’s ruling that technically killed the lockout yesterday. I’m not really sure why any fans were rejoicing at the ruling, because this thing is still dragging well into summer, folks. I’m trying to distract myself with the draft, but I’ve been doing that for three months and the act is wearing thin.
Now you’ve got the NFL appealing, and asking for a stay to maintain some sense of order before everything descends even further into chaos like they started to this morning. You had players showing up at work, looking for workout bonuses, and being asked to leave. This whole thing is still a nightmare, and I’m skeptical that we’re any closer to a resolution today than we were before the lockout was “enjoined”.
The players meanwhile appear to be asking Judge Nelson to force the NFL to start the league year. Under what rules? No one is quite sure, but possibly just under the old CBA.
And of course the volleys back and forth keep on coming. In keeping with the snarky, finger-pointing tone this whole negotiation has had, we have DeMaurice Smith saying it’s the NFL’s fault that chaos is now ensuing.
Then you have Commissioner Goodell’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal which, in a nutshell, says that the players and their lawyers want the NFL to go to a completely free market system. No more draft. No more Franchise Tags. When a players contract expires he’s a free agent. No salary cap. Cats and Dogs living together. Total anarchy.
It’s really only one of the extreme lawyers on the players side who once made a comment that the picture Goodell painted is how he thinks it should be, not the entire FKA-NFLPA pushing for this completely new scenario, but you get the point.
All this rhetoric from both sides needs to end. They are just desperate attempts to win the fans and public opinion to their side. What they don’t realize is that they’re not winning anyone over, they’re just turning everyone away from football. The evidence is already there, people are less interested in the draft this year. Hits on NFL.com are down.
People get enough of this kind of thing from politics, especially in today’s climate in Washington. Sports are supposed to be an escape from petty arguments and the inability to compromise, not an extension of them. Damage has already been done to the sport, and the longer this drags on the NFL will no longer have to worry about “growing” the sport, they’ll just have to worry about getting it back to where it was before this whole debacle.
The NFL was preparing for a lockout for the last three years, going to specific measures to make sure that the owners would be able to shut their doors and still keep on chugging. It completely backfired for them.
They thought the deal they forced their TV partners into that pay them regardless of a lockout would hold up. It didn’t. They thought the dissolution of the NFLPA would be ruled null and void by a court. It wasn’t.
Let’s remember the wheels of this whole debacle began in 2006 when the players got a better cut of the big pie than the owners liked. Now everything the NFL has done has been to get part of that cut back, under the guise of continuing to grow the game.
I just like to watch football on Sundays. I like team building in the off-season. I don’t want my favorite form of entertainment to descend into a barely recognizable professional sport where only the teams with the most money win. Nor do I want to see a league where the players who put their life and limb on the line are not properly taken care of during and after their careers.
There are elements to both side’s arguments that the fans definitely side with so there has to be middle ground. There has to be a way to put aside all the vitriol that has built up and start from scratch to find a deal that both sides can live with.
Unfortunately given everything we’ve seen, from the petty shots via twitter to partisan and inflammatory press releases it doesn’t look like anything will get done until the sides are forced to talk again, or games begin getting cancelled.
Pretty shocking how hard it is to divide up $9 billion huh?
Lockout or no lockout the sides need to reconvene and get down to negotiating a new CBA. This is the one and only end game that will be satisfying to the NFL, the players, and the fans. Otherwise the great heyday of the NFL has passed us by.
Must read alert!!! I know I give Simmons a hard time because he has to pretend like he knows as much about football as he does about basketball, but this article is an outstanding read. If you want have the NFL CBA negotiations boiled down into the simplest form, this is the place.
It’s hard to read this and not find yourself even more on the side of the players. The practices of the NFL and the owners are sadly much like many businesses are run today. Without any concern for the people, the environment, or anything else that is not the bottom line.
The ironic part is that it will be this greed that eventually knocks the NFL off it’s lofty pedestal. It might not be this time with the CBA, but whenever you have an organization that has been so committed to “growth” as Roger Goodell’s NFL has been it will inevitably hit a ceiling at some point. Especially when this growth is being manufactured at the expense of the players and fans who made it what it was.
NFL/NFLPA agree to extend the current CBA 24 more hours… so they can work on extending it ever further. Whole lotta extending going on…
Please mean that there is some hope…
https://www.patspropaganda.com/nflnflpa-agree-to-extend-the-current-cba-24-more/
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.