Oceans of fiery magma bubble and spit fire at unprotected players trying to negotiate with unregulated owners.  The screams of poor uncompetitive franchises echo across the slimy and singed walls.  Gargantuan, large market behemoth teams break the chains of regulation to rise from the ashes of the collective bargaining agreement to create a near monopoly on the playoffs every year. They throw their weight in gold around to continue signing the best talent out of college now that the NFL draft is a thing of the past. The weak teams perish; parity is as dead as the library on Friday night, the new world order is an MLB like auction of talent every year, with few rising from worst to first.  The hell that I am describing is the CBA-less NFL. 

Or at least that’s how it was in my nightmares. 

Thankfully though, the owners and the players have finally reached an agreement that they find amicable enough to allow them to continue milking the cash cow.  Being the preeminent sports league in America, the NFL is the role model in how to run a league. Competition is good between teams with very few elites, and a majority of middle of the road teams; which always makes the playoff crunch very exciting.  Not to mention the NFL is the only major sports league in the country that hasn’t had to axe any games since their last strike in 1987. 

So why was it so difficult to get this deal done?

One word…Money.  When talks had originally broken down between the players union and the owners, the dispute was over a total of 4 percentage points.  Now to me and you that doesn’t sound like a whole lot. Why can’t you guys just each give 2 and call this thing a deal?  Well I doubt you’d be very willing to just compromise either when each percentage point is worth roughly a billion dollars.  Yeah a billion, that’s a 1 with nine zeros after it.  4 percentage points doesn’t sound so measly now does it?

Fact is though that the NFL as a whole; the league, the players union, and the owners, owe it to everybody to make sure that this game continues to be played at the level of competition, and equity that it currently holds.  Because even though we’re talking about 4 billion dollars, those 4 billion dollars is, in part, ours.  And I don’t mean just the fans’.  I mean the companies that pay teams to advertise, local radio and television contracts, major network television deals with the NFL, merchandising, virtually anything garners some investment on the public’s part into this marketing titan.  While I’m not suggesting that we still have a right to decide what’s done with our money once we give it to the NFL; I am suggesting that the NFL as a whole owes a duty to those who have invested in it on a multi-year basis. 

What’s really the most important about this deal is how well the players have come out of it.  With the exception of the MLB, which apparently wasn’t informed that a league can stand up to its’ players, every other major labor dispute in professional sports usually ends up favoring the management more than the players.  This deal doesn’t necessarily favor the players, but it does at least not seem to hamstring them any more than they already are.  In fact they do gain, over the 6 year life of the new deal players will be earning in total anywhere from 850 million to 900 million more.  This extra money will be coming from the top 15 revenue teams each year, which will be required to pay into the salary pool. 

The players union also gains something more than just better financial compensation for their services.  They also gain the protection of veterans, who surely would have been cut in much higher numbers had a deal not been reached.  The cap will grow above 100 million for the first time ever next year, giving some teams enough wiggle room to be able to keep players that, without a new deal, would have had to have been let go. 

Surprisingly enough, it was not two high revenue teams that voted against the deal.  Both Buffalo and Cincinnati voted against the deal.  Under the terms of the deal the top 15 teams in revenue are split into thirds, which each third paying more depending on how close to the top they are. 

News flash to Cincinnati, you’re going to need all that subsidized contract money when your bevy of young talent start demanding new contracts and ask you to fork over the dough to keep them. Yes, we know you’re a small market team, but there are plenty of small market teams that didn’t have a beef with the plan.  Why didn’t Green Bay, Indianapolis, and Cleveland vote against it?

Not to mention the overall issue that stares every team in the face.  If you didn’t get a deal done, there wasn’t going to be a cap in 2007, and there wasn’t going to be a season in 2008.  I’m not a finance whiz, but I’m pretty sure you can’t make profit as an NFL team if you don’t play the games and fill your stadiums.  Before the strike or lockout would occur in 2008 though, there would be a chaos of an uncapped year, the likes of which haven’t been seen since well before I was born. 

The threat of an uncapped year likely would have slowed down long term free agent signings this year.  If the cap goes away so to does the minimum salary requirement.  Basically in terms of the players this means that the elite ones can bargain for more payment, and the less elite ones lose their bargaining power and can be paid less, creating a greater disparity between them. 

As a passionate fan of the NFL, I can’t begin to thank the owners enough for figuring this deal out.  Despite a few errors in judgment…cough…Browns leaving Cleveland….cough, the NFL continues to be the most exemplary league in the world.  The players are happy, the Owners are making money hand over fist, and the entire country is stark raving mad for the sport.  A more poorly ran organization most likely would have failed at getting this deal done, but the NFL owners are smart enough to know that killing the golden goose is always a bad idea.  What keeps the NFL so successful and so competitive is the willingness of its owners to share the wealth, to fight the urge of greed and to allow all to succeed. Maybe it’s time that some other leagues start thinking that way before more small market teams like the Expos come under the chopping block. 

Seth Glasgow is a junior at Ohio University and can be reached at seth.glasgow@atomicsportsmedia.com