[BeaverFever]

Published on Wednesday, September 26, 2012 by On the Commons

$1:

We're the NFL. We Don't Have to Care
Here's what's really happening in the football referees lockout
by David Morris

Watching professional football these days reminds me of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine the telephone operator on Saturday Night Live and her famous punch line, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

Or in this case the National Football League. For those who don’t follow football, let me bring you up to date. In June the NFL locked out its referees and has been using replacements ever since. Referees at major college conferences refused to become scabs so the NFL reached down into the lower college and even high school ranks.

The result, as many predicted, has been a disaster.

“We have all seen officials have bad games. We have even seen bad officials. This is different, and unlike anything I can remember,” writes Michael Rosenberg of Inside NFL. “These guys are overwhelmed. They look like they spent 20 years riding a bicycle and now they have to fly a plane, and they keep looking around the cockpit for the handlebar brakes.”

Mike Pereira, who used to oversee NFL officiating before he went on Fox t.v. reveals that his on-the-air commentary has become much more challenging. “I’m not sure how refs arrive at rulings when they aren’t using NFL rules.”

Games are longer and much more tedious as replacement officials huddle and huddle and huddle trying to figure out what to do. “They’re killing the tempo and flow of the game,” CBS’ Shannon Sharpe asserts.

Typically, the home team wins a little more than 50 percent of the time. This season, the home team is 31-17 writes Marc Tracy at The New Republic. Some believe this is a result of replacements being intimidated by hometown fans.

It’s gotten so bad that Mitch Mortaza, founder of the Lingerie Football League, a league that has fined players for wearing too many clothes, recently tried to make his league look good by comparison. “Due to several on-field incompetent officiating we chose to part ways with a couple crews which apparently are now officiating in the NFL,” he writes on the league’s Facebook page. “We have not made public comment to date because we felt it was not our place to do so. However in light of tonight’s event, we felt it was only fair that NFL fans knew the truth as to who are officiating these games.”

The “event” he was referring to occurred on Monday Night Football. With a few seconds to go the Seattle Seahawks QB launched a Hail Mary pass into the end zone. A Packer caught the ball and a Seahawk quickly grabbed on to it. When they hit the ground they both had possession. According to NFL rules that meant the pass was an interception. Two replacement officials, positioned perfectly on either side of the corner of the end zone, made two opposite calls. They huddled and huddled and after reviewing the play ruled it a touchdown. Only the hometown fans were happy. Others are already calling it the play that will live in infamy.

The assault on the integrity of the game, and the safety of the players, has not fazed the NFL. Before the season began Dave Zirin and Mike Elk predicted in The Nation, “The NFL clearly believes with no small amount of justification that they can do this because no one will care.” At the time NFL Vice President Ray Anderson apparently agreed, “You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch someone officiate a game.”

By the second week of the new football season coaches and players were vigorously complaining about the officiating. The NFL quickly responded by threatening to discipline those coaches or owners who publicly protested. “We contacted them to remind them that everyone has a responsibility to respect the game,” said NFL’s Ray Anderson. A few days later the fines began.

On SportsCenter, former Forty Niner QB Steve Young forthrightly explained to fans that nothing could be done, “Everything about the NFL now is inelastic for demand. There’s nothing they can do to hurt the demand for the game. So the bottom line is they don’t care. Player safety—doesn’t matter in this case. Bring in the Division III officials–-doesn’t matter. Because in the end, you’re still going to watch the game, we’re going to all complain and moan and gripe and say there’s all these problems, all the coaches say it, the players say it—doesn’t matter. So just go ahead, gripe all you want.”

After griping, Josh Levin at Slate grudgingly agrees, “It’s crappy to know that you and I and all the NFL fans out there provide the NFL’s leverage against its workers. But what are we supposed to do—not watch football? … Being a silent accomplice to Roger Goodell’s union-busting barely even registers.”

The key bargaining issue between owners and workers has to do with money. No surprise there. What is surprising is how little money is involved—$3.3 million a year according to Peter King of Sports Illustrated. That’s the amount the NFL wants to cut from its current pension contributions.

Compare that to the $3 billion a year the 32 owners of the NFL are dividing up in t.v. revenue, plus the tens of millions of dollars more they make from selling tickets, merchandise, concessions, etc. The cost of keeping referees pensions where they are is about $100,000 per team. A few days ago Forbes came out with its 2012 list of billionaires. Three more NFL owners made the list, bringing the total number of billionaire football owners to 18.

Ironically, there is another sticking point between referees and owners. The owners want to be able to “bench” referees who make mistakes in order to hold them accountable. But no replacement referee has yet to be benched.

And who will hold the owners accountable for the way they have undermined the sport? Apparently no one. We like our football too much.

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/were-nfl-we-dont-have-care

[Thanos]

The owners have already eviscerated the NFL players association. By getting rid of the officials union they'll have no more opposition to massive salary cuts, top-to-bottom for all of football. That's why they apparently don't care about how badly the replacement refs have done. The end goal is destroying all unionized entities inside of pro football and they'll let the disgrace on the field continue for as long as it takes, until the refs cave in and come back to work for massively reduced salaries and benefits.

This one is important to study because you can see the outlines in this plan repeating itself in the current NHL lockout. There's no fiscal justification for locking the players out or demanding that they take another massive pay cut on top of the 24% one they already took back in 2005. Once again, the end goal for the owners is the obliteration of all union/association activity within professional sports. They'll destroy the game altogether in the short term if they end up with a total victory in the long term.

[Lemmy]

And I say it again: in the long-term, all pro-sports leagues will be owned by the players' associations. There's no other logical long-term scenario except for the players to also be the owners. Parasites are removable.

[Thanos]

How so? Even if you could get all the players on a team to pool every penny they had together they'd still fall tens of millions of dollars short to buy an NHL team, and probably hundreds of millions short if they wanted to buy an NFL/MLB team.

The more logical scenario is that professional sports will be returning to the way they were operated before the players associations were formed. Yeah, the player salaries will be much larger; none of the guys are in danger of ever going poor after they've been signed or end up homeless after their careers are over, the way it happened to too many of them way back when. But practically all of the side-benefits from TV revenue, merchandising, arena revenue, etc, will flow directly into the owners pockets without any of it going to the players anymore. The bigger insult to injury that the team owners are going to get away with isn't even going to affect the players anyway. The taxpayers and city councils that get bullhorned and threatened into building new arenas and stadiums ("build me a new arena at your expense, not mine, or I'll move the team to Florida") see very little in the way of fiscal return. They basically end up build a $500 million to $1 billion building and get nothing at all out of it, aside from the very dubious civic "pride" of having a professional league team in town. When they find out the hard way (Maple Leafs, LA Clippers, Washington Redskins, etc) with an uncompetitive joke of a team that the owner usually doesn't even care if the team wins as long as he keeps making money for himself, all they can say is that they're just another bunch of suckers that got completely fleeced by a snake-oiling robber baron.

Seriously, the collapse of all the professional sports leagues in North America would probably be the best thing for everyone. Too bad it'll never happen because the fans always keep coming back for more and more abuse.

[Alta_redneck]

The NFL fired the replacements refs tonight and reach a tentative deal with the regular officials, so this thread's dead Fred.

[Lemmy]

Thanos Thanos:

How so? Even if you could get all the players on a team to pool every penny they had together they'd still fall tens of millions of dollars short to buy an NHL team, and probably hundreds of millions short if they wanted to buy an NFL/MLB team.

800 NHL players with an average salary of $2.5M. That means if they pooled their current year salary, for one year, they'd have $2B to spend. With that they could buy the five most valuable NHL franchises, by Forbes' valuation. In 4 years, the players could own all 30 NHL franchises. Similar timelines would buy out the NFL and MLB, if players pooled their salaries. That's without even considering input from the unions and from alumni. It would be much easier than the owners ever considered for the players to buy them out.

And if the owners refuse to play ball, the players will simply wise up and form their own leagues. But I'd bet everything I own that, one day, pro sports will be owned and staffed by the players. The magnate owners will be cut out of the equation because the only thing they bring is money and now that the players, collectively, have money, the owners have no leverage.

[Freakinoldguy]

Alta_redneck Alta_redneck:

The NFL fired the replacements refs tonight and reach a tentative deal with the regular officials, so this thread's dead Fred.

And I'm assuming the call or missed call, depending on who's team you cheer for, on the last play of the game in Seattle Monday Night was the straw that broke the camels back. It must have embarrased the dolts at NFL headguarters enough to get them off their asses and finally give the Ref's what they want.

[Lemmy]

Nah, it was the players who came to the owners and said "Someone's going to get killed with these Bozos calling the games, so get the real refs back or we walk and your revenues plummet".

[rickc]

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/26/nf ... -contract/
The NFL and the refs have came to an agreement. They will be back to work tomorrow.
Monday nights debacle was just too much. Many fans were talking about boycotting the games untill the real refs were reinstated. There was just too much money on the line for everyone involved,if the fans quit watching. Monday night is the biggest money making night for a sports bar. I'm glad its over. I will go a lot easier on the refs, now that I realize just what a fantastic job they actually do.

[Thanos]

Lemmy Lemmy:

Thanos Thanos:

How so? Even if you could get all the players on a team to pool every penny they had together they'd still fall tens of millions of dollars short to buy an NHL team, and probably hundreds of millions short if they wanted to buy an NFL/MLB team.

800 NHL players with an average salary of $2.5M. That means if they pooled their current year salary, for one year, they'd have $2B to spend. With that they could buy the five most valuable NHL franchises, by Forbes' valuation. In 4 years, the players could own all 30 NHL franchises. Similar timelines would buy out the NFL and MLB, if players pooled their salaries. That's without even considering input from the unions and from alumni. It would be much easier than the owners ever considered for the players to buy them out.

And if the owners refuse to play ball, the players will simply wise up and form their own leagues. But I'd bet everything I own that, one day, pro sports will be owned and staffed by the players. The magnate owners will be cut out of the equation because the only thing they bring is money and now that the players, collectively, have money, the owners have no leverage.

I'll grant that it's mathematically possible but there's two things that would stop it from ever happening. One, the owners are experts at collusion. They'd just close ranks again and refuse to sell any team to an ownership group comprised of players. Two, atheletes aren't normal people. They live in a pocket universe by themselves that's full of the stereotypical successful-guy attitude of "fuck you, I did this all on my own". The idea that they'd ever engage in any sort of openly collectivist behaviour, outside of belonging to the players associations, isn't believable. I don't think that they're as openly greedy as the owners are, but they are very self-centred as far as personalities goes. Charity appearances are one thing, because most of them are good guys who like to help out the less fortunate. But adopting a collectivist business plan that would forever alter the nature of professional sports? I can't see it ever happening.