Stalemate

 

Just when you thought you could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Right when we all let out a deep sigh of relief. We woke up and realized, nothing had changed, and are left wondering what is really going on?

Thursday night around 7:30 it was breaking news, Friday morning around 7:30 it was back to the same old routine for the past 4 months. Breaking News: The NFL is still locked out!

Here is what we do know: The owners voted 31-0 (the Raiders were the only ones to abstain from voting, and then everyone remembered that Al Davis owns the team and wasn’t really surprised) in favor of a 10-year collective bargaining agreement. Included in this new CBA is new revenue sharing models, a new salary cap and salary floor to help make the playing field even, a rookie pay-scale, and new rules on veterans eligible for free agency. Seems great, let’s get this signed and the players back on the field! Wrong, the players needed to have a majority vote in favor of the CBA and then reinstate the dissolved players’ union in order for this to take effect, and well last night; the players were not seeing eye to eye with the owners.

Here is where the media is leading us astray. This is all nonsense! The real story is the owners got together and voted on this before the players so that the players now look like the bad guys. When in reality in this deal, the players are getting a smaller percentage of the revenue (46-48%) and are being forced to explain why they did not vote. ESPN’s Chris Mortensonreported that many unnamed players association representatives are not happy with the new agreement, while some owners felt like there was an agreement on both sides about the deal.

Commissioner Roger Goodell said in his press conference this is about getting football back, that is what everyone wants. Well excuse me Mr. Commish, but clearly that is not the case. If it were the case, then there wouldn’t be a “one side votes then the other side votes” atmosphere. If everyone was thinking about the best interests of football, and the people who help put money in the owners’ and players’ pockets, the fans, then there wouldn’t be the bickering, and banter from the two sides. If they really wanted football back a deal would have been done four months ago when the last CBA expired. These two sides don’t care if football is back; they just want to guarantee they are getting more of the pie.

One of my favorite quotes came from Carolina Panthers ownerJerry Richardson who said, “We believe we had a handshake agreement with the players.” This is almost laughable. It is certainly hard to shake hands from over 800 miles away. The owners are in Atlanta meeting while the players are in Washington DC. How can you have a handshake agreement if the two sides aren’t even meeting in the same place? You can’t shake hands on a conference call. To say there is a handshake agreement when you haven’t shook a hand is a bold faced lie Mr. Richardson.

What the two sides still cannot agree on is how to split up the $4 Billion in TV revenue insurance that the owners were withholding from the players. That must be rough; I can’t imagine how hard it could be to split up 4 billion dollars. Is this a joke? This is where all of the fans get fed up, 4 billion dollars? Really? And they are arguing over who gets what percentage. It is almost embarrassing, actually. You could give every citizen in America a million dollars and you would still have over three-and-a-half billion dollars left. If they cannot figure out what to do with 4 billion dollars, here is a novel idea: how about we give half of it to charities across the United States, and give the other half to America’s schools so that kids no longer have to pay to play high school sports, or worry about their sports getting cut because of lack of funding. This is the part of it all that I cannot forgive; these two sides are fighting and complaining over how to split 4 billion dollars, while we are in the midst of an economic recession. I feel no sympathy towards either side at this point.

The “story” that the media has been hand feeding us is an absolute joke. I wish the media would just quit talking about it. There is no NFL right now, until there is a signed agreement, just don’t talk about it. Pretend like it’s not there and then maybe they (the owners and players) will get the point and really try to figure this out. If they really wanted to get something done, they would get together in the same room, and not come out until the deal is done. The problem is these guys do not really care about football; it is just a bunch of rich people arguing over how to get richer.

I have tried to stay away from talking about the NFL lockout because there is no point to talking about it if there is no season, but this was the last straw. The fact that these two sides would throw their fans under the bus even when the NFL was at the pinnacle of its popularity is appalling. The Commissioner should have made both sides come together in his office like a principal and forced them to figure out a deal, instead he is running around like a puppet trying to tell us that everyone wants football back, when the reality is, we are no further along than four months ago when this thing all started.