What If Wednesday: What if the NFL Owners Actually Locked the Players Out?

The media wants you to believe that the owners of the biggest and most lucrative sports league in the United States will actually lock out their household-name cash cows. They are also leading you to believe that these owners won’t ultimately settle in a situation that they already held the advantage in before there was even any discussion of a lock out. These are the same owners who currently pay their players significantly less relative to other leagues despite the NFL’s domination over those leagues in viewership and revenue. The way the “possibility” of a lockout has been glorified by news outlets is purely for the angle of dramatic hook.  It is simply a way to gain eyes and ears.

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.