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.

Peanut-gallery pleading from the stands by a rabidly-insane fan? Hardly. This was the proposal Inez Gomez-Mont of TV Azteca shouted in Brady’s direction, white gown and all, during the 2007 Super Bowl media day–or as it is so cavalierly labelled.

Yes, she was a credentialed member of the media, one of a few thousand that are allowed access to this annual three-ring circus. The swirl of global media that flocks to the spectacle each February should be covered by a tent upon arrival. The media director for the event should be dressed as the ringleader, whip and all, and the PR slaps accessorized with red clown noses. Credentialed woman in a wedding dress? (Cue the horse-whip sound effect).

Reportedly, there are 5,000 credentials issued this Super Bowl, ranging from 26 different countries. “Zu viel,” “trop,” “demasiado,” or simply “too much,” in the language most NFL fans speak. Maybe it’s the small beach-town kid in me, but I hate tourists, especially ones that get in the way of ruining one of your biggest events of the year (see also, 4th of July).

What truly baffles the mind however, is how the week leading up to the Super Bowl and the week leading up to the conference championship games are complete polar opposites in not only the department of scrutiny, but more so, the direction of it. The week prior to the conference championships is AP English class, nothing but a hardcore study of the X’s and O’s, almost to a fault.  The week prior to the Super Bowl is a lunch break, where the only scrutiny is about who said what about who, while the campus outcasts partake in a tree-climbing or backpack-swinging exhibition for entertainment of the picnic. How the game with more on the line became less of a pinnacle and more of an expo is beyond coherence.

It seems even the commissioner of the league has caught the virus and is joining the party. Roger Goddell announced this week that when he was contemplating the punishment of Ben Roethlisberger before the season (Ben was accused of sexual assault at a Georgia nigh-club by a 19-year old–the charges were later dropped) he polled two dozen random players and to quote Goddell, “not one of them had one positive thing to say about him.”

Okay, boss. Let me pull the knife out that you, with perfectly executed timing, stuck in my back while I’m in the elevator on the way to my biggest presentation of the year. Is this the buttoned-up NFL or an MTV reality show? Why this week brings out the inner TMZ of everyone, even the commissioner of the league, defies explanation. The irresponsibility displayed by the supposed most responsible and leading figure of the league borders on the deplorable.

That’s not the only story this week that has been erratically sensationalized. Ambulance-chasing scoop-fiends used the tweets of both IR riddled Green Bay Packer middle linebacker Nick Barnett and tight end Jermichael Finley to drum up a controversy about the Green Bay Super Bowl team picture. Apparently Barnett and Finley were disappointed about not being featured in the picture. If you were to buy into the media hoopla, you would be lead to believe that the two gave an ultimatum to be included in the photo, or not show for OTA’s in the spring. The way the hacks of the media construed it, you would think fixing the misunderstanding would have rivaled brain surgery. It’s a stupid picture!

When the bandwagon of misguided hype passes and Mason Crosby finally kicks off to Antonio Brown, the insignificant fodder that amounted prior to the game, that didn’t regard the game itself – rather just the “idea” of the game, will disappear. The Italian reporter that doesn’t know if the football is filled with air or feathers will be in a press box, his back to the action on the field, talking on his blackberry. The inquiry about opinions of movie stars recently converting to Islam are gone and the inner-question becomes, “how are we going to convert on third down against the zone-blitz?”

There will only be the game. The white-hat’s whistle will start the play clock and the sticks will measure ten. Rogers will be throwing dimes on time, not answering 20 questions about his new movie-star girlfriend. Polamalu will be playing like his hair is on fire and with the fever-pitch of the Tasmanian devil, not being asked his opinion on hair products. Condition or not to condition?

When the final whistle sounds, we will realize that what we saw was a football game. It will be a great football game, maybe even an epic bout, but nothing outside of that. A classic clash of two of the league’s all-time greatest franchises, but nothing outside of that. What we will realize we didn’t see, was a game that was affected by knowing where Hines Ward was on Tuesday night until 11:30pm or whether or not B.J. Raji thinks he is an inspiration to fat people everywhere.

Real journalists will be pounding away at their keyboards, trying to describe what they just saw for their die-hard football readers. The imports posing as journalists will be pounding away at the cab driver to get them to the airport as quickly as possible.

The point? The glitz and the glamour isn’t what is on trial here, Mr. reporter who was sent over the Pacific by TV Japan to cover “the game.”  We know why our game is “Super, #1,” and it has nothing to do with Chris Kemoeatu reminding you of a popular sumo cartoon from back home. You are only getting in the way of the real stories.

When the game is over, ‘go back to Fresno.’