Killing the Golden Goose

Bob Ford does a good job of highlighting many of the owners' advantages in ending the NFL's collective bargaining agreement two years early - advantages which have gotten short shrift among most media reports.

The threat of that uncapped 2010 season could also provide an enormous benefit to the owners in the next two seasons, a brilliant and somewhat overlooked bit of strategy. Let's say you represent a player who is supposed to become a free agent in 2010, but won't be if a new bargaining agreement isn't reached. On the Eagles, that list includes Omar Gaither, Chris Gocong and Max Jean-Gilles among others. Would you advise your client to sign an extension in the interim and not bet on free agency? Think the teams might be able to sign players in that situation to less attractive deals than they would have gotten otherwise? Me, too.

Aside from all that, the league simply wants more of the $7 billion it generates in revenue each season. The players currently get 59.5 percent of it, divided up into the salary cap. The owners want the percentage that goes to salaries to be smaller, arguing that they have to build stadiums and things like that and would prefer someone else pay for them.

Two things: Ford perpetuates the myth that the owners "build stadiums," or at least, have to pay for it. States and localities have picked up the vast, vast bulk of stadium construction expenses and where teams have had to pay - typically a token amount - the naming rights (which the teams keep all to themselves) has covered it.

But the big unanswered question is why the owners are willing to kill the golden goose. Are they really quibbling over a couple of percentage points and lower the 59.5% of league revenue that goes toward players salaries/constitutes the salary cap?

Are they really willing to lockout the players to get salaries down to 56% of revenue? Especially when the teams are able to keep to themselves all of their locally generated revenue? Do the owners really want to open that pandora's box of unaccounted for team revenues in all of this? That is the great unanswered question.