A Conservative Look at the NFL - and Glass-Steagall?

The Tygrrrr Express wrote a great piece today about the NFL lockout. He offers substantive ideas to bring the matter to a head. But he finishes with this poignant message to Roger Goodell:

"The National Football League is bigger and better than ever. Roger Goodell is presiding over the most successful sports empire in sports history. He inherited a gift from Pete Rozelle and Paul Tagliabue. He must maintain it if he wants his legacy to be on their level one day."

Wow. That was so well said. And Tygrrrr has always been a Goodell supporter. That's what you call good ol' fashioned "tellin' it like it is."

I, however, felt compelled to add this:

The owners are losing money on other endeavors and now want to loot the NFL to compensate. It’s no different than when after the repeal of Glass-Steagal(sp) and the subsequent tech-crash, insurance companies raised their rates and blamed tort law and such. The insurance companies lost a fortune in that crash. They simply shifted the burden. In the NFL’s case, the owners are claiming they are losing revenues but will not share with anyone exactly how. You can’t negotiate in a revenue sharing model without all sides knowing exactly where they and each other stand. The owners are trying to set a legal precedent here - the ostensive right of owners in a franchise to obscure their operations from each other. I hope the players can force the owners to the table by killing that dangerous and stupid idea. As owners in the NFL they must keep their books open.

Tygrrrr offers a nice package or two, but parties can't even talk about that until they know each other's positions.

Though not a franchise in the traditional sense, the "NFL" is de facto a franchise no matter how you look at it. Many an upstart league (USFL, XFL, to name but two recent debacles) learned this lesson. The NFL has become like the Holy Roman Empire, and like the Holy Roman Empire, there is nothing Holy nor Roman about it, but it is an Empire and it's high time the owners faced the reality that the NFL made them, not the other way around.

JMJ