Poll: Who is to Blame for the NFL Lockout?

I’d love to see your reasoning.

But I do think the blame falls 70% players, 30% owners.

“both sides who are acting like little children arguing over more money than 99.9% of the world will ever see in their lives while our country is going to shit with 10% unemployment”

That’s my vote.

I would like to see the owners open up the books cuz I don’t think it should be a problem for them to prove their losses, if they actually did have any. At the same time the owners made some concessions the players obviously weren’t interested in. Seems like both are really only interested in the dough and being greedy. Basically, both make plenty so meet somewhere in the middle and let me have football. Till then I don’t wanna hear from either side.

and start their own league?

since all he does is ‘win’, according to some…

Both sides are at fault here; ownership never should’ve agreed to the deal back in I think it was 2006 (I guess Tagliabue can be blamed for that, no HOF for you!), while players should’ve taken a closer look at the deal the NFL was offering Friday, it looked completely reasonable to me. And this fuss over looking at the financials, with the publicly-owned Packers excluded, makes no sense. Why as private enterprise should they have to make their numbers known to their employees? Players do deserve to be compensated fairly for sacrificing their bodies, but they’re stretching my sympathy now after looking over that deal the league offered.

1. There was going to be football next year
2. The owners got mad
3. There is no longer going to be football.

I blame the owners

Also, can someone show me these “concessions” that the owners made? All I have been able to find is that instead of asking for an extra $1 Billion, they have reduced that price to $800 million. If I’m a player, that doesn’t even make me blink. Are they still pushing the 18 game schedule?

reasons:

public financing for their stadiums. local governments made the decision to spend money on stadiums to grow the local economy, which i am all in favor of as long as the games are played. the owners are threatening to unilaterally break that arrangement. NFL teams, in almost every case, are (heavily) publicly subsidized operations. they aren’t just locking out players, they are (potentially) locking out small business owners and workers that paid for those stadiums and who depend on game day revenues for their livelihoods.

owners don’t ruin their bodies. the majority of NFL players make less than $1mill over the course of their career. it’s easy to think of both sides as being very wealthy, but on the whole, that simply isn’t true of the players, and they are the ones making permanent sacrifices to their health.

why should the players take less? i’d like to see one good reason besides greedy old white dudes want more cash to roll around in and jerk off to. the NFL has record breaking profits, is the most successful sports entity in the history of the world, yet NFL players deserve less money?

the owners have been plotting this shit. from opting out of the last CBA early to the strike-proof TV deals, these sinister bastards have been itching to do this. the players would have happily continued under the previous deal, which was massively profitable for all parties involved. they rocked the boat when it didn’t need to be rocked, so fuck them.

Now from what I understand the revenues are 9 billion dollars, the owners want a billion off the top and split the remaining somewhere around 50/50 leaviing the players 4 billion dollars. How many players are there? 32 teams with 53 man rosters is 1,696, players. lets get generous and round it up to 1800 with IR and practice squad players

So $4,000,000,000/1800players = $2,222,222 average salary

Thats a 23.4% increase in two years.

What more does the union want? The owners have expenses, they have to wait on these large children, market them to the world and create their popularity that allows for these endorsement deals (I don’t think the owners see any of that money)

“Both” votes since school got out today…

$4.2B, in 2010 – $9.3B The owners opted out of the existing CBA which allows the players portion to be ~59% of total revenue (define revenue – monies before or after expenses – idk). The owners believe that ~$5.4 billion split amongst all the players is too much and want to include the players involvement in infrastructure costs, i.e., an additional $1B off the top. The players said “NO” and the rest is history. All of the other points are chump change compared to this.
Fact of the matter is, the players union probably could initiate a union supported retirement fund, and long term health benefits to retired/injured players with the salaries that many now have. However, not all players have big money contracts, Adrian Foster got $385K last year and I would think that most players have many expenses that you don’t think about or are not incurred by a regular Joe, such as agent percentages, public relations manager/firm, financial aide/manager firm, etc. I would suspect that he spends 30-40% of his income on these type costs, but I just am not sure.

Remember people: revenue means NOTHING if your expenses are just as much as revenue.

You can have 40Billion dollars or revenue and 39.9Billion dollars of expenses and only come out with 0.1Billion (100Million) of profit.

Revenue does NOT mean that is how much money the league makes…