The NBA and NHL playoffs are in full swing and the baseball season is just beginning, but for some reason, people just can’t seem to forget about football. That may partly be because of the draft, but it is mainly due to the large amount of uncertainty surrounding the sport. In case anyone doesn’t know, the league is currently at a standstill due to labor trouble. But let’s be honest; once again, it comes down to the money in pro sports.
Everyone is wondering why the two sides, the NFL Players Association and the NFL, don’t just come together and agree to a deal that would be beneficial for both sides. Well, as we all know, human beings are very selfish and do not let things go that easily.
The owners are in a tough position right now. They are trying to sound like the good guys, all while being hypocritical and fighting to the death to improve their already glamorous lives. Last issue was about how massive amounts of money could be obtained and used the right way. This time, I see a case of one side being content with what they have (which is a lot) and the other side still wanting more. This might be the only time that I side with a union, but I hope the players win this battle. Maybe it could be my desire for football that is blurring my sense of right and wrong, but I’m on the players’ side.
There are several sticking points that are keeping this deal from getting done. The first one is the issue of whether the league should change to an 18 game regular season from the current 16 game season. They propose doing away with two preseason games so that they can fit in an extra two games to the season that actually matter. The players do not want this because the regular football season is already tough enough. It would be hard on the players, to say the least, to add two more real games to an already physically rigorous schedule.
The NFL claims to have solved that problem by decreasing the amount of preseason games played, so the season isn’t longer at all. That would make sense if players actually tried in the preseason. The preseason is basically warm-up for the regular season, just like a sprinter might jog and stretch before running the 400 meter dash. Using that analogy, the NFL is basically proposing less warm up time for runners while increasing the distance to 500 meters. They claim to have player safety as their first priority, but are really doing the players a disservice in the long run.
Another major gray area in the discussions for a new labor deal is the proposal of a rookie wage scale. Everything gets more expensive throughout the years, and NFL rookies are no exception. When a player coming out of college gets drafted by a team, that team has exclusive rights to negotiate a contract with him. The number one pick always gets the most amount of money, and over the last several years, the amount of money that rookies are getting paid has skyrocketed. Just last year, the hometown St. Louis Rams took Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford with the number one overall pick in the draft. They signed him to a contract that guaranteed him fifty million dollars without taking a snap in the NFL first.
This is why the NFL has proposed a rookie wage scale, which would set a limit on how much rookies could make in their first contract coming out of college. Obviously, the NFLPA wants players to make as much money as they can, so they would rather not have this. Personally, I believe that if someone is willing to pay that much for a rookie, there is no problem with it. If the market demands that price, then that’s how much he should be paid. But I can certainly see where the NFL is coming from, and if this is in the new deal, then I would be fine with it. Some of the contracts are pretty ridiculous.
One last area of debate, and possibly the most important, between the two sides is, of course, the money. It always comes back to money, doesn’t it? The revenue that the league takes in is being divided about 50-50 right now between the players and the owners under the last collective bargaining agreement. The league/owners think that it is too much of their money going to the players. They say it should be about 60-40, or something around there, in favor of them. The players, however, do not want any more of what they already get being taken away. They are fine with the last agreement. The owners are the ones clamoring for more money, and, ultimately, the ones that should be blamed.
