Basically, the same thing I just said back to you.

I admit, I didn’t read that one carefully enough. My apologies again.

Brady, Brees, and Manning were asked by the NFLPA to lend their well-known names to the suit. However, none of the players were needed in court today. They had no role to play in these proceedings. How many owners were in court today?
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What?……

The players can have counsel represent them but the owners HAVE to show their faces instead of just being represented by counsel as well?

Why, exactly, is that????????

Last I heard, lawyers are not suing the NFL….Brady, etc. are. And, the owners and players are both represented by counsel…. so please explain why the owners need to be there but the players don’t

And the owners forced the players to include the opt-out clause.

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Lol…Really? The best contract the players ever had was forced on them by the owners?????

Really????

-TheLockoutBeard-

At the bottom of this whole fight I suspect is a faction of owners who really, really liked it when the cartel could keep players in indentured servitude and think that this is their oppertunity to go back to that golden age.

On the other hand, I suspect that there is a faction of players who believe that the TV money train can never be derailed.

Both are delusional positions.

Both these delusions need to be capped in the head to make progress.

In 1959, Johnny Unitas’s salary from the Baltimore Colts was $25 grand per year. Now I read that Peyton Manning is demanding a salary of over $23 million dollars per year from the Colts. Anybody who claims that player salaries have no impact on ticket prices is an idiot.

But the player costs don’t impact the prices. If you’re argument was true, then the last CBA wouldn’t have included a provision telling teams there was an absolute minimum they could spend on player salaries.

The crux of the whole argument is whether players should get 40% up to 56% of revenue minus 2 billion. So the limits on player expenditures come after the profits and are divided up (roughly) by what a team is willing to spend on a particular player vs how it affect the team against the salary cap.

If your theory was correct, the Pack could decide to pay Rodgers 30 mil next season and just raise ticket prices.

The driving force of the ticket price is what the market will bear.

The driving force behind player salaries are idiot owners and bloated TV contracts. And when I say idiot owners I don’t hate all owners, I’m just talking about guys like Synder who pay guys like Haynesworth in brinks trucks.

Oh, and as a Packer fan I have no dog in this fight. FA was supposed to destroy the Pack, and that didn’t happen. There is no owner of the Pack (well I guess I am one of thousands) so none of that hoopla applies.

I see points on both sides. I’d love if the NFL kept most of it’s rules and I hope the players get their money. I love everything about football. I just wish these guys could (gulp, here comes a dirty word for us Americans) compromise.

If the owners didn’t violate our laws and labor regulations, as well as the labor contract they themselves agreed to, they would not find themselves in court.

The players have sought legal remedies to protect their rights and economic interests. The availability of these remedies is also an important part of our economic system.

Reality Police already addressed the issue of the deadline. The players had to decertify within the time limit or they would have had no way to combat the lockout for six months. The proposal was given to them less than 12 hours before the deadline.

You need to understand the difference between wanting to go to court and being willing to go to court. Gene Upshaw was not an attorney, so he was more intimidated by the idea of litigation. As I’ve posted before, I’m not a De Smith fan and would have preferred attorney David Cornwell had been elected to the position. But as accomplished litigators, neither Smith nor Cornwell is intimidated by the idea of going to court if necessary. And neither are the team of litigators the owners hired.

Perhaps you’re not aware that the owners began this process by hiring Bob Batterman, the attorney who ran the lockout for the NHL, so if anyone was planning for things to go as they have, it was the owners.

You’re incorrect about the owners begging the players to resume negotiations, and I can’t imagine where you came up with that. For months before things broke down in March, the owners repeatedly walked away from the negotiating table. And the owners forced the players to include the opt-out clause.

Brady, Brees, and Manning were asked by the NFLPA to lend their well-known names to the suit. However, none of the players were needed in court today. They had no role to play in these proceedings. How many owners were in court today?

You need to take some reading comprehension classes.

Neither Deb or Reality police made any claim that the NFL is representative of a free market.

They actually said the opposite.

As for supporters of the players being “leftest”.

That’s 100% BS.

The owners have caused this problem which is pissing a lot of us off. So they get the blame.

Simple. Not ideological. Not a grand union conspiracy. Not any of your tin foil hat theories.

Reality Police already addressed your post. No need for me to embarrass you further.

@mistrezzrachael …

From the way you talk, I gather your schtick at the, a-hem, house is truck driver or lady wrestler. Get many customers that way?

@mick730 …

I’m crushed that you don’t believe any non-tea drinkers own businesses.

They want to impose their own rules & regulations and employee jackasses like Goodell to enforce them. Rules like salary caps.

We allow them because the majority of us do not want the NFL to turn into MLB where the teams with the deepest pockets get most of the playoff appearances & world series titles.

The Yankees have bought all their decades of success. We don’t want Dan Snyder or Jerry Jones doing the same thing in the NFL.

Interestingly enough, neither does Jerry.

He is quite clear that he wants to make as much personal money out of the Cowboys as possible. He doesn’t want to be able to spend more on players. He wants to spend less.

Goodness knows what Dan wants. It’s not clear even he knows.

PS to the Packer folks that keep telling stories about their club and inviting us to apply relevance to the rest of the league.

The Packers are not run like any other franchise.

Your stories are not relevant.

Be quiet.

But so what? It’s an entertainment business that tens of millions of people enjoy. It doesn’t have to represent unfettered capitalism. What is so truly awful about 1700 people benefiting economicallyfar more than 99% of Americans
and in return, not having the full benefit of unfettered capitalism? Man, cry me a river!

Tens of millions of fans thoroughly enjoy the NFL, from the draft, to the Super Bowl, from offseason trades and free agent signings to the creating of rosters over the preaseason.

The leftists on here, and I don’t believe for a minute that posters like reality or deb are independent business owners, want to destroy the entire system of the NFL, not because they are big defenders of capitalism ( reality’s comments about the “ruling class” sort of give him away), but rather because they are big supporters of unions. Now why would unions and their supporters be so interested in the NFLPA which only has around 1700 members? Well, because labor unions are so roundly disliked. Less than 7% of the private sector workforce now belongs to unions. The vast majority of union members now work for the government and are funded by taxpayers, which is becoming increasingly untenable. Laborites are looking for some kind, any kind, of victory somewhere. The NFLPA gives them a high profile case to get behind and push the agenda of organized labor.

The big fly in the oinment of course, is that the 1700 members of the NFLPA are in no way a hardship case. Indeed, they represent some of the highest paid wage earners on the planet. The lowest paid member of the NFL earns almost ten times the pay of the average salaried or hourly worker in this country. So it is a tough sell. On top of that, what the NFLPA wants, unfettered free agency, the end to the draft, will drastically change what those tens of millions of fans really like.

So, most supporters of the owners fully realize that the NFL is not the real world, nor does it need to be. It’s a game in which the participants are hugely rewarded. Unfettered capitalism in the NFL would produce a very dull, uninteresting product in which the two most despised people in the game, Jerry Jones and Daniel Snyder would finally be able to succeed at what they have been attempting for years; buying multiple Super Bowls.

Reality would like for everyone to believe that pro owner folks are ignorant dullards who simply follow what fox news is telling them, and that he and his ilk, are independent, wealthy business people who are tyring to defend the free market capitalist way of life in America by defending the rights of NFL players.

Baloney. Reality and most of the others are simply schills for the labor movemenet.

The funny thing is that there is alot of socialistic practices within the NFL (salary cap, draft, etc). So you have the pro-owner group who I believe are mostly conservatives fighting to keep these socialist practices intact while the pro-player group is fighting for the open market to determine player salaries.
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Hallelujah.

Someone gets it. Someone finally gets it.

Everyone who thinks they are “pro-business” are supporting the owners, because they think that is the “capitalist” position.

Meanwhile true independent businessmen like myself (and I assume bukes111) realize nothing could be further from the truth. That in reality the way the NFL operates is about as anti-free market and capitalist as you can get.

As I have said all along, just because the players are (or were) in a “union”, which has never really operated as a true union but more of a trade association, doesn’t make them “laborers” in the sense everyone on here is thinking.

NFL players negotiate their own contracts, within the framework of the CBA, based upon their market value. They sell their services to either the highest bidder or to the organization that best meets their criteria.

That’s business, that’s free market.

Not the price fixing and collusion and corporate welfare that is the backbone of the league.

The average player has 3-4 years to make most of the money they will make in their entire life, yet you call them greedy for trying to maximize their value.

You tell them they should sacrifice for the good of the ruling class, the owners. You tell them they should be happy for whatever the owners are willing to give them, and should put the good of the league over their own free market value.

That’s straight out of marxist ideology- each according to his abilities, each according to his needs.

The point. Corporations are not buying up all the seats at Lambeau Field. I have cousins who have purchased box seats, indoor ones, in the names of their companies, but the rise in ticket prices at Lambeau is not because of corporate demand.

For the 1996 season, the face value of our tickets was $39.00. Last season, the face value was $79.00. It is my belief that the increase is because of the increase in operating costs for the Packers, the biggest of which is player salary costs.

If Supply and Demand were the driving factor in ticket prices for Green Bay, the price would surely be much higher. The Packers make a conscious effort not to price the average resident of Green Bay out of the market for a ticket to a Packer game and I know that the Packers believe their average ticket price is in line with the average ticket price around the league.

In 1959, Johnny Unitas’s salary from the Baltimore Colts was $25 grand per year. Now I read that Peyton Manning is demanding a salary of over $23 million dollars per year from the Colts. Anybody who claims that player salaries have no impact on ticket prices is an idiot.

Part of me wants the NFL to die a little so that we see drastic change — Goodell ousted, rules of the game returned to how they used to be, lowered pricing, etc etc.

Part of me wants the UFL to prosper till it becomes a rival pro-league equally acquiring NFL-caliber players, seeing more expansion teams, and/or NFL teams ‘relocating’ to the UFL.

Let’s get this thing over with and get back to football.

Im sick and tired of both sides trying to screw each other into a bad deal. That bullcrap needs to end right now.

Typically, at these type of proceedings, a message is delivered to the lawyers for both sides “off the record,” that a ruling is not going to be helpful even if it is favorable. This is designed to create doubt and encourage settlement.

The players have the better legal argument, but if they get the lockout lifted but a global settlement hasn’t been reached the practical effect will be chaos, which will be a pyrrhic victory.

1) One of the players main complains is that their salaries are not guaranteed. If an NFL team cuts a player part way through his contract, he’s done, no more money is paid to him. The players therefore bear all the risk of injury, or deteriorating performance. The only implications for the team are if a signing bonus was paid, that money is lost, it is not refunded by the player. There is also a cap-hit to the team as the money which was prorated over the life of the players contract is immediately counted against the team’s salary cap. Only about 40% of the players have received any kind of signing bonus and therefore only these players have any type of guarantee of the money in their contract. Since guaranteed contracts would be welcomed and have a real value for the players, they may be willing to reduce their cap percentage in exchange. The owners might be willing to do something they have dismissed as too expensive in the past because now each 1% differential of the players share mean at least $4,250,000 yearly to each team. To make it more tenable to the owners, the individual maximum could be 5 to 7 million dollars minus any signing bonus the player received. This would protect those average players who need the protection most. A reduction of 5% would be worth at least $21 million per team per year, and the players salary Cap for each team would still be in excess of 200 million dollars. The actual details of the implementation would be worked out by both parties to this agreement. This should zero out or accrue slightly to the benefit of the owners.

2) It may be in the NFLPA interest to maintain the membership of retired players, and set up a jointly administered employer/employee welfare (health-disability) and pension plan, as exists with most unions. Since the benefits retired players now receive are relatively small, and based on projections that Cap revenue should explode upward starting with the 2014 TV contract, these benefits could be included in the gross cap (although not for individual teams). The players then would have a greater voice in how these benefits were handled, at the current time they have none. This would reduce the immediate financial obligations of the owners (245 million dollars this past year), and thereby increase the justification for maintaining a close to current percentage of revenue the players receive. In addition, the retired players will have an more effective voice in looking out for their interests, and every player will retire at some point.

3) The percentage of total revenue that makes up the cap would now be lessened, as the owners have been demanding, however the players received something they wanted in exchange. This is what real negotiations are all about. Yet, this in itself would not take care of the owners problem. Therefore, instead of evenly dividing the pool of shared money amongst the owners, the owners could divide a portion of it proportionally. For example, the first 2 billion dollars of the pool of shared money among the owners is cut out, and shared equally among the owners as it is now done. However any revenues in the pool above this amount would be divided in an inverse proportion to the real revenue of each team, as compared to the NFL average. This would adjust for the differences in “Local” revenue, yet not wipe it out completely. The divergence in the total real revenue of each team would be lessened. The details and formula would be worked out by the owners amongst themselves, and the only one who would need to see their books would be the NFL office itself. The owners problem would be solved by the owners, and their sacrifice. Thus, they would not have to be demanding the players to make a major sacrifice, which they fear may well be the precedent for sacrifices asked of them in the future.

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Your comments are dead on. Well said.

I actually think it’s a left wing vs right wing(and a couple guys who washed out after high school football) where left wingers are supporting the players and the right wingers are supporting the owners.
The funny thing is that there is alot of socialistic practices within the NFL (salary cap, draft, etc). So you have the pro-owner group who I believe are mostly conservatives fighting to keep these socialist practices intact while the pro-player group is fighting for the open market to determine player salaries.

And before the ignorant start squawking, the players cannot return to negotiations (unless ordered by the court) without assurances from the owners that their negotiating efforts will not be used against them in the decertification suit. The owners refuse to provide that assurance because they are more interested in winning the legal point than in reaching a new collective bargaining agreement. The players have repeatedly offered to resume negotiations

You are completely out of your mind thinking the owners wouldn’t return to negociating table.

But guarantee if they do that their offers will not be as strong as the one made a few weeks ago. Players have way overplayed their hand here. Just as last player strike was within their rights..owners have right to lockout.

God you sound like either you or daddy was in a union shop or 2…Duh! ..Your statements shows that you are dumber than a bag of Rocks.