Brian Tuohy on the lockout -- and me on why it needs to destroy the National Football League

Brian Tuohy, in one of his most recent posts on his The Fix Is In website, talks about the NFL lockout and the largest bargaining chips both sides have on the lockout.

This post is a very good discussion as to the lockout and the problems which should be exposed in this league.

So consider this a commentary on that post.

The first thing which I think a lot of people misconceive about the lockout is that it is only, as Brian puts it, trying to get a "small redistribution of that wealth", the $9-10 billion in league revenues that are one of the main sources of contention.

The league is trying to vastly redefine itself. An 18-game season is just one way. I truly believe that there is, in the works, a means to create an elite group of franchises in the league who will trade the championship between themselves. (The NFL is, in a realistic sense, the last of the major sports leagues, as I've said before, with any real degree of year-to-year parity.) I also believe that the owners are attempting to gain a measure of power which will have them lord over the players.

Brian decides to take this discussion a step further and offers solutions which he believes could end the lockout. He offers various proposals which I will offer my opinions on.

First, he goes to the Owners' side:

One of his core assumptions is his belief that the players "are the attraction, and they are what the fans pay to watch."

In a healthy situation, one might believe this. I don't. I believe one of the things which has completely compromised the National Football League (and football in general) is the fact that the attraction of the game is now The Game, as a religious construct.

Death in the family? Rally around football. Ignore your own grief, The Game will make you feel better when Your Team wins...

Economy going into the crapper? President wants us around football at the expense of reality.

Wedding? Make sure the event doesn't compromise the current "Big Game".

Etc. and so forth and so on.

The Game itself, The Sport, has taken on a religious level of significance in this country, subsuming all else. So I cannot agree with the premise given, not that it isn't necessarily well-founded.

That said, Brian offers that the owners should give the players what they want, with some exceptions:

"However, the owners should hold firm on one thing: rookie pay scale cuts. It’s foolish for them to consistently pay over-hyped rookies guaranteed money prior to them ever playing a down of professional football. That money should be paid to the proven players busting their humps in the trenches each and every week."

Sounds good in theory. The problem comes to the point that most of these players, as I stated in my last post, have basically been playing professional football for several years already in the college ranks (and possibly even high school), if they've been getting enough visibility to be impacted by these pay-scale cuts.

It certainly stands to reason why the point should be made. Just ask the Chargers with Ryan Leaf, or the Raiders, who should be arresting JaMarcus BackFat for impersonation of a football player.

It gets back to the question I ask about college football: Is college football a real college sport, or are the colleges fronts for a minor-league system, especially at the top levels?

But the meat and potatoes of why Brian's approach wouldn't work come to the next point that the owners would demand:

"In redistributing this money to tenured players, a caveat should go along with it. Owners should tell the players this: we will no longer cover for you.

There should be a zero tolerance policy in the NFL for criminal behavior.

Player arrested for a weapons violation? Out of the league. Assault and battery, especially of a woman? Finished. DUI or drug arrest? Done. No second chances. No half-hearted public apologies and sob stories traded for a lucrative contract.

Crime = expulsion. Plain and simple."

This would be the one thing which could make me a football fan again. There's one major problem:

You cease to have an NFL at that moment.

You would literally have to shut down the National Football League for at least one season. You would probably have to do the same with major college football -- with a recent admission that one major-college player in ten would already have to be banned.

You would also have to create a National Sports Commission, with inter-disciplinary power to remove players from the ability to play football at any level.

In 1998, as Tuohy notes in his book (page 23 in the Nook version), a prominent survey indicates that 20% of the surveyed players in the league had criminal records. (A similar FOIA request about the NBA's American-born players puts their number about 40%!!)

You'd have to think it's worse today, especially with the news continuing almost every day about the farcical nature of the purported "structure of the National Football League".

Just ask Mike Vrabel.

You'd literally have to expel a third of the league -- MINIMUM -- if this took effect. That's why you won't see it, especially with Tuohy's premise.

It needs to be done, but, especially as criminal as college sports have become, where do you get the players, The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater?

Roger Goodell has just announced Tuohy's final point for the owners:

But the players would never agree to this, nor will they agree to the HGH testing which the NFL supposedly wants to impose upon the end of this labor dispute. Why? Because the decertified Players’ Union always has protected these miscreant athletes whenever and wherever they run afoul of the league or the law. Instead of rooting out the bad apples—and the NFL is loaded with them—they grant them chance after chance to “rehabilitate.”

If the National Football League did just these last two things, they would not be able to fill five 53-man rosters from the current players.

I said it, that's my opinion, and that's how reliant I believe the players have become reliant on criminal elements and drugs to "be the man".

Many of these players have probably laid a trail of rape and robbery since high school (dear God, what are the high school cheerleading squads even for, if nothing more than just a sexual conquest for the starting quarterback?), and don't get me started on the drugs...

Every major team (and many top players on top of it) have "fixers", effective Mafia-types to clean up the mess so that the players can continue to be presented as these Adonis-types we are all supposed to literally prostrate ourselves to and worship.

Facts are facts: Any real attempt to clean up the league now forces a major reorganization in American sport.

The National Football League needs a long lockout for this to even be considered, and probably needs to be destroyed. Goodell is part of it, but the nature of the conduct of the players and what they do cannot be ignored.

Tuohy then goes to the other side of the argument, the players.

If the players would be bold enough, they should simply begin their own league.

Again, taking from his premise that the players are what the people come to see, his central proposition is, in fact, that the players should threaten to destroy the National Football League and create a player-oriented league.

There are certainly questions -- some of the stadiums currently in use are tied to the National Football League (most prominently the likes of Lambeau Field and Jerry Jones' billion-dollar Palace), so do you start playing the games of his hypothetical "Madison Cheeseheads" at Camp Randall?

But Brian's best idea, whether or not it would be in a new league, comes down to the simple philosophy that even Vince McMahon figured out for his professional football league:

More wins mean more money. Win as a team, lose as a team. Every player is accountable, and accountable to each other.

Everybody gets paid the same (if you want variation by position, fine, though Brian does not propose it), but if you really want to get paid, WIN.

It would do one more thing, especially if such a league took off and carried the "National Religion" banner forward -- it would reduce the probability that the games would be fixed. It would not eliminate it, by any means, but it would reduce the possibility, since, to really get paid, you have to perform on the scoreboard.

Could you really risk tanking a game or shaving points if you didn't get that money back from losing the game in your side affairs? And wouldn't some of that carry over into endorsements, etc.?

Brian, once again, gives good ideas to think about. I don't think some of them would work, because of the criminal fraud that the Religion of Football has, in and of itself, become.