With the news that Labor and Managment have extended their impass for another week, I thought it best to reprint my article for JoeBucsFan.com in the Optimist column.
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Thank goodness I’ve been busy last three weeks working day and night on the NEW Bucstop.com, because there really isn’t too much in the news these days, that is NOT regarding the NFL that isn’t strike related; be it something a player said, or a piece of news about an Owner said this.
To be honest, its kind of hard for an Optimist like myself to be optimistic, especially having lived through 1982 and 1987.
’82 was hard, there was just nothing going on for weeks at a time, but truth be told the ’87 strike wasn’t much better. Oh sure we had something to watch at least, but was it really worth watching?
It makes it a lot easier if you can take a side, but which one do you choose? Do you side with the millionares? Or the Billionares?
The owners take one Billion dollars out of the pie before its divided up 60% for the Players and 40% for the Owners. That sounds pretty fair, but now if the owners want to take Another Billion dollars out before they divide up the pie, the 4.8 Billion dollars that would go to the players would come out to 48.5% of the whole pie. Not exactly half.
But who says an owner of a business has to give out half of his business? There is no doubt the players are the driving force of the NFL. We don’t go to the stadium, or tune in to TV to watch Jerry Jones or other owners. That’s not to say that the players are the end-all/Be-all either; that job belongs to us.
But so far, all we are hearing is posturing. The owners cannot take TV money out early, so the new stadium owners are going to hurt early. Players can decertify the union, making them no longer union members, but just plain old people.
If there is no union, they don’t work for the NFL anymore. They work for their teams, which means you now have 32 bosses, with 32 sets of rules, and that is more likely to land the NFL in some kind of trouble with the age-old exemption from anti-trust.
None of that is new of course, its same old-same old-Same Old to be sure, none of that info changes a single bit from the last 30 years.
The only thing really new is the current issue like the 18 game schedule, rookie salary cap, and health care for players after they retire.
The health care is something that both sides should find a way to get done; Players only keep their health insurance for 5 years after they retire. They still feel find during that period. Once a player gets 15 years past their playing days, well that is another story. The cost of this would be so small, it could probably be solved with the amount of money one rookie minimum salary would eat up in a season.
Then you have the Hypocrisy of the 18 game schedule. Listen, I don’t feel bad football players have to work on Thanksgiving, Christmas, ect. They are getting paid millions of dollars to entertain us. Roger Goodell tells us we the fans want an 18 game schedule. Well, that’s not really the truth. We just are tired of the 4 preseason games that cost the same as a regular game. If your going to add 2 more games to the schedule, you need to make sure your paying these players for the games, and make sure your taking care of them for the damage an extra two games a year will do.
Last but not least, everyone, Veteran player, Owner, fan, wants to stop seeing an unproven college kid from strapping a team for the next several years of salary cap room because of what he did his Senior year or more. Over the last couple years, you’ve noticed that teams do not even think about trading away their no.1 pick, because no one is able to do it! A lot of teams could use more than just one player, and throughout history would do just that. But not now; because now a No.1 draft pick is going to cost a team about 50 million dollars, and that goes against your cap.
But if your going to get rid of that messed up system, and save yourself a lot of dough, you cant just take that entire savings and put it back in your pocket! Some of that has to go towards players who actually DID deserve it via performance.
It’s a touchy subject, where there is so little black and white. Whose side do we take? Well how about football’s side. Please figure it out guys, no matter if its 16 games or 18, Free hip replacements or free Cold tablets. Our 3-13 football team turned into a 10-6 excitement capable of offensive fireworks, and we want to see them grow some more in August and September.
Make sure we get ALL 16 this time ok!
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