Usually, NFL owners don’t care about anything that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has to say, especially since Cuban’s most recent foray into football-related commentary consisted of pissing and moaning about the league’s decision to stage a playoff game at the North Texas Football Cathedral on the same night that the Mavs were playing a home game.
This time around, however, the league probably would agree with Cuban.
In an e-mail interview with Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com, Cuban was asked whether fans should be concerned about labor issues in the NBA.
In response, Cuban said he couldn’t comment on the NBA. And so he instead commented on the NFL’s labor issues. NFL, not NBA.
Wink.
Nod.
Fart.
"[I]f the NFL is looking at a stoppage when they just had the biggest audience in the history of television, that tells you that just maybe the cap approach to their economics might not work,” Cuban said. “I wrote a blog post a few [years] back saying that NHL players lost more than 1 billion in wages for their missed season. It could be more than that if the NFL walks out. The players can’t ever get that money back. Their playing time is perishable. That’s an awful big hit for players to take and very difficult to justify in any quantitative analysis.”
Cuban is right, but we hope that doesn’t mean the NFL will try to cram a bad deal down the throats of the players. It’s critical that both sides search for a fair outcome to their current impasse -- without fairness, it will be impossible to maintain long-term labor peace, which means that there eventually will be a work stoppage, either in 2011 or at some point down the line.