The Real Losers Of The NFL Lockout

With the NFL lockout now in full swing and a decertified Player's Union sitting on their hands until an April 6th injunction hearing (which will basically argue the lockout is unlawful and will hope to force NFL business to resume as usual despite not having a CBA in place) many football analysts are left only having the Draft to discuss. In the absence of any March football news bar the labor hearings there have been dozens of pieces about who are the winners or in most cases the biggest losers of the lockout. Many NFL coaches and players feel hosed by the NFL especially people like new head coach of the San Francisco 49ers Jim Harbaugh who cannot conduct mini-camps and OTAs to get acclimated with his team, assess personnel and implement his system. Other losers are teams like the Philadelphia Eagles who are unable to trade their expendable asset in the form of Kevin Kolb or make a splash in Free Agency.

Then of course you have the individual players most notably the nearly 500 unrestricted free agents who currently have no team nor any means of signing with a new one. Also there are the Adrian Peterson's of the world who liken the conduct of the NFL to "modern day slavery" despite the $10.72 Million Peterson was paid in base salary last season.

However many are forgetting the people who will be hurt the most by the NFL lockout save ESPN.com's Howard Bryant. Despite the "war chest" the owners have compiled in order to wait out a lockout we are in the midst of seeing pay cuts across the board for every NFL franchise as well as many layoffs likely to come in the near future depending on how long the lockout period lasts. These rank-and-file employees obviously do not have the means to survive a lockout like the players do and virtually all of them have had their financial futures thrown into disarray.

In addition Bryant's article sheds light on the $4 Billion dollars the owners secured through their television contracts to see them a season or even 2 without football. Bryant argues that such is the NFL's power that they were able to strong-arm their television clients into accepting deals that would force them to continue paying the league even if a season was cancelled and in one case DirectTV would actually pay the NFL more in 2011 if the season is cancelled than it did in 2010 to broadcast its famous Sunday Ticket Package. This would invariably cause a trickle-down effect for the television companies if the work stoppage continued into the season and would put even more people in financial peril.

This labor situation is getting to the point where now I hope the courtroom dealings get nastier and nastier so that the NFL and its owners will be forced to own up to all their greedy financial dealing they have been getting away with since the NFL took over as the preeminent cash-cow in professional sports.