Happy Sunday, Lunatics. Even though there is no NFL Football on, Sunday remains a day of worship for me.
As most of us know, the owners and the players have been at a negotiating impasse for some time now. For the last three days, both sides have met with a mediator in an attempt to move the talks out of a standstill. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but when I hear the term "mediation" all I can think about is the opening scene of Wedding Crashers. Instead of haggling over frequent flier miles though, the Owners and the Players' Association are fighting over the way revenue is distributed in the NFL. There are other factors to be sure, such as a rookie wage scale and an 18 game season, but the heart of the issue always comes back to money.
The current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) creates what is essentially a 60/40 split between Players and Owners. The NFL took in $7.8 billion in revenue last year, by far the highest of any of the four major sports. In fact, the next highest was Major League Baseball and its revenue trailed the NFL's by over $1 billion. This means the players collectively received a revenue share of $4.68 billion, while the owners were stuck with only $3.12 billion. Now, if the Players were to concede 10% of their share and level the playing field to a 50/50 split, the owners pick up $780 million or nearly $25 million per team. The Owners want some other concessions to go along with that, such as the aforementioned 18 game schedule and a rookie wage scale, but at the end of the day they'd take a 50/50 revenue split as fast as I'd take a double BJ from Scarlett Johansson and Brooklyn Decker. (LINKS NOT SAFE FOR WORK, and does anyone else suddenly crave milk...?)
Now 25 million dollars is not an inconsequential sum of money. That's almost 1/3 of the Tampa Bay Bucs' current player salaries. However, just two teams failed to turn a profit in 2009 (the 2010 numbers aren't available yet): the Miami Dolphins and the Detroit Lions. Considering the fact that the small market 1-15 St. Louis Rams somehow turned a profit that year, I'm speechless as to how this is possible. (Though I assure you, the Dolphins sucked balls at 7-9 while Detroit gobbled down an extra helping of epic donkey cock at 2-14. Ironically, this was an improvement over their famed 2008 0-16 team which is so pathetic I can't even bring myself to make fun of them). The point being that a team that counts Mark Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Jimmy Buffett and Fergie as minority owners has stumbled upon a surefire way to lose money. The Lions took the only possible surer path to unprofitability when they hired Matt Millen to be their GM for seven years. A team spokesman recently said that plan B during 2008 was to just pay someone to go door-to-door slugging each season ticket holder in the cock with a busted parking meter. At least then the team would have been creating jobs in Detroit, no small feat considering Detroit has less money and more car fires per capita than Mogadishu and Cairo combined. So what does this information tell us? That as an NFL franchise, you almost have to be trying to not make money...to not make money. And in case this wasn't enough, how much did these teams lose? $7.7 million and $2.9 million for the Dolphins and Lions, respectively. Just half of a single $25 million share turns both of these teams into profitable franchises. The Lions are already well on their way, and in fact I would not be surprised to see them return to profitability this season. If they could only keep Matthew "I've fallen and I can't get up" Stafford healthy they might even be a playoff team.
The players are who the fans show up to see, not the owners. The Owners agreed to a 60/40 revenue split in the last CBA because they believed it would be a fair way to distribute the avalanche of cash that pours into the NFL's coffers each year. Now they don't like the bargain they struck and are considering a lockout to stuff their already overfilled pockets with more cash. Are there legitimate concerns that need to be addressed in the new CBA? Absolutely. A rookie salary scale or slotting system is a MUST (and there will be a full post on such a system coming soon) and I can see why some would argue for a shorter preseason followed by an extended regular season as well. But until I see hard evidence to indicate that a large number of NFL teams are going to become unprofitable, as was the case with the 2004 NHL lockout, the current situation will continue to remind me of this one.
Also, I lied about the '08 Lions- I can absolutely make fun of them. Watching that team play football was like handing a monkey a screwdriver and watching it try to build a car. You always knew it wasn't going to end well, but not even you foresaw the monkey trying to use the screwdriver as a catapult for its own poo and in the process accidentally bleed to death from its asshole. I'm willing to bet that any Lions fan would tell you they would rather have watched that than another Jon Kitna interception-fest.
Until next time, Lunatics.
No comments:
Post a Comment