People also seem to confuse these lockouts with what they mistakenly are most related to by the average fan – a strike.  Pump your brakes.  A strike is when the players gather in mutiny.  A lockout is when the owner has had enough.  Know the distinction.  They are absolute polar opposites.

Collective bargaining agreements are the middle ground between unions and owners.  When they expire, the status quo is lost and the current state of play needs to be reassessed.  The current popular belief of the fans, unfortunately for the players, sides with the owners.  You poll the average fan and they will, without question, respond with the stance that yes, in fact, players as a whole in professional sport are being paid way too much.

The NFL is much closer to a resolution than the NBA, not only because they have had the opportunity to deliberate in mediation much longer than their hardwood counterpart has, but also because of the fact that they are asking for much less.  In the previous CBA, NFL players weren’t even offered guaranteed contracts.

What that means?  Well, in layman’s terms – if you were a dispensable NFL player and you happened to get devastatingly injured in the midst of navigating the most injury-ridden sport in the world, you were guaranteed no monetary relief from that point forward after you were injured, and more times than not, your contract would have then become null and void.  You were then left to fend for yourself out on the street, jobless and without a marketable skill even close to the level of what you most recently were able to dispense.

This travesty within the NFL system is the very basis of what the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) is fighting for against the owners, for the sake of its players and for the sake of their union.  Another vital arguing point is how much of a bigger piece of the pie the owners want from the players.  In the previous CBA, the players were allotted over 50% of all revenue.  The players are now struggling to hold onto only 48% of the cake.

The owners contend that all is well within the realm of the current condition as far as guaranteed contracts are concerned, and if that weren’t enough, they also want a little bit more from the players – for instance, an 18-game season.  The current debating positions within the NFL’s potential new CBA forum are as follows:

-A rookie wage scale will be included but is still being ‘tweaked’.
-The 18-game season will be designated only as a ‘negotiable item’ with the players and is not mandated.
-A new 16-game Thursday night schedule will start in 2012 as a source for new revenue.
-Significantly increased pension funding and improved health care for retired players.
-A built in mechanism that requires teams to spend close to 100% the salary cap.
-Four-years needed for unrestricted free agency (franchise tag would remain).

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

The state of the NBA is in much more of a dire and completely ugly condition.  The basic fact lies within the concept that, not just superstars, but even the most average of players are making incredibly too much in relation to the state of the market.  For instance, a backup-center, or 7th man at best, Nick Collison of the Oklahoma City Thunder, was due to make $13 million next season. Read that again.  Ridiculous and utterly inexplicable, right?  The owners of NBA teams have much more of a leg to stand on than do the owners of NFL franchises.

The simple premise of the NBA’s lockout situation is that there is also has a major issue with the dividing of overall league revenue. But unlike with the NFL’s players and owners, who most experts project will resolve their differences before the start of the upcoming season, the NBA could face a much longer and more painful work stoppage. The two sides remain deeply divided over what percentage of revenue the players should receive, whether teams should have a hard cap on payrolls, which would allow for more parody within the league’s competition, and also how owners should share their money percentage-wise.

“We may not see movement until it gets close to the end of the year,” said Marc Ganis, president and founder of the Chicago-based sports consulting firm SportsCorp. “Players have been so well paid for so long, they can hold out for longer than most of the other sports. NBA players don’t have the same [financial] issues as NFL players, who are very eager to get back on the field.”

“This one is likely to be a long lockout. It could be half a season; it potentially could be a whole season.”

Players such as Kobe Bryant are promoting a form of barnstorming in a relaying of propaganda amongst the players. The players are rallying around the idea that going overseas to play next season could be just as beneficial as an NBA season to a player, both in terms of skill-development as well as wallet-stretching. America isn’t the only place where large amounts of dispensable cash lies to compensate elite entertainment ability.  If the players don’t get anywhere with the owners before the next season is set to begin in October, this idea is undoubtedly more than a realistic premise.

Watch out for Kobe taking over China, Dirk relocating to Germany, Pau coming home to Spain, or “The Heatles” trying their defeated hand at invading either Greece or Turkey. The NBA could potentially fall on its own sword, as Commissioner David Stern has worked tirelessly over the past decade-plus to expand the game globally. That same global expansion campaign could very well be what ultimately gives the players some hand over the owners and prevents a 2011-2012 season.  Ironic?

We as Americans need to realize that we are now, in this day in age, not the only NBA fans on this spinning globe.  This serves as a nice little wake-up call for not only us as fans, but NBA ownership as well – an alarm clock that yes, these players are paid handsomely, but in a worldly sense, almost rightfully so in terms of the new global market.  Our domestic market, unfortunately today, pales in comparison to the rest of the major nations around the world.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

All of this NFL and NBA complication being considered, the consensus of the menial will be a believed transparency of a plain and simple case of ‘billionares fighting millionares.’  To most unseasoned, this is nothing more than a mirage of an unfathomable conundrum that could very easily be solved, right?  This unfortunately is not the case.

Instead, it needs to be realized that these types of dilemmas are precisely what our capitalistic system ultimately creates.  Hopefully in the end, a sense of forthright judgment can slam these cans of worms back in their tin, sealed for years and years to come with a new CBA for both leagues, that are a realistic compromise for both sides of the table. And hopefully for the sake of us fans, two forms of debatable wrongs can eventually make a right.

It pains me to say it, but I wouldn’t hold out for that to happen any time soon.  When big money business slams up against a struggling marketplace, its going to take more than a little while for that kind of car wreck to be pieced back together.

Then again, I wouldn’t put your jerseys in storage just yet.  Keep them hanging on the rack.  We’ll be back.

How the owners contend for a redistribution of a bigger piece of the pie is baffling. NFL players incur the most physical risk of any professional athlete. They get paid less and have less contractual guarantees than any other athletes in the same realm of major professional sports.

The reality of the situation is clear. There is no way the league and its owners would trade generating a few less million a year for the possibility of making zero or even losing money. There is no way, in the year 2011, when the league is at it’s all-time peak, that they will let Shane Falco run out onto the field instead of Peyton Manning, and deflate the biggest revenue-generating balloon in American sports history.

The pure and evident fact of the matter is – this distant possibility will simply not happen. The men involved are too intelligent and there is entirely too much on the line for this lock out to come to fruition. In the end, either side will both get some of what they wanted, as well as not all that they wanted, which of course is the trademark of a good compromise.

But what if, by some defiance of incredible odds, it were actually to happen? How would it happen?

If NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell keeps contradicting himself on major points of emphasis, it could happen.  He and the owners are pushing the demand for adding two regular season games.  At the same time, they want to pay the players less, and also claim they want to make “player safety” a point of emphasis.  Holding steadfast on the stance of both adding games, and at the same time supposedly wanting to show “concern” for player saftey is absolutely comical.  Go become a politican with that laughable double-speak.

If the NFL Players Association Executive Director, DeMaurice Smith, doesn’t do his research of how Gene Upshaw used to efficiently do his job in the very same chair, it could happen.  Smith is a Washington D.C. lawyer who was never a player in the league.  His predecessor Upshaw was.  This makes one question if Smith can even relate to the plight of the players.  It also makes one question if he could have motivations other than simply getting the job done for his client.  We all know the alternate motivations that exist with attorneys, and the players better hope for their sake that hype, ego and the thrill of being publicised doesn’t blur the goal.

So what if Falco decides to give up chipping plankton off the bottom of boats and get back to taking snaps from under center for fee? What if Herschel Walker decides to take his recently publicized vitality from the octagon back to the backfield? The hardcore fans would watch ……. for about two weeks. The casual fans would watch ……….. golf, the Nascar race, 60 Minutes and Two and a Half Men.

The NFL would lose an inordinate amount of money, and not just the amount lost by the absence of the real 2011 season, but the exponential amount lost by the number of fans that would turn their collective backs for good.

As a point of precedence, refer to the Major League Baseball strike in 1994. There were a great number of fans that were lost and never have returned. They swore and stuck by the promise to not submit another dollar to Major League Baseball, and the league still lacks that faction of fans to this day, 17 years later. Does the NFL really want this to happen to them?

I can attest to this first hand and proof posative. I remember old man Bill that worked the cash register at the local liquor store in his waning years. As a youth, we discussed shorthand baseball topics like a grandfather and his grandson would. After 1994, he swore the league off due to the selfishness of the whole situation – billionaires bickering with millionaires. God rest his soul, he took this resentment to the grave.

Plain and simple, the risk the owners are incurring is not worth the reward. The owners locking out the players is the equivalent of being under a spell of swagger, and making yourself susceptible to a permanently-damaging black eye when you have had your opponent on the mat for the majority of the fight. It doesn’t make feasible sense to portray your only motivation in this dispute as greedy capitalism, while the fans of your teams are struggling to put bread on the table day-to-day in this current economic climate.

If it were to happen, it would in fact be much worse than the fan fallout attributable to the 1994 strike in Major League Baseball. You think fans were rubbed the wrong way by the greed of millionaire players then? Imagine the damage done in today’s world if the fans were to be slighted by billionaire owners. If evil were to prevail, we would see an unprecedented divorce by the fans from a professional sports league, one of which the monster that is the NFL might never fully recover from.

However, in digression, and after all the scenarios have been reasoned, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves in the hollows of this anemically-potential, dark nightmare. Fans should rejoice, because come September, Falco will still be scraping barnacles off the toys of billionaires, not tossing touchdowns for them.