There's a lot of ways for the NFL to come up with this money, and I wouldn't be surprised if trying to reduce the cap isn't one of those ideas. In the current agreement, there's a revenue sharing split between the owners and players. Whatever that percentage is, it would be fair to me to have it apply to who pays the lawsuit bill. Both the owners and players made out on the TV deals. Look at the NBA. The players negotiate their deals almost exclusively around when the new TV deals are set to land.
I'm not going to argue what the players have to physically go through and the toll playing takes on their bodies, but they can definitely afford to make less if needed.
To me, I do think the owners should take the brunt of paying the fees as they were the ones who negotiated the deal. As for the owners who don't have that type of cash laying around, there are plenty of legitimate ways for them to get it.
As for the comments about fans being willing to pay the Sunday Ticket price. What other choice did they have as a football fan? I think it begs the question, just because they can charge that much, should they? This is where the governments gets involved with monopolies and anti-trust. The prices for Sunday ticket and where it's available are crazy. I'd argue this is almost like gambling addictions. You can always say that people don't need to gamble, but let's be real. Most fans aren't going to stop watching their team because the price of Sunday Ticket is too high. Sunday Ticket almost single handedly kept DirecTv in business because of it.
There's a lot of rambling in there. End result, I think this loss by the NFL is a good thing. They have been running unchecked for a while now and the fans are paying for it. From Roger saying Super Bowl isn't for the fans to attend anymore, what we are seeing with the Bills new stadium and PSL's, and a bunch of other moves, the NFL is feeding off the addictive nature of it's product and needs to be regulated.