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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Locked out

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The National Football League (NFL) is back. The season's first week gave us the usual share of touchdowns, big hits, concussions, celebratory chest beating, upward angle shots of cheerleaders and any other aspect of football that has been absent since the Super Bowl. Fantasy football is relevant again, as is the gleam of Terry Bradshaw's bald head. The return of professional football makes homework very hard to finish on Sundays because one can sit on the couch and watch televised coverage — pre−game and post−game included — nonstop between 11 a.m. and midnight. And that is wonderful.

Unfortunately, a year from now there likely will be no NFL season. With the labor agreement between NFL team owners and the NFL Player's Association (NFLPA) set to expire in March, a lockout looms. In the likely lockout scenario, the owners would fail to come to a collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA, which would prevent any players in the NFLPA from legally being allowed to play next season. To avoid the lockout, both sides need to compromise on a number of issues, including their respective shares of total revenue, the length of the season's schedule and a decreased sliding scale for rookie salaries. When asked to gauge the probability of a lockout on a scale of one to 10 earlier this year, NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith had a slightly pessimistic answer: 14. In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Smith added, "I feel a lockout is coming in March."

What makes the approaching lockout even more problematic is the lack of communication and transparency on the owners' side. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell toured team training camps in August and was frequently grilled by players about what specific concessions the owners wanted from the NFLPA. Goodell couldn't answer. Yes, the owners want more money, but how much they want is still up for debate. Here, the disagreement becomes a numbers game. Many reports argue that the owners want the players to take an 18 percent pay cut. It is still unclear whether the pay cut would come out of the current stake of revenue or a revised one. The players have asked the owners to open up their financial records before any such negotiations take place, a request that has yet to be accepted. This tug−of−war between owners and players has left both parties in a standstill with neither side willing to budge.

Other issues have sprung up on the peripherals of this debate. The NFLPA wants more money and medical insurance for the pensions of retired NFL players, who are largely ignored after their careers end. The owners want to pay rookies less money — under the current system, NFL rookies are given contracts that dwarf those of NBA or MLB rookies. Sam Bradford, the first pick in the 2010 NFL Draft, signed a $78 million contract with the St. Louis Rams before taking one snap in his professional career. To put this in perspective, the rookie contract of NBA star Lebron James was worth $13 million. The NFL owners want to pay football rookies similar salaries to that of NBA rookies.

In an effort to squeeze out increased revenue, NFL owners continue to push for an 18−game regular season schedule as opposed to the current 16−game schedule. The NFLPA, weary of more games, wants to protect its players from increased injury. This expansive conflict between owners and players involves many issues but is really only about one thing — money. For the most part, the looming lockout is a battle between billionaire owners and millionaire players.

Some readers may be thinking to themselves, "who cares?" And maybe, to an extent, they're right. Football is not the most important issue in the geopolitical sphere. It is a game, something most people watch for pleasure. Football is an escape, something to look forward to after a long week of work or school or whatever more meaningful endeavors people partake in before the weekend. Football — or any other sport — will have zero impact on the upcoming midterm elections or U.S. foreign policy. Yet, the likely lockout is troubling and goes beyond the realm of professional sports.

If the lockout happens next year, the media will portray it as white versus black: greedy white owners, who want a bigger slice of the pie so they can continue to sit in skyboxes with Brioni suits and Ermenegildo Zegna ties, versus the black athletes, paid millions of dollars to play a game. They will haggle over astronomical salaries while the rest of the population grinds away at lower−paying jobs. In this scenario, it is not wrong to associate the owners with the culprits of the current economic crisis. The NFL owners represent big business — the white collar executives who only cared about their immediate profits and disregarded what was good for the common man, or in this case, the athlete.

But to me, this angle feels cheap and superficial. There are greater forces at play here, unsettling factors that go beyond football. A 2011 NFL lockout would indicate that the country's economic recession could even infect professional football, which is the most popular and profitable professional sports league in America. First and foremost, the NFL is a business. For the past three years, that business has been suffering. Attendance figures are down over that timeframe, which leads to television network blackouts and a loss of advertising revenue. The average Fan Cost Index — the total cost of taking a family of four to an NFL game — is $412, and many people are not willing to spend that kind of money on one afternoon of leisure. The economics of professional football are becoming more important than its in−game statistics. And when that is the case, a lockout is imminent.

An NFL lockout would not be the end of the world, but it could hint at the direction in which the economy is headed. Many of us forget that professional sports are not immune to fiscal shortcomings, even when hundreds of millions of dollars are thrown around in contract negotiations with regularity. We take sports for granted, assuming they will always be there to overshadow the country's more pressing political issues. But on occasion, sport itself transcends that boundary, and with an NFL lockout hanging over the horizon of the current season, we will be reminded that sometimes it is about more than just a game.