5 BOROUGH SPORTS

You have got to be kidding me. I don’t even know where to begin. This is not a lockout where there are major negotiations going on. You might think that this lockout is because of the owners wanting to extend the season to 18 games or the fact that retired NFL players receive little funding by the league. These issues, along with many others, have been agreed upon by both sides. The NFL has agreed to keep a 16 game season, along with having a rookie wage scale, creating new safety rules, and establishing a larger fund for retired players. Only one part of the negotiations have been rejected by the players’ union – the owners’ refusal to completely open their books. The owners don’t want the players union to know how much money they’re bringing in. Plus, there’s a disagreement with how the two parties will split $1 billion. The owners want over half, while the players want to split 50-50. With both sides being rich as hell, this should not be an issue.

It’s a travesty how these negotiations couldn’t be settled in proper form. The NFL just had it’s greatest financial season of all-time. Since I don’t know all the details that are involved in these negotiations, I’m not going to take sides. From the media’s perspective, the owners seem like the bad guys. It looks like they don’t want to make their books public because people would be amazed of their teams’ revenue. Of course we all know both sides are greedy, but who knew their greed would lead to this? During a time where this country struggling economically, how can we be happy with the league arguing over billions of dollars? And this is only the beginning. If God forbid there’s no 2011 season, it will take years for America to forgive the NFL. It took America four years to forgive Major League Baseball after their strike in ’94 (it would’ve been longer if it wasn’t for the steroid-fueled home run race in 1998).

So as we begin the 2011 NFL lockout, who knows what will occur in the next six months? What we do know is the NFL will lose a ton of money given this is the time they renew deals with their sponsors and corporate partners. Plus, what’s going to happen with free agents?  No player is allowed to sign with a team until the lockout ends. So let’s all pray for progress in the negotiations to come. No NFL season will be an economic disaster for this country.

This entry was posted on March 12, 2011 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Giants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.