football

43 posts

Stop Crying, There Will Be an NFL Season (maybe)

11 comments

Since labor troubles in 1987 cancelled one game and saw replacement players in NFL uniforms, labor issues have been minor compared to the other major American sports leagues. The NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball have all seen seasons cut short (or cancelled altogether) as a result of labor strife. Now the NFL is facing a real possibility of losing games in 2011.

Cigars and brandy, NFL Owners' second biggest expense after player salaries

The main issue in labor talks is how to split up the reported $9 billion in revenue the league and its teams take in each year. Under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the first $1 billion off the top belongs to the team owners. Of the remaining revenue, 60% goes toward player salaries while the balance goes to the owners and team expenses. The owners claim that rising costs are directing most of the profits toward the players, and that they should receive a bigger portion of the $9 billion. Some of their proposals involve increasing their primary allocation from $1 billion to $2 billion and reducing the 60% of the excess revenue that goes to the players. Their position is that they no longer want to pay the players as much as they are.

There is a key bargaining difference between “not wanting to pay” and being “unable to pay”, and that’s a main sticking point for the NFL Players Association. If the owners came to the bargaining table and claimed they could not afford to pay the players, the NFLPA would have a legal to right to examine owners’ financials. NFL owners, however, have claimed that general economic difficulties are resulting in an overall strain on profits. Essentially, they’re saying “We can pay you that much, we just don’t want to.” Under established labor law, the NFLPA has no rights to see team financial statements if this is the case. Players do have audit rights, but owners are only obligated to show them team revenues and not expenses.

So what happens now?

Many expect that an agreement will not be reached before the current CBA expires on March 3rd, and the owners will lock out the players shortly thereafter. This will affect the off-season in a number of ways until a deal is reached:

Some owners have even sent their kids in to negotiate with players.
  • The NFL draft will still happen in late April, but teams will not be able to sign their draft picks, trade draft picks that involve a current NFL player, or sign undrafted rookies. The teams will essentially pick their guy and then wait until a new CBA is hashed out.
  • Free agents are out of luck. Players whose contracts have expired cannot sign with another NFL team while players are locked out. They could go play for a team in another league like the CFL or UFL.
  • Players under contract will not be paid, and (most likely) could not play for another league. Teams could not bar a player from working at all, but could possibly bring legal action if a player participated in another football league. During the NHL’s cancelled 2004-05 season, many players went to Europe and played professionally there, and owners had no issues. NFL owners have already stated they might.
  • Head coaches will most likely be paid during a lockout, but their assistants most likely will not be. Coaches’ contracts are written differently from those of players and assistants, and most will continue to receive full salaries even if no football is played.

The implications become much greater if a deal still hasn’t been reached in August, when teams are ramping up for the regular season. A shortened pre-season or regular season would be the most innocuous result. Replacement players have and can be used if the owners want to stage the games.

Players are preparing for the lockout. Tom Brady replaced his dog's bed of hundred dollar bills with twenties.

The worst possible scenario is one where a deal still hasn’t been reached well into the fall which results in a cancelled season and no Super Bowl.

In any labor negotiation, both sides want to feel like they stood up for their constituents and fought as hard as they could. This is the main reason why a deal most likely won’t be done before August. Any conclusion before then will make it look like one side gave in and let the other side win. I wouldn’t expect a deal before August or September with the most likely effect being a shortened season. In the end, I think the billionaires will win out over the millionaires, owners will get their concessions, and the game will go on.

In the meantime, most fans (yours truly included) will continue to freak out about the possiblity of no NFL in 2011. I don’t even want to think about all the time I spend watching NFL network in the summer hearing about how my favorite players have been arrested or showed up to camp overweight. The thought of having to work after 2pm on Fridays and Tuesdays, key times for fantasy football owners, frightens me more than birds do. (And I REALLY hate birds.) But most devastatingly, the thought of spending Sundays at home instead of at a bar watching the Vikings sends chills down my spine. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, but COME ON.

Let’s all just hope that this gets worked out and such fears aren’t realized. If August is on our calendars and labor issues remain, we’ll circle back and figure out what the hell to do with our lives.

Your College Rivalry is a Cotillion Compared to Auburn-Alabama

108 comments

Are you one of those people who leaves a football game in the fourth quarter if it’s raining, or if your team is up by four touchdowns, or you want to beat the traffic, or you’re just generally kind of feeling like a pansy that day? If so, you are not qualified to be a University of Alabama fan. In fact, I hope you never meet any Alabama fans, because they would sense the pansy in you and eat you for lunch. Perhaps literally.

Yesterday, Auburn University announced that the two giant oak trees at historic Toomer’s Corner have been poisoned and will likely not survive, which comes two weeks after an Alabama fan who identified himself only as “Al from Dadeville” called in to Paul Finebaum’s radio show (which is a whole different circus of insanity that I encourage you to explore on your own time) and claimed to have administered a lethal dose of herbicide to the trees following the Crimson Tide’s defeat in the Iron Bowl. Since Al from Dadeville is an Alabama fan, he obviously didn’t claim responsibility by using such big words, but you get the idea.

Trees might not seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but they’re central to the most Auburn-y of Auburn football traditions: Rolling Toomer’s Corner with toilet paper after a victory. Killing the trees at Toomer’s Corner is akin to a Michigan fan blowing up The Horseshoe and then pissing on the rubble or an Oklahoma fan shooting Bevo in the head and butchering him for steaks. Not only is it a drastic act of crazed fandom (and, it must be noted, sore-loserdom), but it’s also at least vaguely illegal; the FBI has opened an investigation because the poison used to kill the trees may have seeped into Auburn’s groundwater. Al from Dadeville potentially succeeded into sorta-poisoning not just the trees but the whole town, the prospect of which I can only imagine would make him nothing less than sexually excited.

The Great Toomer’s Tree Tragedy marks the second time in the past six months that an FBI investigation has rubbed up against the Auburn-Alabama football rivalry (the first involved dog track impresario and Auburn booster Milton McGregor and his possible financial involvement with some guy named Cameron Newton, a young man of whom I have certainly never heard and on whom I would cast nary an aspersion), clearly setting some sort of asinine fan-scandal record for American sports. We all have a lot of catching up to do in order to be the kinds of fans who commit not just regular felonies, but federal offenses for our teams of choice.

As a Georgia fan and somewhat impartial third party, I’m not really sure where I stand. My first thought was, “Sounds like something an Auburn fan would do,” which is perhaps even more telling when you consider the fact that my sainted mother is an Auburn alumna. And really, the only way that an Alabama fan could have cut further to the core of the Auburn fanbase would have been to hide Cam Newton’s Crest WhiteStrips. Killing the trees could have been an act of vicious brilliance if Al from Dadeville had only found it within himself to let them die silently, but like the moron he most surely is, he had to call in and claim ownership for the Crimson Tide. If a redneck sports fan does something rash and doesn’t document it on sports talk radio, does it still count? Of course not.

Which means that the real endgame of this whole debacle is not that the historic trees are about to be actual history, but that Auburn has a free shot at Alabama, one which surely no one will begrudge them, and Auburn fans can take that shot on as grand a scale as they see fit. Mostly because Alabama deserves it, but also partly because they’re already Auburn, the Dick Cheney of modern college football, so no one will be surprised when they retaliate. If I were them, I’d start trying to figure out some way to sell Nick Saban into white slavery immediately.

UPDATED: The man arrested this morning for the tree murders, Harvey Almorn Updyke, has children named Crimson and Bear. You cannot make this shit up. He was also never an Alabama student and has never been a season ticket holder.

Earlier: Trees at Toomer’s Corner poisoned via ESPN.com

Gawkward: We Like Sportz Edition

4 comments

Gawkward is Crasstalk’s regular feature where we point out the most insane bullshit that gets posted to Gawker.

Today’s Gawkward is actually from Gawker’s fratty younger brother, Deadspin. Here’s the backstory:

1. On Monday Night Football, the Arizona Cardinals continued their season of general suckery by getting smoked by the fairly-sucky-themselves San Francisco 49ers.

2. During the fourth quarter of that game, long after the Cardinals’ general suckery had become obvious and the game was no longer in question, Cardinals QB Derek “Moose Balls” Anderson was briefly caught sitting on the bench cracking a smile after a teammate said something to him. No, he was not caught sucking a clown’s dick. He was not caught buying jenkem from a Malaysian tranny-boy. He was not caught murdering kittens with a blow torch. He was caught smiling.

3. After the game, some enterprising cockhole of a reporter blind-sided Moose Balls with a gotcha question about “the smile.” Moose Balls, understandably,  did not take it well when some Dockers-wearing asshole questioned his competitive drive. Moose Balls stomped out.

4. The aforementioned smile, combined with the press conference temper tantrum caused an ESPN-fueled Jetstream of Bullshit from the sports media.

5. Deadspin smartly asked the awesome former NFL tight end Nate Jackson to write an essay about the incident. He defended Moose Balls. Go read it. It’s really well written. It turns out all professional athletes are not actually completely worthless to society when not performing on the field.

6. One Deadspin commenter, shady37, was not impressed.

This article is fucking outrageous. The people who think its ok to laugh when you’re getting blown out in MNF, when a loss in this game ends the 2010 season are the same people who probably think its ok to not keep score in little league games so little johnny’s feelings don’t get hurt because his team lost. Magic Johnson is right, Anderson should get cut from Arizona. Like Magic said, Anderson is suppossed to be the team leader, hes the QB, and players will follow Anderson’s actions. I know I don;t want a team that can laugh on the sidelines when they are getting disgraced. When the Giants lost to the Colts, all the fucking Giants looked like they wanted to fucking die. That shows to me as a fan they are into the game and that they care. Not one person should stick up for this piece of trash. Lets not forget he lost his starting job this year because he sucked so bad. There’s no coincidence here, his shitty attitude does have a correlation to his shitty play.

Make sure you go and read all the replies because it goes on from there, and turns into a general pile-on with shady37 continuing to replay… which just makes it worse (better for the rest of us). Sometimes you dig a hole, and then just keep on digging deeper…

@blogsarefun: Get a fucking clue? I’ve played sports my entire life. I ain’t laughing if I’m getting smoke whether I’m playing football, baseball or handball. If you are totally vested in the game, the game feels like 10 minutes long, not 3 hours. When the game is about to end, a vested player feels like it just started.
I didn’t watch the giants sideline the entire time. But i know Giants leaders like Tuck, Osi, Eli were never laughing, not for one second. If a bench warmer, a backup kicker, someone who never gets in the game is laughing on the sidelines, I can understand that, because backups who don’t play can’t be nearly as invested in the game as a starter. Anderson is no backup, although he should be a 4th stringer or practice squad QB. He was the starting qb, the supposed leader of the team. It’s unacceptable for him to be laughing and sitting on the bench. And who the fuck is Nate. Never heard of him. I think I’ll listen to Magic Johnson, someone who knows what it takes to be a champion, to be one of the best all-times in his sport, and knows the kind of mental attitude it takes to be a champion and a winner. Oh yea, and I’ll listen to Gruden too. A blowhard, how about a Super Bowl Winning Coach.