I spend sleepless nights just thinking about it.
The National Football League season was tentatively scheduled to start on a Thursday September night at Lambeau Field in a sea of green and yellow clad cheese-heads basking in their recent Super Bowl glory. That was before the collective bargaining agreement between the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) and the owners ended. That was before the greed. That was before…the lockout (sigh…).
So what happens now? What if the two sides can’t figure out a way to equally disperse the annual $9 billion in revenue that during the last labor agreement was slightly in favor of the players? How do the players and owners not realize the negative impact that the lockout could have not only on the game of football, but to the fans that support it?
People love NFL football and everything about NFL football. The NFL’s average attendance per game during the 2010-2011 season, according to NFL.com, was 68,240. That’s the most of any professional sport not only in the United States, but in the world.
Look I get it, the price of a new stadium is astronomical and there’s a lot to pay for if you’re an NFL owner, but with the revenue that ticket prices, television rights and advertising accumulate, you should be able to survive not buying another yacht or sports car for a little while.
As for the players, shouldn’t the most important thing that you should try to protect be the fans and people that support you? The NFLPA recently contacted top NFL Draft prospects and attempted to persuade them to not attend the draft, one of the most exciting events of the year for a fan, to boycott the owners. Additionally, Adrian Peterson, whether taken out of context or not, recently compared the owners to slave owners and the players to slaves.
That’s exactly what everyday hard-working middle class football fan want to hear, a guy that makes millions of dollars a year playing the game he loves complaining that he’s being treated like a slave when there are people out there barely able to make ends meet in this economy. Look, fans tend to side with the players on disputes such as these, but when players make comments like that, the casual fan might say
“to hell with all these bickering millionaires”, and move on.
For the sake of the sport, the NFL lockout can’t go into next season. It took a magical run at Roger Maris’ single season homerun record between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1997 for baseball to recover from its work stoppage in 1994, and the NHL still hasn’t recovered from its 2004-05 lockout.
Sure, we can try to throw ourselves into college football and the last couple of months of the baseball season, but nothing really compares to the excitement of NFL Sunday. It’s about more than just the game itself. It’s about the pools at work, the trash talk and how this is the year you win the fantasy football championship.
The show must go on.
Otherwise, what will I do with my Sundays?
Shawn Ferris can be reached at sferris22@gmail.com.