Maybe, if the players union would offer to pick up half the expenses (travel, payroll-other than players, health care expenses, insurance, etc.) , those greedy owners would consider that 50-50 split equitable. Just a thought.

i am amazed that anyone has the balls to “dictate” how much an owner should be paid on his investment or how much he can pay his employees. did you ever tell the owner of your company how much they are “entitled” to make? i understand that some of the owners may be very greedy people but so is every business out there. since when did anyone complain about apple being too greedy and not lowering prices? (they have $65 billion cash on the books>> this is over 6X NFL total sales in any given year).

in this country you have no right to tell the owner of a private enterprise what they can do unless it is against the law. that’s the way capitalism works! our choice is to buy or not buy that is the extent of our rights. if you want to change that then you have to revamp our whole economic system.

you want to say owners may fight dirty and they are greedy. i agree! but they have the rule of law on their side if they want to pay players $100/game that is their right. of course they will destroy themselves in the process but that is also their right. no one has the right to tell an owner of a company what they are entitled to make. only the market can decide this effectively. gee, i think gas should be fixed at $2/ gallon that would help us consumers out a lot.

this is just ridiculous.

the owners opted out of the past cba a full 3 months BEFORE upshaw was even diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. if this is the case, then how can brees explain the attempted take over matt stover tried to pull to take upshaw’s job away even 2 months before the owners actually opted out because the writing was on the wall that they would? upshaw obviously planned to see the deal through.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3545830
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3404596
the nfl also hired batterman 5 months before upshaw was diagnosed. yeah, it’s obvious the league was planning a lockout but they were planning it BEFORE upshaw’s death.

this is just a ridiculous accusation by brees and frankly i’m disappointed.

the more $ you make, the more you want. rich people are greedy, so are poor people. everyone in the world is greedy to some extent.

if you have a 4,000 sq. foot house but your buddy has an 8,000 sq foot house with an indoor pool and theater you want that too.

if you were an NFL owner and you were making a net profit of $5-10mm/year would you be satisfied? if you could get $5-10mm more/year by cutting players pay wouldn’t you do it? be honest with yourself.

if you were paul allen with $18 billion you wouldn’t care b/c it is a trifle amount. but if you are richardson who is worth $100mm $10mm is real $ to you and it may be the difference between you keeping your team, damn right you’d do it.

everyone wants more, because it is all relative. why would you think the owners are any different then the rest of us?

that the NFL took any of these actions does not say anything about the fact that they WANTED a lockout. The owners opted out because they thought the deal was unfairly weighted to the players. I don’t see how that’s a big surprise seeing as we are currently well into a lockout based upon, you guessed it, the owners trying to get money back. The remainder of these actions, to me, suggest the owners were planning ahead for the possibility of a lockout if the players would not accept the reduction of their share in the new CBA. Trying to get the American Needle case through is just good business. If you have the potential for a broad ranging exemption from something that could potentially come back and bite you in the ass, tell me you wouldn’t. To me, all the actions Brees talks about can equally be referred back to the NFL planning ahead. Its’ really just smart business.

To me, it makes no sense that businessmen would WANT a lockout. It makes no sense. A lockout is inevitably a tactic in a negotiation. To say a side WANTS it is, in my opinion, ridiculous. You use a lockout to try and get the other side to make a deal.

but these owners are getting to fund LAVISH lifestyles with this football money

I don’t know that I agree with that. In some cases, the owners have bought and funded their teams, and these lavish lifestyles with other businesses and the football team doesn’t contribute a whole lot. In others, I don’t agree that owners live lavish lifestyles.
But beyond that, that’s how it works in business. The owners took and take the financial risks of the business. The basis of most corporations is the one who takes the financial risk ought to take the financial gain. The owners put in a lot of time and money to make their team and, by extension, the NFL, what it is.
I agree that it shouldn’t be that every activity is associated with making money, but sadly it is. I don’t see how the players are any better in that sense though. They’re suing in a Court over the fact that they want 50% rather than 47% or whatever it is. To say the players are ‘making a living’ may apply to some of the lower paid players but every one on the Brady lawsuit (sans probably Von Miller) could already be a rich, rich man based on what they’ve made. I tend to have limited sympathies for guys who make millions a year and can’t save properly. That’s no reason to punish the men who paid them extraordinarily well for several years

based on the average team revenue for 2009, each team had $250.5mm in revenue (this is net of stadium debt) but it doesn’t matter for these calculations. so the players essentially get 50% of total revenue thru the salary cap mechanism regardless of which team makes the revenue.

so the three highest revenue teams (cowboys, skins, pats) had exactly $339.5mm above the average revenue. that means that a team with $250mm in revenue had their salary cap/floor raised by $10.61mm to get the players their 50% share. so essentially the 29 other teams paid $307.67mm in wages to the players for revenue that the big 3 earned.

the steelers essentially paid a tax (in the form of increased payroll) of more slightly than $10.61mm (because they were under the league average) to the players while the top 3 teams got to keep their revenue/profits. cowboys, skins and pats dumped 90% of their contribution to the increased salary cap while getting to keep 90% of that revenue for themselves. how come i never get deals like that?

it just didn’t make sense that all the lower revenue teams were so unprofitable until i confirmed how they come up with the salary cap. i didn’t think it was possible because it made no sense. i thought a portion of unshared revenue never got into the player’s hands. i still can’t believe this is truly how they do it!

and i read the legal info and it was very good (albeit a little scary for the parity of the league) and if found something very good written by a professor from PSU and that got me to write the fanpost " the nfl revenue model is all f***ed up". i came across the post from the dallas poster months ago but i thought he was wrong b/c it made no sense but then when someone wrote a response to why my revenue #s don’t add up i started looking around and stumbled across this PSU proffesor. it confirmed what the cowboy guy was saying and it was just too good to pass up. it’s no wonder there is a lockout, the NFL has never really addressed the issue and now this unshared revenue is really killing some of these teams (especially the lions who only have $210mm rev). it’s just so screwed up you have to laugh.

here is the link to the PSU Professor and he goes into great detail about how teams make $ and where some possible solutions to the lockout could come from.

More Like the United Nations Than McDonald’s: Economic and Policy Aspects of the NFL Labor Dispute