The NFL Owner Liberation Army

I don’t know if you’ve heard (sarcasm), but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the owners a full stay of Judge Nelson’s enjoinder of the lockout.

I started out completely neutral in this whole mess; as many have since said, I declared myself “on the side of the fans.”  But as I dug deeper and deeper into the issues, I discovered that the league’s behavior has been, frankly, despicable. Unable to resolve their own differences on revenue sharing, the owners have spent the last four years trying to bring about this day: a judicially-enforced lockout that could last into the season, so they can exert maximum leverage on players. Their goals: to build more ridiculous billion-dollar stadiums, to play more games unnecessarily, to put franchises on other continents, and to bleed every single person on Earth for every cent they’ve got, everything else be damned. That’s what they mean when they say “grow the game,” people.

More interested, intelligent, initially neutral observers have been coming around to my way of thinking. Here's an excellent piece by Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post:

Should you find yourself drifting to the side of the players in the NFL labor dispute, it doesn’t mean you’ve gone all communist. Some fans may feel that to support the players is anti-capitalist, a little too May Day. But there is the spirit of free enterprise, and then there is the spirit with which NFL owners tend to do business. They aren’t at all the same thing.

What’s so American about gouging, price-fixing, and frankly, sucking the life out of fans?

It's an honest question to ask--and Jenkins' investigation into the answer is intelligent, well-informed, and balanced. At least half jokingly (though partly seriously) Tony Kornhieser called her piece "shrew-like" and "hysterical" during a radio show. But if Kornheiser couldn’t have made that crack with a straight face if he’d read Drew Magary of Deadspin fame setting “The Bizarre Cult of Pro-Owner Fanboys” of Pro Football Talk’s readership on blast:

It's like a group of people went directly to their computers after walking out of a screening of Atlas Shrugged. You can find retarded commenters at virtually any Internet forum (why, just scroll down!), but the idea that there are people out there who would like to see the owners succeed in PREVENTING THE PLAYING OF ACTUAL NFL GAMES to spite NFL players strikes me as … what's the word? Oh, right. F***ING INSANE.

[. . .] There's a distinctly political turn to much of these lockout arguments among fans. I guess if you think the players are right (and I do), that makes you a dirty liberal and there can't possibly be a decent case to be made. All unions are bad, which means the NFL players are ungrateful and lazy and deserve to be booted out on their ass because the owners are the beginning and end of why the NFL is successful.

It’s not just the ridiculous comments that are being made over there, or the sheer volume by which pro-owner comments outweigh pro-player ones. PFT has an upvote/downvote system, and they REALLY tell the tale. Check the comments (and votes) on these PFT posts. My favorite, though, is a post called “More Misplaced Rhetoric From De Smith,” which is Florio ripping DeMaurice Smith for his characterization of the state of affairs as the NFL “suing not to play.” The NFL commentariat almost unanimously hailed this post as Florio’s first fair and balanced article on the issue:

theangryrob says:May 18, 2011 9:08 AM

I’m having a hard time rationalizing it, but I kind of thought this was a great, even handed post. I’m strangely pleased and confused at the same time.

So, uh, nice work :D

232 upvotes, 5 downvotes    [Ed.--as of the time of this post]

Look, in a vacuum, there’s no question whose side the fans’ interests align with. The players are the ones we pay to see. The players are the ones whose jerseys we buy. The players are the ones who we see on TV, endorsing products we buy ‘cuz we love them. The players are the ones who are putting their bodies on the line, sacrificing their joints, their backs, their necks, and maybe even their long-term mental health for our entertainment. The players are the ones who come from the same places we come from—neighborhoods, high schools, colleges—and who, within a few years, either come back to those places, or put down roots in whichever city they played.

What is it that makes so many fans root so hard for the owners, then? Men or women, who typically inherited either the team itself, a business empire, a personal fortune, or any combination of the above? Why is it that working fans with mortgage payments and credit card debt are gleefully cheering for the players to be crushed by those same bills as their bosses withhold paychecks? What kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome is at work, here?

That’s what’s really happening here: fans are sympathizing with their captors. We’re paying $20 to park, $70 or so a head to get in the door, $7 for hot dogs, $8 for beer, $4 for water we’re not given a cap to so our kids can spill it, and uncountable dollars in jerseys, shirts, pennants, stickers, garden gnomes and other ridiculous merch, and at the end of the day these fans sneer at the players on the field and say “YOU MAKE ENOUGH MONEY! CAVE INTO THE POOR OWNERS! THEIR PROFITS AREN’T GROWING AS FAST AS THEY’D LIKE ANYMORE!” No doubt, when the lockout ends, all these fans will be happily thanking the benevolent owners—and lantern-jawed protector of the game, Commissioner Goodell—for ending they started to begin with.

Let me post-script all this with a few caveats. I do see the last deal as being player-friendly, and I do believe there’s room for fair concessions on both sides. TLiW (and elsewhere) commenter LineBusy has an interesting take exploring just that; you should read it. I do think both sides have grossly disrespected the fans by not resolving this before the expiry of the old CBA; both sides have been planning for THIS day for so long they’ve failed to stop it. However, one side is working men speaking plainly and truthfully about protecting their current and future interests, and the other side is a bunch of fabulously wealthy people in control of one of the most monstrously profitable industries in the world, strangling the golden goose while smiling and saying “We want football, too!”

Technorati Tags: nfl,nflpa,roger goodell,demaurice smith,nfl lockout,nfl lawsuit,deadspin,washington post,pro football talk

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What Jerry Jones, & the NFL, Can Learn from Detroit

This is the Michigan Central Station. It’s familiar to Detroiters as the avatar of the city’s decline. Any national “Woe is Detroit” story has to be accompanied by an image of this beautiful, awful edifice.  Designed by the same firm that penned New York’s Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux-Arts Classical visage of this 18-story monolith contains a message for the NFL.

The MCS was built to accommodate a large volume of rail traffic, part of a grand vision to unite the station and the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel to Canada along the main Detroit-Chicago railway line. The 18-story tower was to provide office space for the future businesses sure to spring up around the new transportation hub.

That’s right, the city’s new main train depot was not in the heart of the city. Situated along the main line, as opposed to the branch that ran through downtown, passengers got to and from the station via intercity trains and shuttles, at least until 1938. Unfortunately, thanks to the Great Depression, that development never really came—and the original designers hadn’t planned on people driving there, so there was no passenger parking lot.

After World War II, the automotive revolution that fueled the growth of the Motor City sapped the MCS of much of its relevance. At various points throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, the station was put up for sale, partially shut down, sold off, partially re-opened, shut down, and sold off again, until 1988, when the last Amtrak train rolled out of Michigan Central Station. It cost fifteen million dollars to build in 1913. It was put up for sale (with no takers) for five million in 1961, and eventually changed hands several times for undisclosed sums in the 80s and 90s, with rumored prices as low as $80,000.

Now it sits empty. Now looters have stripped it of wiring and fixtures. Now it’s a quietly decaying monument to a bygone era of unbridled growth and fantastic excess: too far gone to revive, far too beautiful to tear down, and far too ugly to let stand.

“Unbridled growth” and “fantastic excess” are apt descriptions of the state of the NFL. While America’s economic belt has been slowly tightening for several years, the NFL’s revenues have exploded. In a time when cable and satellite offer hundreds of viewing options, and America has never split its TV focus so wildly, the NFL’s ratings continue to smash records. Attendance has been flat at nearly the maximum possible numbers; even the Lions sold out all but one of their home games.

The NFL and NFLPA scheduled two negotiating sessions this week, and the first one went so poorly that the second one was cancelled. The rumored dividing point was the most basic one, the one that started it all: how to divide all the money that the NFL earns. The owners already receive the first billion of revenue off the top, to cover expenses.  The owners want to increase that by 18%, to cover anticipated capital investments in the game that will bring in more revenue. What capital investments—designed to bring in revenue—could require that much money?

This is Cowboys Stadium. This $1.1 billion-dollar edifice sits on a 140-acre site a 45 minute drive from downtown Dallas. Its 300 luxury suites, along with its concessions stands, bars, and restaurants—not to mention auxiliary attractions like a football-inspired art gallery—provide huge streams of revenue that have little to do with watching a live football game. In fact, “live” might not be the best way to watch a football game inside Cowboys Stadium: there are 2,900 TVs scattered throughout the dome, plus the infamous titan that hangs over the field, a sixty-yard HD monitor able to display a blue whale at a 1:1 scale.

Nicknamed “Jerryworld” after the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, this stadium marks the endpoint of one stadium-building craze, and perhaps the beginning of another. In the mid-90s, teams explored the brave new salary-cap world, and realized that unshared revenue like luxury suites and concessions not only didn’t have to be shared with other owners, it didn’t have to be shared with the players! This kicked off almost two decades of teams building new stadiums filled with luxury suites and swank accommodations. Teams, for the most part, took advantage of easy credit and/or public financing. Jones used $325 million worth of public funds, secured $625 million of credit—and received a $150 million loan from the NFL.

That's the money the owners are looking to keep from the players: nearly a billion dollars a year to help build the Vikings’ Zygiworld, the Bills’ Ralphworld, and many others. Even the Panthers, a team whose stadium is was built in 1996, are already talking about building another one. Over the next ten-to-twenty years, most NFL cities will feel the pressure to either build a similar monuments to unbridled growth and fantastic excess—or risk their teams’ Ownerworld being built in another town.

The problem is, it’s not sustainable. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post wrote, brilliantly, that Super Bowl XLV’s rough edges hint at the fault lines running through the “billionization” of the NFL:

It's not clear what the pain threshold of the average NFL fan is: Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets haven't found the bottom yet. But the NFL would be advised to recognize that it's getting close. Those folks who found themselves without seats? Many were among the league's most loyal paying customers, season ticket holders. Yet they were treated like afterthoughts, awarded half-built, jerry-rigged seats, folding chairs on auxiliary platforms. Which begs the question of what the "NFL fan experience" really means anymore.

The NFL’s surge in popularity has granted it great profits in the face of an economic downturn—but that downturn is real. Municipalities are out of stadium-building funds; free stadiums, like the one Hamilton County built the Bengals, don’t come with sixty-yard TVs. The credit bubble has burst; loans are much tougher to secure—and imagine how big Jerry’s mortgage payments must be on his borrowed $725 million! Roger Goodell said it himself, in his email to fans:

“Economic conditions, however, have changed dramatically inside and outside the NFL since 2006 when we negotiated the last CBA. A 10 percent unemployment rate hurts us all. Fans have limited budgets and rightly want the most for their money. I get it.”

If Jerryworld is the template for new stadiums going forward, I don’t think he does. He—and the owners—need to learn a lesson from Michigan Central Station. It cost about  $335 million in today’s dollars—almost exactly the same amount the city of Arlington paid for Jerryworld. If the CBA is not extended, that massive revenue pie owners and players are fighting over will shrink. Even with the public thirst for football, the Cowboys pushed the envelope. If that thirst is quenched by other sports during a needless lockout, they’ll be unable to fill Jerryworld, or Zygiworld, or Stephenworld once play begins again.

America’s cities can’t afford to drain their public coffers again. Americans can’t afford to blow their personal budgets on even-more-expensive tickets, parking, and concessions. America—for our entertainment, and for the thousands, maybe millions whose livelihood depends directly or indirectly on professional sports—needs the NFL to keep chugging along.

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