How about replacement owners?

[Calgary_JG]

Nonsense - the players themselves have more than enough money to start their own league, with equity as salary. They would be playing in lousy stadiums, but so what? And a television deal would not be hard - they wouldn't get any money at first, but they would get great national exposure. And if they could keep it together for 5 years, the money would come.

 

The problem is that they would soon find out just how important they really are to the NFL. It would be them, in new teams and minor league stadiums, against the historical NFL franchises, run by actual businessmen and restocked with the latest shiny new players from the college ranks. I think they would be finished in two years and they know it.

 

 

The players don't want to share $1 billion of costs now with competent and successful business owners running the league...the thought of them getting together to share $7 billion in costs is laughable

[simpleman]

Not commenting on the logic of the rest of your post, but I think this particular statement is incorrect. The recently expired CBA is publicly available, and contains a sample player contract. See Article XIV, section 1, at page 40/301 of the CBA here:

 

http://images.nflplayers.com/mediaResources/files/PDFs/General/NFL%20COLLECTIVE%20BARGAINING%20AGREEMENT%202006%20-%202012.pdf

 

 

Interesting reading. According to the contract, even if a player plays only the first game of the season and is available to play others, he gets the full amount of his salary for the season. So to the players (considering only base salary) , if there is only one game or 16 games, it does not matter as long as they play the first game and are available to play others, regardless of how many are held. A shortened season will not affect a players base salary, just incentives and other payments. So a shortened season does not mean any loss of BASE salary or BASE benefits to the players.

 

And it also states players are payed per season, not per game as someone previously stated.

[Mickey]

because the players are employees and the owners own their business.

 

They don't own football. They don't own the players. They don't own the fans. Fans pay to see players play football. Television networks pay money for football games. The last time the league was this arrogant, a thing called the AFL happened.

 

I like to watch football. I especially like to watch the best players in the world play football. And most of all I like watching them play for my favorite team. I would definitely watch a new league on TV and in person if they had the best players and I don't care if their helmets had an NFL logo on it or something else. I would want a team in Buffalo or, in Syracuse, or in Upstate NY but if there wasn't, I would deal with it. There is no guarantee that there will be a team in Buffalo in the NFL either.

 

As much as I admire and respect him, I don't pay to watch Ralph Wilson wave to the crowd.

Edited May 24, 2011 by Mickey

[Mickey]

do you honestly think any of the players especially the ones with higher contracts would risk their careers playing for some cracker jack league?

 

 

Why would it be a "cracker jack" league? Whenever a franchise goes up for sale, there is a bidding war for it. There is plenty of money and financing out there and lots of empty stadiums.

This is the same stuff they said about the AFL. These guys would have an edge over the AFL, they would be starting with all the best players, every last one of them and would have no

competition signing the rookies as their choice would be the new league or the lockout league.

[Mickey]

Yeah, I mean, who wouldn't want to sink a $billion into a franchise where you can have a bunch of snot nosed punk ass 20 and 30 something millionaire jocks try to put you over a barrel in an attempt to take the lion's share of the reward from your risk and investment?

 

 

Because you still make a ton of money and every year the value of your asset goes up so that if you ever want to sell it, you'll make an absolute killing. Ralph started with what, $100,000 investment? Now the team is worth 750 million to a billion not including the year to year income generated. The reason those players get the money they get is because that is what they are worth. In fact, they are getting less than they are worth as they are not able to sell their services to the highest bidder. The players give up that right for the good of the league and its long term success, even though they don't share in it as they don't get anything in exchange for the value they add to a franchise's net worth. Every anti-trust suit they have ever brought of any significance, they have won. They handed back those victories in exchange for a piece of the pie. No one was held over a barrel. The players gave up something they wanted to get something else and the owners did the same. That is what led to the settlement (SSA) agreement that was later converted in to the CBA that has worked so well for so long. The only reason this issue didn't go nuclear before was because the players were winning their antitrust suits which forced the league into cutting a deal. That may be the only thing that would get it done here.

[Hplarrm]

Many thanks for thoughtful (though often incorrect) responses. My reactions are:

 

Your bias is very evident, and you demonstrate a complete ignorance of economics. The agrument you are making is very similiar to the historical agruments against middlemen, which is not born out by reality.

 

 

Like all people I have biases and am happy to plead guilty.. I assume you are as well.. so on to the particulars as there is little need to worry about the broader indictments

 

 

 

First, if the players are what drive the sport without anything else, then why don't they just create their own league?

 

You misunderstand me as you assert I am saying something stupid and obviously incorrect. No the players are not the driver of the sport without anything else (well duhh). Neither are the owners the driver or the sport WITHOUT anything else.

 

Among the drivers are the fans (the ultimate engine actually as we provide the $ but we are not the driver as we do not control the steering wheel. The TV networks are also reasonably considered a big engine in this tortured analogy as they are the direct conduit for our bucks but they do have some control over steering (as anyone who sees the disruption of the game caused by TV timeouts will tell you). The players are more and more becoming a driver and rightfully so after the last CBA which delivered them a majority of the total take.

 

The owners are a driver far beyond the amount of the total receipts and as I pointed out beyond what they add to the game.

 

They used to be the primary source of capital (there are now multiple potential sources like the nets, municipalities (both private purchase of small non-controlling shares or through taxpayer purchase), corporations, and by the players themselves (pooling their money through an institution like the NFLPA and needing only to raise a downpayment with the rest paid for by a huge bank loan. The capital can be raised through other sources.

 

They used to be the team manager back in the day of handson sportsmen like Halas. Tod ay general managers can be hired, assessed, promoted or fired.

 

The owners really no longer are necessary.

 

 

 

How about we fire management for all of airlines and let the pilots get all of the money and see how that works out?

 

As I said you can hire and fire business managers and GMs it happens all the time. The airline comparison of this life and death industry and the football entertainment industry is on it face silly.

 

 

 

 

You could have a free market if it were illegal for the players to unionize. Currently, they are still a union because you have union representatives suing in court. The idea that there is no union is more legalize then

reality.

 

 

It is really a misunderstanding of the role the union plays in the American free market to attempt to pose this as some mere ideological difference.

 

If one understands how unions actually operate in today's modern economy then you would understand that at least here in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, the unions and business work hand in glove to actually make the free market perform efficiently. For example, a developer such as Benderson owns a bunch of properties and slowly builds out it properties with office space, light industry, retail, etc depending upon what it perceives the market will buy. They would love to simply sell land and have the buyer build to suit. However, many buyers are willing to in essence rent a pre-built site that meets their needs rather than building to suit and absorbing all capital costs.

 

Benderson makes judgments based on what price it can get renting or selling built spaces. It thus attempts to control capital costs. Benderson thus perceives that it will cost it less money to build an office (lets say) if rather than hiring an electrician and higher a wire layer that if they can hire one person who has both wire laying and electrician skills. It offers this job to the market of workers. The union sees this market demand and informs its members that the only jobs available right now are for people with both electrician and wire layer certifications.

 

The union then provides educational classes to its members to get them the certifications that a contractor like Benderson wants.

 

This is a perfectly legitimate method of allowing market demand drive the skillsets and training workers and the unions are a far more efficient means to training workers than simple individual action in a totally free market.

 

The modern union is not opposed to the free market they help the free market work to the workers advantage.

 

This is specifically seen in the NFLPA example which was actually run by the traditional AFL-CIO style by Ed Garvey ubtil the owners kicked their butts with the replacement player gambit of the mid 80s. In the face of the old union style losing out, a talented tenth of NFL players led by Gene Upshaw augmented by a group of smart NYC lawyers launched the first decert strategy and won the new CBA.

 

It is old doctrinaire and quite frankly ignorant and stupid thinking to not realize that the modern union (particularly as seem in the NFLPA is part and parcel of the free market. In fact, the current players as seem in the Brady, et al lawsuit are arguing for more of a free market approach were 32 NFL teams compete with each other economically for independent contract players than the owners are who instead argue for a social compact of teams.

I like the comment about how you do not want the government to confiscate the money, but if the government doesn't get the money it isn't confiscation. Sure, eminant domain is confiscation if they give the land to another owner.

 

Green Bay is a corporation, not a public entity. The league prefers to have a single voice in its franchises. I like the Green Bay model because it is more responsive to the fans. Oh, the NFL is a loose franchise model, like Burger King and McDonalds.

 

Burger King and MacDonald's are in competition with each other and do not collude with each other over territories, worker training and a host of other ways in which the NFL teams collude with each other. The market models are totally different and you do not show a recognition of this fact.

 

Ironically, the NFLPA colludes with the NFL team owners to do things like hold a draft where an individual athlete is assigned to one and only one team he can negotiate with without regard to where he wants to live. Yes the NFLPA is different than the Steelworkers, Oil and Atomic workers, etc. The NFLPA operates as a partner with the NFL which is unprecedented among labor organizing.

 

 

I am absolutely convinced that the an owner run league will be more responsive to the fans than a player run league.

1) Players are too defuse, the rich players will dominate and will have their narrow interests at heart.

2) The players cannot come up with a vision of the NFL. You can see this in their statements, they do not want parity.

3) The players will not be concerned about the quality on the field. Mike Williams will have more power to determine the direction of the franchise and there will be more Mike Williams.

 

I think that the NFL will be more like the NBA where players have a lot of power. There will be a few important teams and a lot of bad teams. I will be very depressed because the Jets will compete against the Patriots to play the Redskins, Giants or Cowboys in the Super Bowl, and the every good player the Bills are able to get will be signed by one of those teams once they are good. Oh, the only players the Bills will be able to get will be seventh round draft choices.

No time to respond in any more detail or to format this for easy reading (fee; free to do so moderators if you can even follow my rambling. What I would say in general to your last comments, is that I think the major difficulty facing the NFLPA is that the NFL has been so ham-handed in how it has handled this that the NFLPA has to be careful not to kill the NFL.

 

The old NFL style is done as best as I can tell and actually the NFLPA would be better off not killing it but insted keep it alive but foster more competition. The NFL is so stupid its hard not to kill them.