Yeah, you guys just keep following the program. Keep supporting the filthy rich, giving tax breaks to the wealthy and waiting for Corporate America to trickle the benefits of their bailouts and interest-free loans and government guarantees down to the rest of us. I’ll just stand over here under my umbrella.

Not one executive or CEO has created anything of value without workers to bring the vision to fruition. Next time, smart ass, you try building a nation, a city, or a railroad, fighting a war, manufacturing a car, or playing a football game by yourself and see how much money you make.

My guess is that they’ll try and link this suit to the one involving TV revenue. That suit almost has to bring TV executives in to testify about those negotiations and make the point that the league was planning a lockout long ago and therefore any subsequent negotiations were not in good faith. There was a clause in the old CBA that the league would seek and accept the highest offers (because the players get revenue from this) The argument is that the league didn’t do this in order to get the networks to agree to payments even if the season was cancelled. The networks, tired of the “take it or leave it” aspect to negotiations with the league almost certainly have provided depositions to union lawyers.

Because so many fans are jaded by the fact that they think football is a game they would gladly play for free and they feel the players should be honored just to be allowed on the field, I’m trying to put it in terms to take it out of that mindset. No, it isn’t precisely like the Facebook example. You could also use the example of authors and publishers. The publishers invest the money to bring books to publication, but without the authors, they’d have no books to publish. Any way you look at it, elite athletes are not employees in the strictest sense. And they are compensated based on the revenue they generate.

Players are not the ones who bid their salaries into the stratosphere. Owners like Paul Allen and Jerry Jones did that by using signing bonuses to skirt the salary cap–or as others have pointed out, by obliterating the salary cap and simply raising it each year rather than staying under it like more prudent teams. These guys didn’t mind overpaying for talent because they had plenty of money and thought they could buy a championship. Now they’re not happy with what they’ve wrought. Too bad. That’s what happens when you play fast-and-loose with the rules.

If you read your sports history, you’ll find owners used and abused players until the 1980s, so I’m not crying a river over men who got rich turning athletes into cripples, then turning them out the door. You guys can stand on the side of wealth and power if you like and keep waiting for them to trickle down on you. As I’ve said before, the only thing they’re likely to trickle is urine. No thanks. I’ll stick with labor, even if they make 1,000 times my salary.

I can’t wait til 2013 when we will have Football Night In America on Vs. In between Tour de France and Luge.

What happened?, the players start contacting you telling you no more scoops unless you pull it?

That is a pretty big mistake by the Union Lawyers regarding the Sham D and blowing the terms they had out of the water wouldn’t you say. Where did these players find these Lawyers on a Street Corner?

I do feel for the real Football Players, the majority of the players that are the grunts. You know the ones that moved back in with the parents because of what is going on.

The same ones the GREEDY Manning’s, Brady’s and Bree’s are robbing on a daily basis. Remember owners bring them to their knees and my family and my funds will continue, bend to these GREEDY Punks and there are so many other ways to spend my dollars.

My kids want to get into showing Cutting Horses and I would like to spend more time traveling and playing Golf.

Seriously, if it swings over to the owners, I think they’d gladly sacrifice the 2011 season to get a deal in place that is WAY less generous to the players than their last offer.

And I promise you, no matter how financially sound the players are saying they are, if they go a whole season without getting paid, they are going to crack faster then Humpty Dumpty.

So right now, advantage players. But if it swings back to the owners, they are going to wish they had simply met across the middle where things were in their favor.

Did the league fall apart when Brady was injured? Will it fall apart without Favre?

No

Players comevand gone every year.

Next thing you know these self-important meatheads (I say that as an ex college semi athlete) will tell us they need oversight of operations and GM strategy.

Bring on the scabs. Show us how fungible they are… Again.

If you honestly believe the union didn’t know this, you’re crazy. Whatever you think of union leadership, I am pretty sure they can read.

They obviously decided not to wait until the expiration because they didn’t want to wait 6 months to file the anti-trust suit.

Decertifying early on gives the league the opportunity to argue in court that it is sham. They still have to prove it.

And it doesn’t matter if you know it’s a sham, I know it’s a sham, the whole world knows it a sham, if everything was done correctly and they did truly, legally decertify, it will tough to prove in Court.

Especially if the case lands on Judge Doty’s desk.

The sooner you realize that we don’t really care who is on our team (yes we want to most competetive team) as long as we have a team to root for is all we care about.

The offer made by the league, in my opinion is more that generous and fair, yet you and your leader DS and his trained chimp GA screwed it all up for us fans by walking away.

Shame on you all.

A. Fan

I’m very pro union… but I don’t see how the NFLPA did their members a service….