NFL 2016-2017

I feel this argument fails to hold water in a league in which "Mike the Glennophant Man and Tom Savage, starting quarterbacks" is a thing.

Vick I'll give you because he never had a lick of accuracy, but RG3 was 1) wrecked by Shanahan's coaching, and 2) derailed by his knee getting completely shredded. He was doomed before he entered the league.

 

This is the league playing the long game and gathering ammunition for a lockout in a few years. They'll take advantage of every single case by painting the NFLPA as victim-attacking abuse apologists. They'll take every shot they can for the next three years, lock the players out, then DeMaurice Smith will roll over for the owners, who will take another five percent away from players on top of an 18-game season.

 

Goodell is the owners' employee (and they fucking love him, despite the PR miscues, because they make money hand over fist because of him, and because he championed their successful effort to break the NFLPA), so, yes.

 

Lower television ratings, but that doesn't matter because the annual rights fees are contractual, and all the networks and ESPN are locked in until 2022. (Goodell was smart to strong-arm everyone into signing an eight-year deal three years ago, knowing that the TV sports rights bubble was going to implode -- as it is currently doing; ESPN in particular would do anything to get out of the Monday Night Football deal.) So despite lower viewership, the league and its teams set new records in revenues and profits every single year -- overall they made about $13.4 billion last year, projections are for $14 billion this year. For comparison's sake, the league made $8 billion in 2010.

 

It depends on how forward-thinking DeMaurice Smith and the rest of the NFLPA leadership is. With his background as a litigator, Smith is largely ineffective as a labor leader (something that unions across the sports leagues have been lacking for ages is a genuine trade unionist at their helms; the only reason Don Fehr, who's also a lawyer by trade, has been so effective at the head of first the MLBPA and now the NHLPA is that he spent more than a decade working closely alongside, and learning from, Marvin Miller) but in advance of the 2011 lockout, he was smart enough to get the players to agree to increase their union dues by 50 percent in order to build a war chest for operations during a lockout, and he also took out an insurance policy that would have paid every single player something like $200,000 in the event games were canceled due to a lockout (revealing that was the hammer strike that finally got Goodell and Co. to begin negotiating instead of posturing). If he's smart, he's squirreling away as much money as he can to build another war chest, just to avoid the very situation you describe.

Smith took a lot of heat from his constituents after the 2011 CBA was ratified, because players won essentially nothing outside of some token changes to practice rules and a nominal increase in minimum salaries. Their only real victories were what wasn't imposed upon them -- a massive hit in their share of league revenue, an 18-game season, major changes to free agency, etc. -- and they still took some massive hits, like losing arbitration, teams getting salary floor credit for money spent on their stadiums, changes in the franchise tag system. If I'm recalling correctly, he faced a significant challenge for re-election as executive director two years ago, so his term will be up after this coming season ... which means all of what he's saying now could be moot if he's not even around when the CBA re-opens.

 

Speaking of the owners loving Roger Goodell, he's about to be given a five-year extension on his current contract, which runs to 2019. This would have him in the commissioner's office until 2024.

 

Look at it this way: Every time he smacks the Patriots around, they turn and hate-fuck the rest of the league. You should be happy about this.

 

Well, when you increase your bosses' earnings by $6 billion, they tend to like you...