The Crystal Ball 2011 Labor Blues The Aftermath

Here we stand, a mere day until the glorious return of professional football courtesy of the National Football League. A season, if we recall, was in jeopardy of even happening a mere six weeks ago. Like many, I’m glad we avoided that alternate timeline. Now that the dust settled on the tete-a-tete between the owners and players, and no significant football was affected, many will pretend that none of this ever happened and fill out our fantasy football rosters and pick ‘em pools with naïve glee. But did we avoid the doomsday ramifications, serious damage to the popularity of the NFL and fallout of fans and money due to the lockout?

The labor action, while ultimately resolved before regular season games were affected, still was devastating to some people, especially the fans. And with the resolution coming so neatly right before training camp makes me wonder if this were nothing more than a 5 month exercise to garner unneeded headlines when all that really seemed to be needed on the surface was a few heads full of common sense and a conference room to iron out the minor sticking points.

Let’s be frank, the 2011 season is already affected. The product the fans, as consumers, will pay to see on the field will show signs early of reduced quality. The truncated off season severely impacted player development, including conditioning, learning of the playbook and game plans and bonding with new teammates. Second and third year players are way behind advancing in the offensive and defensive systems of their teams by sitting at home for months on end. This was valuable learning time these gentlemen required to make large leaps in their growth and to help keep them on a roster. Taking away those instructional sessions has cost some players their jobs.

Plus look at the teams that are breaking in first year head coaches and their coaching staffs. These gentlemen normally utilize the off season to evaluate the talent they have on hand, bring in new players via the draft and free agency to fill needs they see and to take the time to instruct the players on their new offensive and defensive schemes. Now, they have had to compact months of teaching and training into a month. Sure doesn’t seem like a good recipe for success or a quality product to me.

And rookies are way behind the learning curve. Those drafted, if they were lucky managed to snag playbooks or glean other information from their new teams during the brief lifting of the lockout. But what about the undrafted rookie free agents? Many of them spent the spring and summer wondering if they would even have an opportunity to compete for a job. And once the fortunate few did get signed, they had a tiny window of opportunity to not only show coaches they had the talent, skills, drive and will to be an NFL player, but to show they could contribute to a team and a system they barely knew. Today hundreds of undrafted free agents sit at home, ruminating over their one shot to make a team, and analyzing what they did wrong and how they can improve, if they ever get another chance. Usually these players would have an entire spring and summer to work with a team to get their shot. This year, they had a month and became another casualty of the lockout.

But young and hopeful players were not the only team personnel hurt by this war of the wallets. Throughout the lockout, stories abounded about teams furloughing employees for periods of time or handing out pay cuts to employees in order to save money. Coaches were not exempt, as some staffs found their salaries cut, in some cases for the duration of the lockout. Mind you, this occurred during the off season, when while there is no active revenue from games coming in, there still is revenue coming in from merchandise and ticket sales plus there are no real expenditures to make. Many of these employees, working in your normal support positions you can find in any office setting, had to make serious sacrifices just to keep their jobs in a stagnating economy while the owners and players bickered about their share of $9 Billion. Talk about a kick in the teeth from your boss.

The effects of the lockout spread outside the doors of team facilities. Ancillary business, cottage industries and other outlets associated with the NFL all suffered in some way from loss of revenue. Fantasy football, food, snack food, alcohol, television and radio specialty programs, websites, sports bars, vendors, memorabilia and souvenir manufacturers, charities and many more have been feeling the pinch for months. And if people stay away in disgust, then the pinch will continue and affect these industries, the companies that compose them and the employees within.

In case you’re thinking that many of these losses are minor in comparison and most of which can be made back now that the season will actually happen, you would be wrong. Yes, while most businesses will recover, and a good portion of employees will see their incomes return to normal and in some cases get paid back their lost wages. But Canton Ohio will not recoup their losses.

Because of the timing of the CBA agreement, the NFL was forced to cancel the Hall of Fame game, the only game casualty of the entire lockout. While merely a small sacrifice for the NFL as a whole, for Canton this was a worst case scenario. Canton does not have an NFL team, so the city derives its NFL related revenue from the Hall of Fame weekend, where people come from all over to watch the latest Hall of Fame inductees give their acceptance speeches and watch the first football action of the season in an NFL exhibition. But with no game this year, the city lost revenue from hotels, restaurants, memorabilia, parking, shopping and myriad other products and services. By not having the game, the city saw fewer visitors and no NFL teams to play a game. The two teams combined would have brought hundreds of people to Canton requiring goods, food, housing and services. For a small city in Ohio, this impact will be felt until the next Hall of Fame weekend.

However, the part that annoys me most is that all the revenue the players or owners could not agree upon how to fairly split comes from one source, the fans, and neither side seemed to openly acknowledge that. Now before you say, oh no the main revenue for the league comes from advertising and network television deals, think about that. Where do networks get their revenue they use to strike major television deals with the league? Bingo from advertising. And where do the companies that advertise on said networks or with the teams and league directly get their money? From consumers, most likely also football fans, who buy their products and services, items geared specifically toward football fans.

The NFL garners all of their income from fans, either indirectly through advertisers, goods and services, product placement or networks, or directly through ticket sales, merchandising, concessions sales, parking, souvenirs, fan clubs and a host of other direct products. It all generates from our pockets.

And by spending the spring and summer of this year in various federal courts, the NFL found a new way to take money from us in the form of our tax money, which is where the money to run those courts comes from. That’s right, by not being able to sit down like two rational adults and work through their problems; they took even more money from us by tying up federal resources and courts, thus extracting money through our taxes. Hey, NFL, when do I get something back in return? Couldn’t you at least give me a football phone as you mug me?

The backlash from these shenanigans began months ago with a vocal section of fans who have stated unequivocally that the NFL can cram it with walnuts. I bet that shows up in the bottom line of ticket sales, concessions, merchandise and everything else NFL related. Of course, to recoup owners will probably just raise prices on all of those items, so there really is no way to win.

The owners, players and the league were willing to throw the fans and its own employees under the bus for a slightly better deal. When you think that the monetary aspects of the deal will only minimally affect the bank accounts of those most prominent involved in the fight, it makes one wonder if those slight gains will be worth it from a financial standpoint in the long run. While many of those involved in the NFL in some capacity do love the fans, it’s plainly obvious there are just as many that see us as revenue and nothing more.

So as we pull our jerseys and beer cozies out of storage while weeping all is forgiven, let’s pause and make a mental note regarding exactly where we stand in the hearts and minds of those we dote with our attention, affection, celebrity and most importantly, money.

I’m not suggesting you turn your back on the game, or loathe it. Heck, if I were condoning such a stance, I certainly wouldn’t be here right now. But as we head back to our huge crush on these gentlemen and their game, perhaps it’s a good opportunity to tread lightly and not be so free with our love and adulation. After all the NFL is an entertainment venue at its heart and in a time with less and less discretionary income, any cash left over for entertainment purposes must be spent judiciously. If the owners and players can treat their own employees so callously, and ignore and marginalize their fans who ultimately supply the league with its record profits, then maybe we spend our dwindling bucks elsewhere. As owners say when they cut your favorite player, or that player states when he holds out for more money, it’s just business.