Sports costing taxpayers billions
THURSDAY, 10 MARCH 2011 13:17
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/sports-costing-taxpayers-billions
As National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell and his owner team personnel continue bargaining with National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith to reach a new agreement that covers players working conditions, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wrestles with his state's budget and the possible layoffs of government workers and still has one budget item that will not go away. New Jersey still owes about one hundred million dollars on a facility that no longer exists — Giants Stadium.
More than 100 days from now, National Basketball Association Commissioner could announce that NBA owners have voted to lockout their employees — NBA players — because the owners and the players could not reach a new collective bargaining agreement. NBA owners claim they are losing copious amounts of money yet in Manhattan, the owner of Madison Square Garden (Cablevision's James Dolan) is pocketing money from his regional cable TV network and sellout crowds at Knicks games and not paying some $13-14 million annually in property taxes on a prime piece of real estate between 31st and 33rd Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenue. Dolan is paying two players more than $20 million a year each (Amar'e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony) which suggests he has the means to pay the taxes.
In cash strapped New York City where Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared war on teachers’ tenure and salaries and New York State where Governor Andrew Cuomo has promised that he will change the way Albany does business and cut expenses, there is no stomach to put the Garden back on the tax roll. Some of those Knicks fans who love STAT (Stoudemire) and Melo (Anthony) may be out of jobs but as long as the team gets tax breaks that seems to be okay with the fans. The more tax breaks, the more money that can be spend on a player.
New York has laid out hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure at the new Yankees and Mets stadiums as well as giving the two franchises many tax breaks and incentives. Former New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner has gotten a slew of tax breaks and incentives to build a Brooklyn arena. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani built the two most expensive minor league baseball stadiums ever in Brooklyn in Coney Island and on the Staten Island waterfront.
New York City Mayor Ed Koch and New York Governor Mario Cuomo in 1982 along with the state legislature removed Madison Square Garden from the city tax roll because then-Garden owner Gulf and Western claimed the Knicks and NHL Rangers could no longer compete with in the Knicks case, the Milwaukees and Portlands of the world and the Rangers were not in a position to spend the same type of money on players as Hartford and Winnipeg. If Koch and Cuomo refused to help, Gulf and Western would put the Knicks at the Nassau Coliseum and the Rangers in the new Meadowlands arena.
The gullible Koch, Cuomo and elected state officials bought the Gulf and Western line hook, line and sinker.
In 1995, New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman rewrote the lease between the state and Devils owner John McMullen even though McMullen had years remaining on the deal. McMullen ended up with a much more favorable Meadowlands arena lease and decided not to move his team to Nashville.
On Tuesday, National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman lashed out at the conservative Goldwater Institute, an Arizona think tank that is questioning Glendale, Arizona's selling of municipal bonds to make a sale of the Phoenix Coyotes more palatable to a prospective owner. If Glendale and the NHL filed suit against the Goldwater Institute, one of the targets could be Randy P. Kendrick, the wife of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and a Goldwater board member. Goldwater doesn't like the idea of Glendale being so heavily involved in the saving of the Coyotes franchise. There is one problem that Mrs. Kendrick has that gets to the heart of her credibility with Goldwater. The Diamondbacks franchise operates in a facility that was built on the taxpayers’ dime.
Politicians look at the construction of sports facilities as an economic engine. In virtually every case, sports arena and construction building has been a failed policy. The construction jobs are temporary and aside from the players and owners not many jobs created by a team are substantial. On game day, there are quite a few per diem slots available such as parking lot attendants and vendors.
The Baltimore Inner Harbor project started without a baseball stadium or a football stadium and did well when the facility opened in the 1980s. Maryland residents are paying millions of dollars a year to pay off the debts on the Baltimore baseball and football stadium.
Just over the Bergen County line in Rockland County, the town of Ramapo is building a small baseball park for an independent minor league baseball team. Town residents said no to funding in a referendum last August but the town supervisor, Chris St. Lawrence, will have none of that. St. Lawrence decided to fund the project with private money but there is a problem. He hasn't found private money and the town residents keep getting stuck with the tab for construction costs.
St. Lawrence joins the likes of the Washington state legislature, elected officials in Pittsburgh, Charlotte and other areas who overturned referendums and built money losing facilities anyway.
There are far more non sports fans than sports fans if television ratings are accurate and the number of empty seats can be counted on in the thousands at various venues in the New York area on a nightly basis (Mets games, Devils games, Nets games, Islanders games) but non sports fans are paying and paying and paying for sports expenses.
What if there is an NFL lockout? What if there is an NBA lockout? How would that impact both the sports and non sports fans? The New York Giants and New York Jets football teams play sixteen home games during the regular season and an additional four pre-season games at the Meadowlands. That is just twenty days a year without playoffs and if the two teams play one another during the regular season, that is one less opening. Under the right circumstances there could be as many as 24 dates in a 365 day calendar. That means there are 341 other days where there is no NFL football at the East Rutherford facility.
In addition to owning about $100 million to pay off the debt on a stadium that is no longer standing, New Jersey sunk about $300 million for infrastructure for the East Rutherford stadium and the Giants/Jets venture isn't fully paying property taxes for the building. Instead they Giants/Jets real estate venture is paying a far lesser fee through a mechanism called payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) and East Rutherford is getting a bit more than six million dollars annually through rent and the PILOT scheme. East Rutherford probably should get closer to $15 million annually.
It is hard to image that businesses near the stadium would lose significant money if there is an NFL lockout. The NFL is about tailgating not people wandering through an area to spend money before and after a game. In fact, unless NFL owners own a nearby retail facility (such as New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft's Patriot Place, which according to the Patriot Place website, "features more than 1.3 million square feet of shopping, dining, and entertainment. You will find major fashion retailers, live and interactive entertainment, eateries, a four-star hotel, state of the art theatre and much, much more."), the owners don't want fans to spend their money anywhere except at team-licensed or owned facilities.
One of the reasons Sacramento could not build a new basketball facility for the Maloof brothers Kings franchise was that the 2006 arena proposal took away parking lots and replaced them with businesses around the facility. The Maloofs refused to give up 8,000 parking spaces and the $3 million or so in revenue that was generated from the lots. The arena proposal was voted down by Sacramento residents in overwhelming numbers. The Maloofs never campaigned for the building as it was not in their best financial interest.
In Philadelphia, there is not much around the South Philadelphia sports complex which houses the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers and Flyers except for roads and parks. Eventually Comcast hopes to replace the old Spectrum arena with a retail, restaurant and entertainment district called Philly Live! which means that all business will be conducted inside the sports complex with monies going to Comcast and their partner the Cordish Company? (Cordish was the partner for the stalled St. Louis Cardinals stadium village concept). Comcast is hoping the center will be open by the start of the 2012 Philadelphia Phillies season.
Madison Square Garden is undergoing an $800 million renovation, all designed to extract more money from patrons. Sports does practice class segregation even though sports operators and some sports fans would beg to differ. Sports owners want customers not fans. Customers can spend money for very expensive personnel seat licenses, club seats, luxury boxes and dine in expensive stadium or arena eateries. Customers can also take off the cost of sports tickets as a business expense.
If the National Basketball Association players are locked out, just how much of a real economic impact will the lockout have on cities? Probably very little. There are 41 regular season games, a few pre-season games and some playoff games. Not many fans travel for an NBA game so most of the people in the stands are local and if there are no games they would spend their money elsewhere. Teams have traveling parties of member 30 people and there are just six games a month between November and April, so that isn’t much of an economic generator. Cities like New York and Philadelphia will lose one day of player salary taxes or six in a month or maximum 50 times over a year if the team advances to the playoffs. Cities should be able to get rent money from teams. In 1999, Golden State Warriors owner Chris Cohan tried to skip out on rent payments at the Oakland Coliseum Arena for missed games. An arbitrator ruled against Cohan and made him pay rent. It was an owners’ lockout after all, not a players strike in the 1998-99 NBA labor dispute.
The middle class has been priced out of attending a cluster of games. But there is always cable TV. Cable TV prices for ESPN and other sports channels are pretty reasonable on a monthly basis thanks to socialism. In 1984, Congress and President Ronald Reagan came up with the Cable TV Act which allowed multiple systems operators (MSO) to create a basic expanded tier and group together channels and sell it as one to a consumer. If you wanted ESPN back in 1984, you had to also take CNN and the Weather Channel if the MSO decided that is what was best for their customers. (Remember the "I want my MTV campaign?") Sports channels ended up on those tiers nationally which enabled sports to migrate from over-the-air TV to cable. Cable channels made more off of consumers whether they watched sports or not and some advertising.
Sports has made billions off of people who never watch a sports event on cable TV which is a significant majority of cable TV subscribers.
The segregation of fans started in 1965 with the opening of the Houston Astrodome when Astros owner Roy Hofheinz included "sky boxes" in the stadium.
Hofheinz was charging about $20,000 annually for the boxes, and that did not go unnoticed by his fellow owners. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle said in the 1980s that the sky box was a "bane to the business," and because of them, NFL owners needed stadium renovations or new stadiums with built-in luxury boxes. Rozelle was correct, and the 1980s and 1990s were a time of franchise shifts in the NFL because owners were looking for stadiums with luxury boxes. Hofheinz also influenced entertainment by using a scoreboard to entertain people during games. Hofheinz went after the non-sports fan who he felt would show up at an event and not be concerned with the action on the field. Hofheinz even put in a Dow Jones ticker in the original boxes.
McMullen once commented that sports is all about emotion and rational thinking goes out the door in sports. In Washington, DC Goodell and Smith are trying to slice up billions that flow into the industry. They are doing that obvious to what has made football — the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act which was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy after sailing through the House and Senate which enriched the football industry, the shifting of stadium costs from private ownership to municipalities (a trend that started in Milwaukee in 1950), the 1984 Cable TV Act and the real dagger in the back of the average fan, the 1986 tax code revision. By accident Congress and Ronald Reagan approved a bill that put a ceiling of eight cents on a dollar generated in a stadium that would go off to pay the municipal debt of taxpayers funded facilities. New arena and stadium building and renovations sprung up everywhere as owners wanted the latest shiny gadgets compete with luxury boxes, club seats and eateries along with other revenue generating sports in a building. Ticket prices exploded even on the minor league level.
Minor league baseball changed as well as the Major Leagues and Minor Leagues Player Development Contract mandated new or renovated parks be completed by 1994 or teams could move. That is how Sussex County ended up with a New York Penn League team as Glens Falls, New York refused to go along with the 1990 baseball agreement. Mario Cuomo approved more than $60 million for New York minor league park upgrades.
Everyone pays for sports in the United States whether it is through a hotel/motel tax, car rental tax, a "sin" tax (alcohol and cigarettes in Cleveland), a water tax (Nashville) or hikes in sales tax (Arlington, Texas). In a sense, both fans and non sports fans should have a seat at the bargaining table in the NFL dispute, the upcoming NBA contract dispute and the possible Major League Baseball and National Hockey League labor disagreements that could take place this winter and in the summer of 2012. Americans are also paying for the care of discarded football players who are in their 40s and 50s who are disabled from injuries suffered in games through social security insurance and Medicare.
The true cost of sports in the United States to taxpayers is in the billions in government spending.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Showing posts with label DeMaurice Smith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DeMaurice Smith. Show all posts
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Randy Cross: Time NFL Owners Took Care of Discarded Players
By Evan Weiner
December 7, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/randy-cross-time-nfl-owners-took-care-of-discarded-players
(New York, N. Y.) -- Randy Cross, who was a member of three San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl championship squads, thinks it is time that National Football League owners take some responsibility and provide medical benefits for retired and discarded players. Cross is now an NFL television analyst and is not part of any of the retired or discarded players groups begging NFL owners to help to pay for medical costs for players who are disabled because of injuries suffered during their NFL careers.
"I read everything, I stay in touch with all of that," said Cross, a six time Pro Bowl selection during his 13-year career which ended in 1988. "I am not sure, I think ultimately there is a real liability issue that the league has to get their arms around and take responsibility for, for the physical and mental well-being for some of these players that have struggled the way they have. I don't think there is any two ways around it.
"You can't tell me that concussions and brain injuries and the physical injuries and what not aren't traced back to the careers in football. The league has to take responsibility for that. And, they (the NFL owners) are the ones who have to do it. It is their game; it is not the Players Associations game. It is not some new executive director's game (referring to National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith); it's the league's game.
"If they are not willing to take responsibility for it, I think---a) it is sad and b) somebody has to hold their feet to the fire."
The National Football League owners and players collectively bargain the labor rules of the industry. The old or discarded players did not get the same post-career benefits that are bestowed on baseball players thanks to Marvin Miller and his Major League Baseball Players Association staff. (Miller was again denied admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday--a wrong decision by voters as Miller changed baseball and made sure those players with the proper service time got a pension and post career benefits although there were some overlooked players who did not qualify based on service time) because former association executive directors Ed Garvey and Gene Upshaw went for money and not post career benefits.
They failed the players. The NFL owners are not legally required to help the former players at this point who need assistance but there should be a moral obligation.
Cross was part of two labor stoppages in 1982 and 1987. In retrospect, neither job action got the players what they really needed----good post-career mental benefits and pensions.
"They were both abysmal failures and this (the potential 2011 lockout) all the earmarks of being the same," said Cross. "When the NFL Players Association is run by and influenced by a union type person (Smith), a person that has interests of a union variety---this is not a union. This is a group that is together for as player’s maximum for two or three years on average. These guys need to make the money they can, get the coverage they can and when you have that kind of influence in this negotiation, it is not good news.
"If Gene Upshaw (the deceased former Executive Director of the NFLPA) for all his failings, and God knows you probably hear enough of that from the some of the guys about the things that went wrong but the game of football for the has never flourished from that period from (19)93 to 2008. Never, ever, ever. That was always because the number one priority was building the game."
Cross is correct about the financial growth of the NFL starting in 1993. It was in 1993 that a desperate Rupert Murdoch threw hundreds of millions of dollars at the NFL owners to land the rights to National Football Conference regular season and playoff games along with the Super Bowl. Murdoch needed the NFL product to give credibility to his struggling syndicated FOX grouping of television stations and scored big with the signing which not only included the NFL rights but he picked up stronger affiliates when CBS stations did not renew affiliate deals because that network lost the NFL TV rights. Murdoch's contract upped the ante for General Election's NBC along with Disney's ABC for the Monday Night Football franchise and Disney's ESPN and Ted Turners Turner Broadcasting for cable TV rights.
New stadiums came on board complete with club seats, luxury boxes, in-stadium restaurants (major revenue generators) thanks to the federal 1986 Tax Act (which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan) which changed taxation language for municipalities building stadiums and arenas. The municipalities could only take eight cents on every dollar worth of revenue generated in a stadium to pay down the debt of the building costs. Individual cities signed various leases with teams and those cities without teams, Nashville, Baltimore and St. Louis enticed owners from other cities (Houston, Cleveland and Anaheim with new stadiums), Oakland convinced Al Davis to move his Raiders from Los Angeles back to the Oakland Coliseum. Owners were chasing sweetheart deals, and enhanced revenues. Expansion teams in Charlotte, Jacksonville, Cleveland and Houston brought in over a billion dollars to league owners. The league got two significant bumps in TV contracts since 1993 and the league owners have a war chest to fight the players in 2011 as Murdoch's FOX, GE's (soon to be Comcast) NBC, Disney's ESPN, Sumner Redstone's CBS and DirecTV will play the league a rights fee in 2011 even if no games are played because of a lockout.
"They need to find a way to keep building the game, take care of the players that went in the past," said Cross. "And I am sorry; I don't think the guys who went in the past are the responsibility of the guys that are playing right now."
Cross doesn't see any hope that the owners and players will have a new collective bargaining deal in place when the present agreement expires on March 3.
"There is going to be some serious toe-to-toe stuff," he said. "I mean, if you are used to scheduling vacations around training camp in late July or early August, I would move my calendar back a month or two. It will affect the season. There is no way around it. There is going to be a draft, the draft is the last official act of this agreement. No (mini-camp or free agency), there will be a draft. The one thing that could happen with the draft and I could be full of it, but they could have it earlier. There is no reason to wait until late April to have a draft, so why not do it earlier?"
The football negotiations are fascinating in that there are a lot of moving parts. Smith, the Obama political operative, is seemingly conducting a campaign sending players to Capital Hill to discuss the possible lockout with Congressional leaders and staffers. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose father replaced Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 in the United States Senate from New York after Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968 while running for President, also is a political lobbyist as are all sports commissioners. Goodell's father-in-law Samuel Skinner was President George H. W. Bush's chief of staff and Goodell's wife worked for Murdoch's FOX News Channel. The owners are not on the same page in terms of revenue sharing but they do want to cut players salaries by 18 percent and reduce the size of the revenue given to players from 59 to 48 percent. Then there are the retired and discarded players who have no medical benefits (some of whom have pre-existing conditions and could not get health insurance that are taking government support through disability and Medicare). They want help. They want medical insurance, they want better pensions. Fifty NFL Hall of Famers get pensions of less than $200 a month.
"I think everyone has a little bit of skin in the game," said Cross. "I just think the majority of this is sort of a token effort to appeal to the old guys whether it is coming from the NFL or NFLPA. It is a PR (public relations) thing more than a legitimate, concerted effort to really get stuff done for the older players that built the game."
Neither Goodell nor Smith has really responded to the former and discarded players. Smith is telling his players to save money because he anticipates a March lockout. There is less than three months to go get a deal done but it appears that both sides are entrenching their positions which means that the NFL off-season may really be an off-season with no free agent signings, no min-camps, no organized team activities and perhaps no training camp or pre-season games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
December 7, 2010
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/randy-cross-time-nfl-owners-took-care-of-discarded-players
(New York, N. Y.) -- Randy Cross, who was a member of three San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl championship squads, thinks it is time that National Football League owners take some responsibility and provide medical benefits for retired and discarded players. Cross is now an NFL television analyst and is not part of any of the retired or discarded players groups begging NFL owners to help to pay for medical costs for players who are disabled because of injuries suffered during their NFL careers.
"I read everything, I stay in touch with all of that," said Cross, a six time Pro Bowl selection during his 13-year career which ended in 1988. "I am not sure, I think ultimately there is a real liability issue that the league has to get their arms around and take responsibility for, for the physical and mental well-being for some of these players that have struggled the way they have. I don't think there is any two ways around it.
"You can't tell me that concussions and brain injuries and the physical injuries and what not aren't traced back to the careers in football. The league has to take responsibility for that. And, they (the NFL owners) are the ones who have to do it. It is their game; it is not the Players Associations game. It is not some new executive director's game (referring to National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith); it's the league's game.
"If they are not willing to take responsibility for it, I think---a) it is sad and b) somebody has to hold their feet to the fire."
The National Football League owners and players collectively bargain the labor rules of the industry. The old or discarded players did not get the same post-career benefits that are bestowed on baseball players thanks to Marvin Miller and his Major League Baseball Players Association staff. (Miller was again denied admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday--a wrong decision by voters as Miller changed baseball and made sure those players with the proper service time got a pension and post career benefits although there were some overlooked players who did not qualify based on service time) because former association executive directors Ed Garvey and Gene Upshaw went for money and not post career benefits.
They failed the players. The NFL owners are not legally required to help the former players at this point who need assistance but there should be a moral obligation.
Cross was part of two labor stoppages in 1982 and 1987. In retrospect, neither job action got the players what they really needed----good post-career mental benefits and pensions.
"They were both abysmal failures and this (the potential 2011 lockout) all the earmarks of being the same," said Cross. "When the NFL Players Association is run by and influenced by a union type person (Smith), a person that has interests of a union variety---this is not a union. This is a group that is together for as player’s maximum for two or three years on average. These guys need to make the money they can, get the coverage they can and when you have that kind of influence in this negotiation, it is not good news.
"If Gene Upshaw (the deceased former Executive Director of the NFLPA) for all his failings, and God knows you probably hear enough of that from the some of the guys about the things that went wrong but the game of football for the has never flourished from that period from (19)93 to 2008. Never, ever, ever. That was always because the number one priority was building the game."
Cross is correct about the financial growth of the NFL starting in 1993. It was in 1993 that a desperate Rupert Murdoch threw hundreds of millions of dollars at the NFL owners to land the rights to National Football Conference regular season and playoff games along with the Super Bowl. Murdoch needed the NFL product to give credibility to his struggling syndicated FOX grouping of television stations and scored big with the signing which not only included the NFL rights but he picked up stronger affiliates when CBS stations did not renew affiliate deals because that network lost the NFL TV rights. Murdoch's contract upped the ante for General Election's NBC along with Disney's ABC for the Monday Night Football franchise and Disney's ESPN and Ted Turners Turner Broadcasting for cable TV rights.
New stadiums came on board complete with club seats, luxury boxes, in-stadium restaurants (major revenue generators) thanks to the federal 1986 Tax Act (which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan) which changed taxation language for municipalities building stadiums and arenas. The municipalities could only take eight cents on every dollar worth of revenue generated in a stadium to pay down the debt of the building costs. Individual cities signed various leases with teams and those cities without teams, Nashville, Baltimore and St. Louis enticed owners from other cities (Houston, Cleveland and Anaheim with new stadiums), Oakland convinced Al Davis to move his Raiders from Los Angeles back to the Oakland Coliseum. Owners were chasing sweetheart deals, and enhanced revenues. Expansion teams in Charlotte, Jacksonville, Cleveland and Houston brought in over a billion dollars to league owners. The league got two significant bumps in TV contracts since 1993 and the league owners have a war chest to fight the players in 2011 as Murdoch's FOX, GE's (soon to be Comcast) NBC, Disney's ESPN, Sumner Redstone's CBS and DirecTV will play the league a rights fee in 2011 even if no games are played because of a lockout.
"They need to find a way to keep building the game, take care of the players that went in the past," said Cross. "And I am sorry; I don't think the guys who went in the past are the responsibility of the guys that are playing right now."
Cross doesn't see any hope that the owners and players will have a new collective bargaining deal in place when the present agreement expires on March 3.
"There is going to be some serious toe-to-toe stuff," he said. "I mean, if you are used to scheduling vacations around training camp in late July or early August, I would move my calendar back a month or two. It will affect the season. There is no way around it. There is going to be a draft, the draft is the last official act of this agreement. No (mini-camp or free agency), there will be a draft. The one thing that could happen with the draft and I could be full of it, but they could have it earlier. There is no reason to wait until late April to have a draft, so why not do it earlier?"
The football negotiations are fascinating in that there are a lot of moving parts. Smith, the Obama political operative, is seemingly conducting a campaign sending players to Capital Hill to discuss the possible lockout with Congressional leaders and staffers. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose father replaced Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 in the United States Senate from New York after Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968 while running for President, also is a political lobbyist as are all sports commissioners. Goodell's father-in-law Samuel Skinner was President George H. W. Bush's chief of staff and Goodell's wife worked for Murdoch's FOX News Channel. The owners are not on the same page in terms of revenue sharing but they do want to cut players salaries by 18 percent and reduce the size of the revenue given to players from 59 to 48 percent. Then there are the retired and discarded players who have no medical benefits (some of whom have pre-existing conditions and could not get health insurance that are taking government support through disability and Medicare). They want help. They want medical insurance, they want better pensions. Fifty NFL Hall of Famers get pensions of less than $200 a month.
"I think everyone has a little bit of skin in the game," said Cross. "I just think the majority of this is sort of a token effort to appeal to the old guys whether it is coming from the NFL or NFLPA. It is a PR (public relations) thing more than a legitimate, concerted effort to really get stuff done for the older players that built the game."
Neither Goodell nor Smith has really responded to the former and discarded players. Smith is telling his players to save money because he anticipates a March lockout. There is less than three months to go get a deal done but it appears that both sides are entrenching their positions which means that the NFL off-season may really be an off-season with no free agent signings, no min-camps, no organized team activities and perhaps no training camp or pre-season games.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Vince Lombardi's players don't have a seat at the NFL lockout talks
Tuesday, 23 November 2010 07:32
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/vince-lombardis-players-dont-have-a-seat-at-the-nfl-lockout-talks
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Eight times a week, the life and legacy of Vince Lombardi is on display on the Great White Way in New York. Vince Lombardi is part of the National Football League's Mount Rushmore for his accomplishments as coach of the Green Bay Packers. Lombardi took over a bad team that was financially boosted in the mid 1950s by dances and fundraisers throughout Wisconsin (aided by the "arch-enemy Chicago Bears coach and owner George Halas) and turned the franchise into champions within three years of taking the job in February 1959.
Lombardi is now being canonized on Broadway in a way no other football coach ever has. But that Lombardi probably would have problems dealing with the football industry of 2010.
Lombardi's teams would win five National Football League titles and two American Football League-National Football League championships (neither the Super Bowl nor the Lombardi Trophy existed in 1967 and 1968 in name). Lombardi came of age at precisely the same time the National Football League exploded on the national scene. The NFL would ultimately become the most successful professional sports organization in the United States but Lombardi's players never did share the financial gains that NFL owners would see with every new TV contract that National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell would negotiate.
One of Lombardi's players who played on five NFL and two AFL-NFL championship games (and a Super Bowl championship team after leaving Green Bay) is now making $176.85 in his monthly pension. A player who competed against one of Lombardi's teams in the early days of the AFL-NFL Championship Game is getting $201.36 a month for 11 years of service. Another of Lombardi's guys, Jerry Kramer, is organizing a fundraiser to help his in need peers from the 1960s. One of the opposing players from the Packers hated rival, the Chicago Bears, Mike Ditka is trying to shame the league to help out his down-and-out peers from the 1960s.
The discarded and left-behind players from Lombardi's NFL of 1954 (when he began as a New York Giants assistant) until his death in 1970 should have an honored seat at the table divvying up the financial pie, but they don't.
There are more than 250 former players including 50 Hall of Famers who receive less than $200 a month in pension payments.
The National Football League and the National Football League Players Association are facing a March 3, 2011 deadline to get a new collective bargaining deal done. The prevailing thinking is that once the present collective bargaining agreement expires, the NFL owners will lock out the players on the 32 teams and a prolonged labor impasse will start.
The players who built the league and association starting in the late 1950s through those who played in 1992 have terrible pensions and need health benefits. Association Executive Directors Ed Garvey and the late Gene Upshaw seemed more concerned about getting players the most money they could for a contract and left out important details like good post career benefits like pension and health care.
A good many former or "discarded" players cannot get health insurance because they have pre-existing conditions. They don't have much recourse. NFL owners have no legal obligation to give them more money or provide health benefits. The league and the players association have been talking about taking care of the former players health benefits but the associations' turned down a deal that might have covered about 2,500 of 3,200 players because the association's reps didn't feel that TransAmerica would insure 700 of the discarded players because of pre-existing conditions.
Because some of the ex-players cannot get insurance, the one-time players are getting government assistance in dealing with football injuries through social security or Medicare even though some of them are under the age of 65.
According to former players, the proposal came from the National Football League not the National Football League Players Association. The "discarded" players don't trust the National Football League Players Association.
The NFL owners collectively bargained the pension plan and post-career medical benefit plan which isn't very much with the players association. The players association has failed the former players. The players association and the NFL Alumni Association have been battling one another and there seem to be a number of splinter groups that have formed trying to get discarded players some extra pension money and health benefits. Some of the splinter groups have forced the league and players association to come up with some benefits for the discarded players.
Meanwhile another precinct has weighed in on the current collective bargaining talks:
The AFL-CIO.
Somehow the National Football League Players Association and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) are embracing one another even though the AFL-CIO rejected NFLPA overtures to join the labor organization in the 1960s. However, the NFLPA's Executive Director DeMaurice Smith sits on the executive council of the AFL-CIO. In September, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he would talk with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Smith and work out a solution. The NFL said no because Smith is serving on Trumka's board.
But in the high stakes poker game between the owners and players, the AFL-CIO is getting involved whether the NFL likes it or not. The NFL-NFLPA collective bargaining negotiations figure to become the most politicized sports labor negotiations on record and there are reasons for that.
The NFL got two assists from Congress and the Oval Office, one in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, which allowed the NFL to bundle the 14 league franchises and sell them as one to a TV network. The second was when President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing the National Football League-American Football League merger to take place. Both bills transformed the NFL from a step above semi-pro level to an enormous money-maker.
Two laws signed by President Ronald Reagan, the 1984 Cable TV laws and the 1986 Tax Act gave pro sports owners even more benefits which allowed them to make even more revenues. A wave of new and renovated stadiums replaced old NFL facilities because of the 1986 legislation, which capped a municipality's ability to take revenues out of a facility at eight percent. There are some variants to that law based on the lease agreements signed by an NFL owner and a municipality. There is also this. Louisiana gave New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson about $186 million between 2002 and 2010 as a thank you for not moving his team elsewhere.
The NFL-NFLPA talks are politically charged.
Manny Herrmann, the Online Mobilization Coordinator for the AFL-CIO sent out an e-mail to members last week even though the NFLPA is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO:
"Incredible news! Yesterday (November 18), the AFL-CIO joined a huge coalition to deliver more than 100,000 petition signatures to Capitol Hill, urging Congress to maintain an extension of emergency unemployment insurance benefits for long-term job hunters. We'll keep you updated on this critical fight.
"If you care about jobs, here's something else you should be worried about: the National Football League is in contract negotiations with its players and is getting ready to do a player ‘lockout.'
"If that happens, players won't be able to play, fans won't have a football season and local economies that rely on football will be devastated -- it'll mean more people out of work.
"Why is the NFL getting ready to lock out its own players and devastate its fans? One word: Greed.
"It is estimated that a lockout would impact 150,000 jobs -- and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each and every NFL city -- some $4.5 billion across America.
"If there's a lockout, stadium employees will be jobless. Sports bars, police officers, restaurants, hotels and various support staff who work supporting the game also will be affected.
"The NFL and team owners don't care what a lockout costs communities and fans -- they only care about their own profits. The NFL's set to make billions of dollars, even without a football season. But if they do that, players and fans lose.
"It is estimated that a lockout would impact 150,000 jobs -- and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each and every NFL city -- some $4.5 billion across America.
"If there's a lockout, stadium employees will be jobless. Sports bars, police officers, restaurants, hotels and various support staff who work supporting the game also will be affected.
"The NFL and team owners don't care what a lockout costs communities and fans -- they only care about their own profits. The NFL's set to make billions of dollars, even without a football season. But if they do that, players and fans lose.
"The NFL's greed is seemingly boundless -- they are demanding a number of outrageous wage and benefit concessions without justification. Here's just one example: the NFL wants to take ALL health care benefits from players and their families.
"An average football player will work for only three and a half seasons -- that's their entire career. But the health impacts from playing can include a lifetime of pain or discomfort -- and even brain trauma that leads to depression and suicide.
"How can the NFL make money without a football season? By rigging the system. They've already set aside $900 million that should've gone to players' benefits to cover their costs for locking players out -- and they've signed TV contracts that'll pay out billions of dollars even if no football is played in 2012.
"To save football next year, and to save jobs, we've got to take the NFL on and tell them locking out players and fans based on greed is unacceptable. If players and fans band together, we can shame them into doing the right thing.
"Please stand in solidarity with the players. Sign our petition to BLOCK the lockout. Make your voice heard to save the sport that you love."
The AFL-CIO numbers seem to be way off base in terms of real economic impact if there is a lockout. There doesn't seem to be 150,000 people in jobs that would be out in the cold because a football game isn't played 10 times in 21 weeks or 147 days (without playoffs) with the possibility of two home games at the most in the playoffs (in 21 days) in the city even if the host Super Bowl city and the Pro Bowl host city are added over a seven month period.
The economic impact is dramatically overstated. The players would suffer major losses and some team and league personnel would be laid off. But the AFL-CIO is right about one thing, the over-the-air, cable and satellite TV partners will fund the lockout which means that Rupert Murdoch's FOX, General Electric's NBC, Disney's ESPN, Sumner Redstone's CBS (and by association their news divisions) are lining up to support management along with DirecTV which might make some interesting conversation on the cable TV "news" sets.
Herrman's blast won't make the NFL owners want to rush to the bargaining table with Trumka. One former player isn't even sure why the AFL-CIO is involved. Dave Pear, who has been critical of the NFL and NFLPA and is one of the "discarded" players, wants to know, "how does the NFLPA get away claiming that we are part of the AFL-CIO? Where is the shop steward when there is a grievance? Somebody needs to write a letter to the AFL-CIO and ask some pointed questions."
Now the AFL-CIO wants a seat at the table. Before this is done, local elected officials, federal mediators, the National Labor Relations Board, the courts, Congress and even the Oval Office will weigh in but an agreement has to be reached by the two parties and the two parties have constituencies that will be heard, big market versus small market owners on management side and a whole host of parties on the players side.
This fight may get very nasty, very soon. It is a scenario that Coach Vince Lombardi, who didn't really want to play an American Football League (or Mickey Mouse) team in a championship game in 1967, could never envision as his Packers ran to daylight nearly five decades ago.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 23 November 2010 07:32 )
Tuesday, 23 November 2010 07:32
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/vince-lombardis-players-dont-have-a-seat-at-the-nfl-lockout-talks
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Eight times a week, the life and legacy of Vince Lombardi is on display on the Great White Way in New York. Vince Lombardi is part of the National Football League's Mount Rushmore for his accomplishments as coach of the Green Bay Packers. Lombardi took over a bad team that was financially boosted in the mid 1950s by dances and fundraisers throughout Wisconsin (aided by the "arch-enemy Chicago Bears coach and owner George Halas) and turned the franchise into champions within three years of taking the job in February 1959.
Lombardi is now being canonized on Broadway in a way no other football coach ever has. But that Lombardi probably would have problems dealing with the football industry of 2010.
Lombardi's teams would win five National Football League titles and two American Football League-National Football League championships (neither the Super Bowl nor the Lombardi Trophy existed in 1967 and 1968 in name). Lombardi came of age at precisely the same time the National Football League exploded on the national scene. The NFL would ultimately become the most successful professional sports organization in the United States but Lombardi's players never did share the financial gains that NFL owners would see with every new TV contract that National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell would negotiate.
One of Lombardi's players who played on five NFL and two AFL-NFL championship games (and a Super Bowl championship team after leaving Green Bay) is now making $176.85 in his monthly pension. A player who competed against one of Lombardi's teams in the early days of the AFL-NFL Championship Game is getting $201.36 a month for 11 years of service. Another of Lombardi's guys, Jerry Kramer, is organizing a fundraiser to help his in need peers from the 1960s. One of the opposing players from the Packers hated rival, the Chicago Bears, Mike Ditka is trying to shame the league to help out his down-and-out peers from the 1960s.
The discarded and left-behind players from Lombardi's NFL of 1954 (when he began as a New York Giants assistant) until his death in 1970 should have an honored seat at the table divvying up the financial pie, but they don't.
There are more than 250 former players including 50 Hall of Famers who receive less than $200 a month in pension payments.
The National Football League and the National Football League Players Association are facing a March 3, 2011 deadline to get a new collective bargaining deal done. The prevailing thinking is that once the present collective bargaining agreement expires, the NFL owners will lock out the players on the 32 teams and a prolonged labor impasse will start.
The players who built the league and association starting in the late 1950s through those who played in 1992 have terrible pensions and need health benefits. Association Executive Directors Ed Garvey and the late Gene Upshaw seemed more concerned about getting players the most money they could for a contract and left out important details like good post career benefits like pension and health care.
A good many former or "discarded" players cannot get health insurance because they have pre-existing conditions. They don't have much recourse. NFL owners have no legal obligation to give them more money or provide health benefits. The league and the players association have been talking about taking care of the former players health benefits but the associations' turned down a deal that might have covered about 2,500 of 3,200 players because the association's reps didn't feel that TransAmerica would insure 700 of the discarded players because of pre-existing conditions.
Because some of the ex-players cannot get insurance, the one-time players are getting government assistance in dealing with football injuries through social security or Medicare even though some of them are under the age of 65.
According to former players, the proposal came from the National Football League not the National Football League Players Association. The "discarded" players don't trust the National Football League Players Association.
The NFL owners collectively bargained the pension plan and post-career medical benefit plan which isn't very much with the players association. The players association has failed the former players. The players association and the NFL Alumni Association have been battling one another and there seem to be a number of splinter groups that have formed trying to get discarded players some extra pension money and health benefits. Some of the splinter groups have forced the league and players association to come up with some benefits for the discarded players.
Meanwhile another precinct has weighed in on the current collective bargaining talks:
The AFL-CIO.
Somehow the National Football League Players Association and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) are embracing one another even though the AFL-CIO rejected NFLPA overtures to join the labor organization in the 1960s. However, the NFLPA's Executive Director DeMaurice Smith sits on the executive council of the AFL-CIO. In September, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he would talk with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Smith and work out a solution. The NFL said no because Smith is serving on Trumka's board.
But in the high stakes poker game between the owners and players, the AFL-CIO is getting involved whether the NFL likes it or not. The NFL-NFLPA collective bargaining negotiations figure to become the most politicized sports labor negotiations on record and there are reasons for that.
The NFL got two assists from Congress and the Oval Office, one in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy signed the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961, which allowed the NFL to bundle the 14 league franchises and sell them as one to a TV network. The second was when President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing the National Football League-American Football League merger to take place. Both bills transformed the NFL from a step above semi-pro level to an enormous money-maker.
Two laws signed by President Ronald Reagan, the 1984 Cable TV laws and the 1986 Tax Act gave pro sports owners even more benefits which allowed them to make even more revenues. A wave of new and renovated stadiums replaced old NFL facilities because of the 1986 legislation, which capped a municipality's ability to take revenues out of a facility at eight percent. There are some variants to that law based on the lease agreements signed by an NFL owner and a municipality. There is also this. Louisiana gave New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson about $186 million between 2002 and 2010 as a thank you for not moving his team elsewhere.
The NFL-NFLPA talks are politically charged.
Manny Herrmann, the Online Mobilization Coordinator for the AFL-CIO sent out an e-mail to members last week even though the NFLPA is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO:
"Incredible news! Yesterday (November 18), the AFL-CIO joined a huge coalition to deliver more than 100,000 petition signatures to Capitol Hill, urging Congress to maintain an extension of emergency unemployment insurance benefits for long-term job hunters. We'll keep you updated on this critical fight.
"If you care about jobs, here's something else you should be worried about: the National Football League is in contract negotiations with its players and is getting ready to do a player ‘lockout.'
"If that happens, players won't be able to play, fans won't have a football season and local economies that rely on football will be devastated -- it'll mean more people out of work.
"Why is the NFL getting ready to lock out its own players and devastate its fans? One word: Greed.
"It is estimated that a lockout would impact 150,000 jobs -- and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each and every NFL city -- some $4.5 billion across America.
"If there's a lockout, stadium employees will be jobless. Sports bars, police officers, restaurants, hotels and various support staff who work supporting the game also will be affected.
"The NFL and team owners don't care what a lockout costs communities and fans -- they only care about their own profits. The NFL's set to make billions of dollars, even without a football season. But if they do that, players and fans lose.
"It is estimated that a lockout would impact 150,000 jobs -- and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each and every NFL city -- some $4.5 billion across America.
"If there's a lockout, stadium employees will be jobless. Sports bars, police officers, restaurants, hotels and various support staff who work supporting the game also will be affected.
"The NFL and team owners don't care what a lockout costs communities and fans -- they only care about their own profits. The NFL's set to make billions of dollars, even without a football season. But if they do that, players and fans lose.
"The NFL's greed is seemingly boundless -- they are demanding a number of outrageous wage and benefit concessions without justification. Here's just one example: the NFL wants to take ALL health care benefits from players and their families.
"An average football player will work for only three and a half seasons -- that's their entire career. But the health impacts from playing can include a lifetime of pain or discomfort -- and even brain trauma that leads to depression and suicide.
"How can the NFL make money without a football season? By rigging the system. They've already set aside $900 million that should've gone to players' benefits to cover their costs for locking players out -- and they've signed TV contracts that'll pay out billions of dollars even if no football is played in 2012.
"To save football next year, and to save jobs, we've got to take the NFL on and tell them locking out players and fans based on greed is unacceptable. If players and fans band together, we can shame them into doing the right thing.
"Please stand in solidarity with the players. Sign our petition to BLOCK the lockout. Make your voice heard to save the sport that you love."
The AFL-CIO numbers seem to be way off base in terms of real economic impact if there is a lockout. There doesn't seem to be 150,000 people in jobs that would be out in the cold because a football game isn't played 10 times in 21 weeks or 147 days (without playoffs) with the possibility of two home games at the most in the playoffs (in 21 days) in the city even if the host Super Bowl city and the Pro Bowl host city are added over a seven month period.
The economic impact is dramatically overstated. The players would suffer major losses and some team and league personnel would be laid off. But the AFL-CIO is right about one thing, the over-the-air, cable and satellite TV partners will fund the lockout which means that Rupert Murdoch's FOX, General Electric's NBC, Disney's ESPN, Sumner Redstone's CBS (and by association their news divisions) are lining up to support management along with DirecTV which might make some interesting conversation on the cable TV "news" sets.
Herrman's blast won't make the NFL owners want to rush to the bargaining table with Trumka. One former player isn't even sure why the AFL-CIO is involved. Dave Pear, who has been critical of the NFL and NFLPA and is one of the "discarded" players, wants to know, "how does the NFLPA get away claiming that we are part of the AFL-CIO? Where is the shop steward when there is a grievance? Somebody needs to write a letter to the AFL-CIO and ask some pointed questions."
Now the AFL-CIO wants a seat at the table. Before this is done, local elected officials, federal mediators, the National Labor Relations Board, the courts, Congress and even the Oval Office will weigh in but an agreement has to be reached by the two parties and the two parties have constituencies that will be heard, big market versus small market owners on management side and a whole host of parties on the players side.
This fight may get very nasty, very soon. It is a scenario that Coach Vince Lombardi, who didn't really want to play an American Football League (or Mickey Mouse) team in a championship game in 1967, could never envision as his Packers ran to daylight nearly five decades ago.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 23 November 2010 07:32 )
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Politics of the National Football League Potential Lockout
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/in-the-nfl-potential-lockout-all-roads-lead-to-washington
By Evan Weiner
November 18, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- Since the last time we visited the potential National Football League owners' lockout of the players next March, about 72 hours ago, it appears that are a number of people have become a bit anxious about the whole process becoming politicized. The NFL had some issues with the piece. Former players had their say and no one, it seems, wants this to head to Congress and the Oval Office.
Or do they?
One former National Football League player sent an e-mail criticizing this writer for suggesting that National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith should take some former players who are disabled from injuries that they suffered while working as football players in the NFL and bring them before Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The suggestion is that Smith have the players testify and ask the GOP leaders to their faces why those two Congressmen and one Senator, along with the others who enjoy stellar house and senate health benefits because they are in Congress, should repeal the law that was passed in 2010 which will allow Americans with pre-existing conditions who cannot get insurance to buy health insurance should be overturned.
The former player wrote, "I take issue with the political spin that you put in your article. You are right, every player has pre-existing conditions as a result of playing in the NFL. It is up to the NFL to take care of their players, past and present. It is not up to the American taxpayer to pay for the care of the NFL players, past and present. It is obvious that the proposed health care plan that Obama passed will destroy our health care industry. I am hopeful that Mr. Cantor and Mr. Boehner will do everything in their power to get the health care plan repealed.
"The NFL owners have incredible revenue streams coming in, and the players who make this possible should be protected by the owners. Football is a huge industry, and there is a tremendous amount of money being generated by the sport. Perhaps the owners could take a part of the revenues that they generate through licensing, and apply them to a health care plan for all players past and present."
The 2010 health care plan isn't too far from the proposed Republican plan of the early 1990s which Robert Dole championed. A number of former NFL players cannot get health care because of pre-existing conditions and they are getting government assistance whether it is Social Security or Medicare despite not being the retirement age which last time anybody looked was funded by American citizens.
The NFL and the NFLPA tried to negotiate a deal to provide health care to about 2,500 out of 3,200 retired players but the NFLPA wanted all the retirees protected and rejected the NFL’s plan. The NFLPA wanted all the players protected and claimed a large group of former players would not be insured by TransAmerica because of pre-existing conditions.
That rejection brings the health care issue into the discussion and could be used as a reason to go before Congress, which under Boehner, Cantor and McConnell wants to roll back the 2010 legislation and there seems to be no GOP alternative.
The National Football League of today was created by Congress and two Presidential signatures. In 1961, two Democrats, Emanuel Cellar in the House and Estes Kefauver in the Senate crafted legislation that became known as the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy which allowed NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to take all 14 NFL teams and sell them as one entity to American television networks starting in 1962. Rozelle played off CBS and NBC and got substantial deals with CBS. After losing two TV battles to CBS in 1964, NBC chairman David Sarnoff decided to make the American Football League a real major league entity. He gave them a huge (for 1965) five year deal and football was flooded with money.
In 1966, the NFL and AFL agreed to merge but needed Congressional approval. Again Cellar was involved but two Louisiana Democrats, Russell Long in the Senate and Hale Boggs in the House literally traded their votes to Rozelle in exchange for an expansion team in New Orleans and the merger was approved. Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation which was on the back of an anti-inflation bill in October 1966 and within ten days, New Orleans had a team.
Additional federal legislation, specifically the 1984 Cable TV Act and the 1986 Tax Act, put more money in owners' pockets. That is why this will play out in Washington eventually.
The NFL-NFLPA dispute will start perhaps with a federal mediator, then the National Labor Relations Board, maybe Congress and maybe even the Oval Office. President Bill Clinton in 1994 summoned Major League Baseball owners and players to the White House in an attempt to settle the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed.
To that former player, here is the answer not from this writer to the column of 72 hours ago of "How DeMaurice Smith can wreak havoc on a NFL lockout" but from an Associated Press story of November 18, 2010 which is entitled "The Influence Game": NFL union seeks Congress help. A note to the AP writer, DeMaurice Smith runs an association not a union. Apparently according to the story the NFLPA has a lobbyist, which seeming comes as a shock to the AP, who has been working Capital Hill since the summer. The NFL too is working over Congress with a lobbyist and both the NFLPA's DeMaurice Smith and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell have visited the White House.
According to the piece, the NFL's political action group contributed $600,000 in campaign contributions.
Goodell, it should be noted is the son of former New York Senator Charles Goodell, who was appointed to the Senate seat after Robert Kennedy was murdered in June 1968 and is married to a former FOX News Channel anchor Jane Skinner, whose father Sam Skinner is a former White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush.
Smith was on the Obama Presidential transitional staff and is a tight friend of Attorney General Eric Holder.
The AP piece, which shows how out of touch the Washington media is with reality has a disclaimer that appears in the middle of the piece --- EDITOR'S NOTE -- An occasional look at how behind-the-scenes influence is exercised in Washington --- as if this is a news flash.
It seems health care for former players could become a major flash point in the battle between the owners and players. Right now the owners seem to have a plan that would cut the players take of the revenues from 59.6 percent of the revenue to 48.2 percent and cut players salaries by 18 percent. If there is no contract in place by March 3, 2011, the players --- a good many of them who have pre-existing conditions could be scrambling for health care.
The NFL plans to use health care as a bargaining tool to get an agreement. The league issued this statement -- "Regarding the funding of current player benefits if there is a work stoppage, here is what we have said: 'This is yet one more reason to get back to the bargaining table and get an agreement. But there is no question that a strike or lockout triggers rights under a federal law known as COBRA that allows employees to continue their existing health insurance coverage without interruption or change in terms -- either at their expense or their union’s expense. This means that no player or family member would experience any change in coverage for so much as a single day because of a work stoppage. The union surely knows this and there is no excuse suggesting otherwise.'”
In the public relations front, the league is assuring retired players that whatever happens with the CBA, they will get their benefits.
“I know that retired players and their families are watching the current round of bargaining between the NFL and players’ union with growing concern,” said NFL Alumni President and Executive Director George Martin in a letter dated September 7, 2010. “They want to make sure that their benefits will be secure and uninterrupted, no matter what happens in those negotiations. I have discussed this matter with Commissioner Goodell on several occasions, and he has always assured me that retired player benefits will be protected, first in the uncapped year, and then if the CBA its expires.
“I have seen the statements from NFLPA representatives that retirees will lose their benefits if the agreement expires. I am convinced that is not true, and have again asked Commissioner Goodell for his assurances on this point. He was unequivocal and told me again that he as Commissioner, and the owners as a group, are committed to protecting and funding current retired player benefit programs.
“In his letter to retired players, Martin said that he had received the following commitments from the NFL:
“First, no matter what the status of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the NFL clubs will continue to make all required contributions to the pension plan, will continue to pay in full all pension benefits earned by retired players, and will continue to accept requests from vested players to begin receiving benefits as provided for in the pension plan.
“Second, NFL clubs will continue to fund the basic and supplemental disability plans, and the 88 Plan, and will continue to accept and process new applications even after the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires. In addition, the league has pledged to work with NFL Alumni to develop new outreach programs to identify retired players in need of assistance and to getting those players the help they need.
“Third, retired players will continue to receive post-career medical benefits as provided in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, regardless of whether the agreement expires. Their medical benefits will continue on the same terms as today just as if the CBA were still in place.
That should come as good news to one player, an 11-year veteran who will continue to receive his $201.36 a month pension.
But former players don't seem to be too interested in helping DeMaurice Smith. "The NFLPA has been guilty of not helping the pre-1993 retired guys, and these are the guys who have medical problems from playing in the NFL. I don't believe that any of the guys will join DeMaurice Smith, and the NFLPA the way that you suggested because we have been discarded for many, many years by the NFLPA. The thought of using the discarded guys to help settle the CBA negotiations doesn`t sound good to me because of the way that we have been treated.
"During the historic trial that 2062 retired guys were awarded $28.1 million, Jeffrey Kessler, the lead attorney for the NFLPA built his defense around the retired guys being un-marketable, and worthless. He compared us to "dog food.'"
The high stakes battle is gearing up. Goodell and Smith are veteran Washington insiders. The battle is political and much more important than who makes it to "The Big Game" in February.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/in-the-nfl-potential-lockout-all-roads-lead-to-washington
By Evan Weiner
November 18, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- Since the last time we visited the potential National Football League owners' lockout of the players next March, about 72 hours ago, it appears that are a number of people have become a bit anxious about the whole process becoming politicized. The NFL had some issues with the piece. Former players had their say and no one, it seems, wants this to head to Congress and the Oval Office.
Or do they?
One former National Football League player sent an e-mail criticizing this writer for suggesting that National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith should take some former players who are disabled from injuries that they suffered while working as football players in the NFL and bring them before Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The suggestion is that Smith have the players testify and ask the GOP leaders to their faces why those two Congressmen and one Senator, along with the others who enjoy stellar house and senate health benefits because they are in Congress, should repeal the law that was passed in 2010 which will allow Americans with pre-existing conditions who cannot get insurance to buy health insurance should be overturned.
The former player wrote, "I take issue with the political spin that you put in your article. You are right, every player has pre-existing conditions as a result of playing in the NFL. It is up to the NFL to take care of their players, past and present. It is not up to the American taxpayer to pay for the care of the NFL players, past and present. It is obvious that the proposed health care plan that Obama passed will destroy our health care industry. I am hopeful that Mr. Cantor and Mr. Boehner will do everything in their power to get the health care plan repealed.
"The NFL owners have incredible revenue streams coming in, and the players who make this possible should be protected by the owners. Football is a huge industry, and there is a tremendous amount of money being generated by the sport. Perhaps the owners could take a part of the revenues that they generate through licensing, and apply them to a health care plan for all players past and present."
The 2010 health care plan isn't too far from the proposed Republican plan of the early 1990s which Robert Dole championed. A number of former NFL players cannot get health care because of pre-existing conditions and they are getting government assistance whether it is Social Security or Medicare despite not being the retirement age which last time anybody looked was funded by American citizens.
The NFL and the NFLPA tried to negotiate a deal to provide health care to about 2,500 out of 3,200 retired players but the NFLPA wanted all the retirees protected and rejected the NFL’s plan. The NFLPA wanted all the players protected and claimed a large group of former players would not be insured by TransAmerica because of pre-existing conditions.
That rejection brings the health care issue into the discussion and could be used as a reason to go before Congress, which under Boehner, Cantor and McConnell wants to roll back the 2010 legislation and there seems to be no GOP alternative.
The National Football League of today was created by Congress and two Presidential signatures. In 1961, two Democrats, Emanuel Cellar in the House and Estes Kefauver in the Senate crafted legislation that became known as the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy which allowed NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to take all 14 NFL teams and sell them as one entity to American television networks starting in 1962. Rozelle played off CBS and NBC and got substantial deals with CBS. After losing two TV battles to CBS in 1964, NBC chairman David Sarnoff decided to make the American Football League a real major league entity. He gave them a huge (for 1965) five year deal and football was flooded with money.
In 1966, the NFL and AFL agreed to merge but needed Congressional approval. Again Cellar was involved but two Louisiana Democrats, Russell Long in the Senate and Hale Boggs in the House literally traded their votes to Rozelle in exchange for an expansion team in New Orleans and the merger was approved. Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation which was on the back of an anti-inflation bill in October 1966 and within ten days, New Orleans had a team.
Additional federal legislation, specifically the 1984 Cable TV Act and the 1986 Tax Act, put more money in owners' pockets. That is why this will play out in Washington eventually.
The NFL-NFLPA dispute will start perhaps with a federal mediator, then the National Labor Relations Board, maybe Congress and maybe even the Oval Office. President Bill Clinton in 1994 summoned Major League Baseball owners and players to the White House in an attempt to settle the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed.
To that former player, here is the answer not from this writer to the column of 72 hours ago of "How DeMaurice Smith can wreak havoc on a NFL lockout" but from an Associated Press story of November 18, 2010 which is entitled "The Influence Game": NFL union seeks Congress help. A note to the AP writer, DeMaurice Smith runs an association not a union. Apparently according to the story the NFLPA has a lobbyist, which seeming comes as a shock to the AP, who has been working Capital Hill since the summer. The NFL too is working over Congress with a lobbyist and both the NFLPA's DeMaurice Smith and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell have visited the White House.
According to the piece, the NFL's political action group contributed $600,000 in campaign contributions.
Goodell, it should be noted is the son of former New York Senator Charles Goodell, who was appointed to the Senate seat after Robert Kennedy was murdered in June 1968 and is married to a former FOX News Channel anchor Jane Skinner, whose father Sam Skinner is a former White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush.
Smith was on the Obama Presidential transitional staff and is a tight friend of Attorney General Eric Holder.
The AP piece, which shows how out of touch the Washington media is with reality has a disclaimer that appears in the middle of the piece --- EDITOR'S NOTE -- An occasional look at how behind-the-scenes influence is exercised in Washington --- as if this is a news flash.
It seems health care for former players could become a major flash point in the battle between the owners and players. Right now the owners seem to have a plan that would cut the players take of the revenues from 59.6 percent of the revenue to 48.2 percent and cut players salaries by 18 percent. If there is no contract in place by March 3, 2011, the players --- a good many of them who have pre-existing conditions could be scrambling for health care.
The NFL plans to use health care as a bargaining tool to get an agreement. The league issued this statement -- "Regarding the funding of current player benefits if there is a work stoppage, here is what we have said: 'This is yet one more reason to get back to the bargaining table and get an agreement. But there is no question that a strike or lockout triggers rights under a federal law known as COBRA that allows employees to continue their existing health insurance coverage without interruption or change in terms -- either at their expense or their union’s expense. This means that no player or family member would experience any change in coverage for so much as a single day because of a work stoppage. The union surely knows this and there is no excuse suggesting otherwise.'”
In the public relations front, the league is assuring retired players that whatever happens with the CBA, they will get their benefits.
“I know that retired players and their families are watching the current round of bargaining between the NFL and players’ union with growing concern,” said NFL Alumni President and Executive Director George Martin in a letter dated September 7, 2010. “They want to make sure that their benefits will be secure and uninterrupted, no matter what happens in those negotiations. I have discussed this matter with Commissioner Goodell on several occasions, and he has always assured me that retired player benefits will be protected, first in the uncapped year, and then if the CBA its expires.
“I have seen the statements from NFLPA representatives that retirees will lose their benefits if the agreement expires. I am convinced that is not true, and have again asked Commissioner Goodell for his assurances on this point. He was unequivocal and told me again that he as Commissioner, and the owners as a group, are committed to protecting and funding current retired player benefit programs.
“In his letter to retired players, Martin said that he had received the following commitments from the NFL:
“First, no matter what the status of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the NFL clubs will continue to make all required contributions to the pension plan, will continue to pay in full all pension benefits earned by retired players, and will continue to accept requests from vested players to begin receiving benefits as provided for in the pension plan.
“Second, NFL clubs will continue to fund the basic and supplemental disability plans, and the 88 Plan, and will continue to accept and process new applications even after the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires. In addition, the league has pledged to work with NFL Alumni to develop new outreach programs to identify retired players in need of assistance and to getting those players the help they need.
“Third, retired players will continue to receive post-career medical benefits as provided in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, regardless of whether the agreement expires. Their medical benefits will continue on the same terms as today just as if the CBA were still in place.
That should come as good news to one player, an 11-year veteran who will continue to receive his $201.36 a month pension.
But former players don't seem to be too interested in helping DeMaurice Smith. "The NFLPA has been guilty of not helping the pre-1993 retired guys, and these are the guys who have medical problems from playing in the NFL. I don't believe that any of the guys will join DeMaurice Smith, and the NFLPA the way that you suggested because we have been discarded for many, many years by the NFLPA. The thought of using the discarded guys to help settle the CBA negotiations doesn`t sound good to me because of the way that we have been treated.
"During the historic trial that 2062 retired guys were awarded $28.1 million, Jeffrey Kessler, the lead attorney for the NFLPA built his defense around the retired guys being un-marketable, and worthless. He compared us to "dog food.'"
The high stakes battle is gearing up. Goodell and Smith are veteran Washington insiders. The battle is political and much more important than who makes it to "The Big Game" in February.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
How DeMaurice Smith Can Wreck Havoc on the NFL and House GOPers and the Washington Media
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/demaurice-smith-can-create-havoc-on-the-nfl-and-house-gopers-and-the-washingt
By Evan Weiner
National Football League fans probably aren’t paying too much attention to what might happen once the Super Bowl rolls around. Some teams and their fans are gearing up for a December playoff run but in Washington, DeMaurice Smith is plotting strategy as National Football League owners and officials of the National Football League Players Association are about ready to face off in a much bigger game than the Super Bowl.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players nearly ends after the NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii in February. The old CBA expires on March 3 but the real lockout for NFL customers and fans, if the owners and players don’t reach an agreement, could start in April with no mini camps and by July, there could be no training camps, It is unclear whether the league can even conduct a draft if there is no CBA in place.
The dispute is all about money. NFL players take about 59 percent of league-generated revenues and the NFL want to scale that back to 41 percent.
If there is a lockout, NFL players and perhaps NFL retired players will be impacted as the owners do not intend to fund the NFL pension plan or pay for life insurance. The league no longer has to put money aside for that under the terms of the expiring labor agreement. The league will use that money for an owners lockout fund.
Present and former players need to find out how the defunding of those programs will impact their lives.
DeMaurice Smith, the political operative who served on President Barack Obama’s transitional committee, could spring into action and shake up not only the football industry, but members of Congress and the zombie Washington, DC/national media by going on a public relations tour which should include the most unlikely of places.
A visit to that noted football fan’s radio show, Rush Limbaugh and other carnival barkers.
Smith should bring with him a number of discarded football players who are suffering from brain damage or other physical ailments and start talking about the loss of benefits for these players and what happens if the NFL players actually lose their health benefits in the course of the lockout. He should also talk about the number of players in assisted living facilities and who might be paying for their care.
Smith, the political insider, should appear before the GOP controlled House of Representatives and tell presumed House leader John Boehner of Ohio and Virginia’s Eric Cantor that you figure out what to do with my players if they lose their health benefits. After all, Smith should say, you want to repeal the new health care law and one of the provisions you would eliminate is that insurance companies could say no to my clients because of pre-existing conditions and all players have pre-existing conditions.
Who will pay for their care?
Smith would put a face to all of those with pre-existing conditions and put Congressmen Boehner, Cantor and all the others who want to repeal the health care law in a box. He would also force the Washington media, most of whom are probably planning the 2011 White House Correspondence Dinner, to examine the health care issue in a different light because the gladiators of Sunday—the players of the most popular sport in America---would been seen as advocates for health care as they do have pre-existing conditions.
The only people reporting on discarded football players come from the sports media at this point.
The Washington media would have to report on something other than polls and conservative right wing talk show hosts like Limbaugh, who have to actually face someone who is more articulate than they are, will be forced to have an honest, two-way conversation about health care. Smith should also hit the so-called cable TV news channels including FOX and MSNBC and get into a real dialogue instead of the usual in your face food fights that passes for news in these environments. He should appear on the Sunday talk shows and the network morning fares. He should engage in a full media blitz and take with him the “discarded” players.
More than a handful of former players are collecting social security and using Medicare assistance to take care of their health needs because the NFL is not paying for medical insurance down the road for former players. Smith needs to point this out to Boehner, Cantor, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell and all the other members of the Senate and the House. It is a story that needs to be told and probably explained to the football crazy Washington insiders who appear at Washington Redskins home games because that is a place to be seen.
Smith should start his tour during the NFL playoffs. If Smith reached out to the retired and discarded players, they would jump on the opportunity to educate the Boeheners, Cantors, McConnells and the Washington media on issues that effect “real Americans” like the ones politicians always talk about and the media always reports on.
Smith can use some political leverage too. Elections have consequences that are often not reported by national or local media. With Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the National Labor Relations Board changed and because there is a Democrat in the White House, there is a good chance that Smith can eventually use the National Labor Relations Board to his advantage.
Democrats are seen as pro workers while Republicans are seen as pro business and the NLRB reflects that.
Smith might decide that the National Football League Players Association should decertify—although he runs the risk that another group of players might want to form a new association----and file a complaint with the NRLB about the negotiations and see whether or not the NFL owners are engaging in fair collective bargaining negotiations.
During the Bill Clinton presidency, the Major League Baseball Players Associations appealed to the National Labor Relations Board in 1995. The baseball players filed for injunctive relief under Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act. Under the provisions of Section 10(j), the players sought a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board for injunctive relief and so they could go to a federal district court and ask for an injunction if a party is found to be negotiating in bad faith to preserve the status quo.
The Major League Baseball Players Association got the NLRB to agree with them and the case ended up in the courtroom of the youngest justice sitting on the bench of the Southern District of New York. A judge by the name of Sonia Sotomayer was assigned the case.
The 40-year-old Judge Sonia Sotomayer on a cold spring day in a packed courtroom at Foley Square in lower Manhattan back on March 30, 1995 issued an injunction against the owners and restored free agency and arbitration and ruled that the owners negotiated in bad faith.
One of those Major League Baseball owners was George W. Bush. Sotomayer eventually was nominated to the United States Supreme Court by Barack Obama in 2009 and was confirmed by the Senate.
In 2004, Judge Sotomayer upheld the NFL’s college draft rule that requires a player to serve three years in a college football program before being eligible for the league’s draft.
In 2008, the minor-league Central Hockey League asked for injunctive relief under the Section 10(j) provision of the National Labor Relations Act in a dispute between Central Hockey League owners and CHL players. The CHL strike ended two days after the request on October 5. The players went back to work. It was the only time during the Bush years that a sports players association looked to the NRLB for help.
Whether the Obama NRLB would take up Smith’s case, if an action was filed, is not known. But, during the Bush’ years between 2001 and 2009 there was only one “major league” sport job action. The National Hockey League owners locked out the NHL players in 2004-05 but the National Hockey League Players Association never sough out the National Labor Relations Board, possibly because the leadership knew that Bush’s NLRB was going to be less friendly to them than Clinton’s NLRB.
Smith and the players are in a high stakes negotiation that is filled with politics. Smith is taking on 31 of the most powerful people in the world (Green Bay is community owned) with powerful political connections. Jets owner Woody Johnson is a major Republican fundraiser as is San Diego’s Alex Spanos. The guys on the other side of the table generally get their way and have powerful allies. Smith also has some leverage and if he was smart would use it for to his advantage on behalf of his players and education the “American people” and the Washington media on contract negotiations, health care and political leverage.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/demaurice-smith-can-create-havoc-on-the-nfl-and-house-gopers-and-the-washingt
By Evan Weiner
National Football League fans probably aren’t paying too much attention to what might happen once the Super Bowl rolls around. Some teams and their fans are gearing up for a December playoff run but in Washington, DeMaurice Smith is plotting strategy as National Football League owners and officials of the National Football League Players Association are about ready to face off in a much bigger game than the Super Bowl.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement with the players nearly ends after the NFL Pro Bowl in Hawaii in February. The old CBA expires on March 3 but the real lockout for NFL customers and fans, if the owners and players don’t reach an agreement, could start in April with no mini camps and by July, there could be no training camps, It is unclear whether the league can even conduct a draft if there is no CBA in place.
The dispute is all about money. NFL players take about 59 percent of league-generated revenues and the NFL want to scale that back to 41 percent.
If there is a lockout, NFL players and perhaps NFL retired players will be impacted as the owners do not intend to fund the NFL pension plan or pay for life insurance. The league no longer has to put money aside for that under the terms of the expiring labor agreement. The league will use that money for an owners lockout fund.
Present and former players need to find out how the defunding of those programs will impact their lives.
DeMaurice Smith, the political operative who served on President Barack Obama’s transitional committee, could spring into action and shake up not only the football industry, but members of Congress and the zombie Washington, DC/national media by going on a public relations tour which should include the most unlikely of places.
A visit to that noted football fan’s radio show, Rush Limbaugh and other carnival barkers.
Smith should bring with him a number of discarded football players who are suffering from brain damage or other physical ailments and start talking about the loss of benefits for these players and what happens if the NFL players actually lose their health benefits in the course of the lockout. He should also talk about the number of players in assisted living facilities and who might be paying for their care.
Smith, the political insider, should appear before the GOP controlled House of Representatives and tell presumed House leader John Boehner of Ohio and Virginia’s Eric Cantor that you figure out what to do with my players if they lose their health benefits. After all, Smith should say, you want to repeal the new health care law and one of the provisions you would eliminate is that insurance companies could say no to my clients because of pre-existing conditions and all players have pre-existing conditions.
Who will pay for their care?
Smith would put a face to all of those with pre-existing conditions and put Congressmen Boehner, Cantor and all the others who want to repeal the health care law in a box. He would also force the Washington media, most of whom are probably planning the 2011 White House Correspondence Dinner, to examine the health care issue in a different light because the gladiators of Sunday—the players of the most popular sport in America---would been seen as advocates for health care as they do have pre-existing conditions.
The only people reporting on discarded football players come from the sports media at this point.
The Washington media would have to report on something other than polls and conservative right wing talk show hosts like Limbaugh, who have to actually face someone who is more articulate than they are, will be forced to have an honest, two-way conversation about health care. Smith should also hit the so-called cable TV news channels including FOX and MSNBC and get into a real dialogue instead of the usual in your face food fights that passes for news in these environments. He should appear on the Sunday talk shows and the network morning fares. He should engage in a full media blitz and take with him the “discarded” players.
More than a handful of former players are collecting social security and using Medicare assistance to take care of their health needs because the NFL is not paying for medical insurance down the road for former players. Smith needs to point this out to Boehner, Cantor, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell and all the other members of the Senate and the House. It is a story that needs to be told and probably explained to the football crazy Washington insiders who appear at Washington Redskins home games because that is a place to be seen.
Smith should start his tour during the NFL playoffs. If Smith reached out to the retired and discarded players, they would jump on the opportunity to educate the Boeheners, Cantors, McConnells and the Washington media on issues that effect “real Americans” like the ones politicians always talk about and the media always reports on.
Smith can use some political leverage too. Elections have consequences that are often not reported by national or local media. With Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the National Labor Relations Board changed and because there is a Democrat in the White House, there is a good chance that Smith can eventually use the National Labor Relations Board to his advantage.
Democrats are seen as pro workers while Republicans are seen as pro business and the NLRB reflects that.
Smith might decide that the National Football League Players Association should decertify—although he runs the risk that another group of players might want to form a new association----and file a complaint with the NRLB about the negotiations and see whether or not the NFL owners are engaging in fair collective bargaining negotiations.
During the Bill Clinton presidency, the Major League Baseball Players Associations appealed to the National Labor Relations Board in 1995. The baseball players filed for injunctive relief under Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act. Under the provisions of Section 10(j), the players sought a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board for injunctive relief and so they could go to a federal district court and ask for an injunction if a party is found to be negotiating in bad faith to preserve the status quo.
The Major League Baseball Players Association got the NLRB to agree with them and the case ended up in the courtroom of the youngest justice sitting on the bench of the Southern District of New York. A judge by the name of Sonia Sotomayer was assigned the case.
The 40-year-old Judge Sonia Sotomayer on a cold spring day in a packed courtroom at Foley Square in lower Manhattan back on March 30, 1995 issued an injunction against the owners and restored free agency and arbitration and ruled that the owners negotiated in bad faith.
One of those Major League Baseball owners was George W. Bush. Sotomayer eventually was nominated to the United States Supreme Court by Barack Obama in 2009 and was confirmed by the Senate.
In 2004, Judge Sotomayer upheld the NFL’s college draft rule that requires a player to serve three years in a college football program before being eligible for the league’s draft.
In 2008, the minor-league Central Hockey League asked for injunctive relief under the Section 10(j) provision of the National Labor Relations Act in a dispute between Central Hockey League owners and CHL players. The CHL strike ended two days after the request on October 5. The players went back to work. It was the only time during the Bush years that a sports players association looked to the NRLB for help.
Whether the Obama NRLB would take up Smith’s case, if an action was filed, is not known. But, during the Bush’ years between 2001 and 2009 there was only one “major league” sport job action. The National Hockey League owners locked out the NHL players in 2004-05 but the National Hockey League Players Association never sough out the National Labor Relations Board, possibly because the leadership knew that Bush’s NLRB was going to be less friendly to them than Clinton’s NLRB.
Smith and the players are in a high stakes negotiation that is filled with politics. Smith is taking on 31 of the most powerful people in the world (Green Bay is community owned) with powerful political connections. Jets owner Woody Johnson is a major Republican fundraiser as is San Diego’s Alex Spanos. The guys on the other side of the table generally get their way and have powerful allies. Smith also has some leverage and if he was smart would use it for to his advantage on behalf of his players and education the “American people” and the Washington media on contract negotiations, health care and political leverage.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, July 23, 2010
Discarded NFL players are often forgotten in retirement
Discarded NFL players are often forgotten in retirement
FRIDAY, 23 JULY 2010 16:15
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/discarded-nfl-players-are-often-forgotten-in-retirement
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
As National Football League training camps begin to open up around the country, (the New York Jets in Cortland, N.Y. on Aug. 1, the New York Giants in Albany, N.Y. also on Aug. 1 and the Philadelphia Eagles at Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. on Monday) some 2,560 players are getting ready for what has become an annual ritual — two a day sessions upon the broiling sun to prove they belong on the field. Eventually only 1,696 of them will make teams. A number of the 864 players who are "cut" might end up on practice squads where they make a minimum of $5,200 a week to hone their skills. Some of the players will be placed on injured reserve and will either return to the field or get cut when they are deemed healthy. Each team can keep as many as eight players on the payroll (practice squad) which means 256 players might get another shot at a roster spot when a team loses a player to an injury.
Football is a tough game. Americans have been sold on football's brutality since the October 31, 1960 CBS documentary called "The Violent World of Sam Huff" which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. Yes TV networks once did documentaries in a time when TV news did reporting, research and presented facts and not worried about being profitable. In the 1970s, Al Primo convinced TV executives that news could be turned into entertainment and news divisions could make really big money. Cable TV news would take Primo's idea to the next level and began to feature raving lunatics screaming about their viewpoint because it made for "good TV". Huff was a linebacker with the New York Giants and was the first NFL player ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine on November 30, 1959. Huff's job was to "hurt people" because football was a "man's game" according to the accompanying Time magazine column.
The Huff piece came about 10 months after the "greatest football game ever" when Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to an overtime win over the Giants in the NFL Championship Game, a game that captivated Americans and propelled the NFL from a "mom and pop" operation into the big time. Huff wasn't the best linebacker in the NFL but played for the "glamorous" New York Giants, a team that caught the fancy of Madison Avenue's advertising community and the TV networks which were headquartered in New York. Huff's Giants didn't win the 1958 championship, Baltimore did but Baltimore was led by a quiet crew cut quarterback named Unitas while the Giants had the handsome Frank Gifford and the tough as nails Huff.
Sam Huff became a successful businessman after his career. Unitas didn't. The quarterback who put the NFL on the map couldn't use his right hand as he got older because of a tendon injury he suffered in 1968. He has two knee replacements and heart bypass was denied disability. Unitas died in 2002 but the denial of disability to the quarterback who put the NFL on the map still draws the ire of former players in tough spots.
In 2007, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, held a hearing because she wanted to have "an open discussion on the fairness of the system to severely disabled retired players." It was the start of drawing attention to the plight of retired NFL players. Johnny Unitas' widow Sandra was in Washington watching the hearings.
Huff in his Time magazine interview in 1959 didn't say anything new. A Life magazine had a cover story on December 3, 1971 "Suicide Squad Football's most violent men." Suicide squads have been given a more genteel name — "Special Teams" — but that's where rookies have to first earn their stripes in the NFL. Special teams are the worst assignments on the team and punt returns can be especially dangerous.
Football has been wrestling with players been injured and maimed for more than a century. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 told college presidents to clean up the game or he would ban football because of the number of deaths and injuries associated with the game.
New rules were implemented but the game remained violent and more than a century later, it seems that not much has changed. Players are still one play away from ending their career and that leads to the question.
Do the young players and some of the veterans who are about to go to camp know what they are getting into? If you listen to Dave Pear (and other older retired players who suffered life changing injuries playing football), the answer is no. Pear played in the NFL for six years as a defensive tackle between 1975 and 1980 with the Baltimore Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders. He played in one Pro Bowl and was a member of the Raiders Super Bowl XV championship team in 1980-81. Despite all of that, Pear wished he never played football.
"They think they are but no they are not," said Pear who broke his neck during his career and is facing hip replacement surgery in the very near future. "I don't begrudge the active players one penny and I suggest to them save as much as you can because when they become 40, 45, 50, 55, if things don't change, they are going to need the money because the union won't support them."
Pear is uninsurable and depends on government support such as Medicare and social security disability for his medical needs. But he might be one of the lucky ones as he has his wife's support and seems willing to take on the NFL and the NFLPA in an effort to get access to his benefits. He is one of the few with George Visger, Brent Boyd, Conrad Dobler and Mike Ditka who are speaking out about what they feel is the NFL and the NFLPA's abandonment of broken down old players who are in need.
But a lot of former players are not talking, partly because they have been trained since junior high school to "suck it up" and "be a man" which is the football mentality. Most players who play college football have no skills when they leave college because they don't get an education as they are too busy playing football. Sunday's warriors have been beaten over their heads since they were small and are team players even in retirement.
Retired players face high rates of divorce, face bankruptcies and have to put up with the pain of serious injuries on a daily basis. Alzheimer's disease and memory-related diseases in former players between the ages of 30 and 49 are 19 percent higher than average in that population pool.
"Football players wear a mask," said Pear. "All people see is a number. We are just a number that is how football works. Nobody knows how many retired players there (in dire straits)."
The House of Representatives has been holding hearings and monitoring the head injuries situation around the NFL. In 2009, several House members did not think NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or the league has done enough to care for players with head injuries — concussions — and that the league really has not made much of an effort investigating long time damage from concussions suffered by players who worked in the NFL as players.
Pear and other retirees have been after the league and the players association to do more and it wasn't until Congress stepped in and began hearings in 2007 that the league and the players association took notice.
The NFL and researches have been at odds over the sports head trauma and later cognitive degeneration. Researchers looking into the relationship between concussions and cognitive problems have seen a link while the NFL's medical committee on concussions has not. On December 3, 2009, the NFL changed the league's concussion policy telling teams that if a player shows any significant sign of concussion that player must be removed from a game or practice and cannot return to the field on the same day.
New NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith told the retirees that "the rift is over" between the old players and the union and that help for those in need is on the way. But Pear doesn't see any evidence that the rift is really over. "The NFL grosses about eight and a half billion dollars a year, so where is the dough? (Former Executive Director, the late Gene) Upshaw once said we could not receive a pension and disability. Now we have the Gene Upshaw Dire Need Fund, but nothing has changed. So (to today's players) save every penny because once they realize they need medical insurance and can't get it."
When the cheering stops for a good number NFL players, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Because of the injuries, a good many players became medical liabilities and are uninsurable. The National Football League does not guarantee contracts and if you are a marginal player who was injured, as soon as a doctor pronounces you healthy, you could be cut and your contract just ends with some severance pay.
Players of Pear's era got no severance and there was no guaranteed money given as a bonus. The bonus money is the only payment that a player will get, all players are then on a week-to-week basis. Virtually all of the players are replaceable on the spot.
"I know there is no pot of gold," said Pear. "In football, you are only a number. When you are a professional football player, you think you are invincible but when you get hit in the head, you injure your brain and life becomes different. We want our disability, our pension and future medical benefits. We don't want charity"
The football culture is different than real life. Football players grow up in a paramilitary setting as one long time NFL owner once said. That may explain why the National Football League Players Association has never been as effective as the Major League Baseball Players Association or the National Basketball Players Association or the National Hockey League Players Association in delivering guaranteed contracts to their members. The NFLPA seemingly has been pushing salaries up throughout the last four decades and not worrying about aftercare for former members until recently when the league and the players association were hauled before Congress to talk about the plight of former players.
"What they have done is create a myth," said Pear. "They have misled these young men telling them to be tough and work through injuries. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL guarantee disability, pensions and medical their career. They (the NFL and the NFLPA) have convinced up that we do not deserve it. They have not allowed us access to our benefits which is not right and that has hurt players and players' families."
The National Football league Players Association has not kept records detailing the difficulties former union members have had in their post-football lives. One of the problems is that most players last 3 1/2 years in the league and pensions for players with three years in the league is not much. But the 3 1/2 year average is deceiving. Running backs may last 2.2 years and not be eligible for a pension or benefits as an example. The NFL may be recognized as the National Football League, but people in the NFL know the initials NFL as Not For Long. A good number of players never make it to where they can apply for a pension or disability and by the time they get to the NFL, after surviving high school and college ball, they probably have had some injury baggage. There is a disability benefit plan but according to Pear, it is more lip service than reality.
Congress, for the most part, has left the NFL issue behind although the House could call the NFL and NFLPA before them at any time. Pear is of the opinion that Congress, a class action suit by former players and chipping away at the NFL's image are three areas where the retired players can make the most strides.
The class action suit demanding compensation for injuries would need a law firm with deep pockets willing to take on the NFL and would require players to step up and talk about their problems. It might be easier to find a law firm than getting macho tough guys to go public. There is still a stigma attached even in retirement for players who don't toe the company line. Congress can go after two of the league's antitrust exemptions, the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to package all of the league's teams (14 in 1961, 32 in 2010) and sell the league to over-the-air and cable TV networks as one entity and undo the 1966 American Football league and National football League merger. That is highly unlikely but the NFL can be vulnerable there. The NFL does a remarkable job selling the product — football — but can the NFL afford images of broken down old stars and grunts who are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s parading around with ailments suffered in games?
It is unlikely that NFL media partners, Sumner Redstone's CBS (or any of the Redstone's holdings including Showtime), General Electric's NBC, Disney's ESPN or Rupert Murdoch's FOX businesses (including Fox News Channel or the FOX Business Channel) would tackle the issue. Newspapers are not partners with the NFL but newspaper sports sections depend on the NFL to fill up space for content and hope that readers will pay attention to ads and some of the ads are football related wrapped around Thanksgiving, weekends and playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl. A reporter sniffing around might lose access to the NFL and most writers would rather give up their right arms than be denied NFL access. The NFL controls the narrative and while Time Warner (the cable TV programmer and channel stock side not the stock side that owns Time Warner Cable) no longer has an NFL TV contract and could do pieces on CNN (a news network that hardly covers news), Time Warner might not want to show the NFL in a bad light. Image or perceived perception is everything to the NFL.
Pear fits into the study of short term memory problems. "There is a problem, you don't know what it is, as a player you are taught to work through it, but as you get older....I wished I never played. I enjoyed playing football when I was not injured. I played with a broken neck for two years. It wasn't worth it."
The image of the NFL, the romance of training camp, the start of the season goes fully on display by Aug. 1. The question for the 2,560 players who are in training camps is simple? Do you know what you are getting into? It is a question that only they can answer and perhaps instead of worrying about how much money they can get in the ongoing collective bargaining agreement, the players should check off safety concerns for both active and retired players (even though retired players don't pay the salaries of NFLPA staff) as their top priority in the next CBA.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
FRIDAY, 23 JULY 2010 16:15
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/discarded-nfl-players-are-often-forgotten-in-retirement
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
As National Football League training camps begin to open up around the country, (the New York Jets in Cortland, N.Y. on Aug. 1, the New York Giants in Albany, N.Y. also on Aug. 1 and the Philadelphia Eagles at Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. on Monday) some 2,560 players are getting ready for what has become an annual ritual — two a day sessions upon the broiling sun to prove they belong on the field. Eventually only 1,696 of them will make teams. A number of the 864 players who are "cut" might end up on practice squads where they make a minimum of $5,200 a week to hone their skills. Some of the players will be placed on injured reserve and will either return to the field or get cut when they are deemed healthy. Each team can keep as many as eight players on the payroll (practice squad) which means 256 players might get another shot at a roster spot when a team loses a player to an injury.
Football is a tough game. Americans have been sold on football's brutality since the October 31, 1960 CBS documentary called "The Violent World of Sam Huff" which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. Yes TV networks once did documentaries in a time when TV news did reporting, research and presented facts and not worried about being profitable. In the 1970s, Al Primo convinced TV executives that news could be turned into entertainment and news divisions could make really big money. Cable TV news would take Primo's idea to the next level and began to feature raving lunatics screaming about their viewpoint because it made for "good TV". Huff was a linebacker with the New York Giants and was the first NFL player ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine on November 30, 1959. Huff's job was to "hurt people" because football was a "man's game" according to the accompanying Time magazine column.
The Huff piece came about 10 months after the "greatest football game ever" when Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts to an overtime win over the Giants in the NFL Championship Game, a game that captivated Americans and propelled the NFL from a "mom and pop" operation into the big time. Huff wasn't the best linebacker in the NFL but played for the "glamorous" New York Giants, a team that caught the fancy of Madison Avenue's advertising community and the TV networks which were headquartered in New York. Huff's Giants didn't win the 1958 championship, Baltimore did but Baltimore was led by a quiet crew cut quarterback named Unitas while the Giants had the handsome Frank Gifford and the tough as nails Huff.
Sam Huff became a successful businessman after his career. Unitas didn't. The quarterback who put the NFL on the map couldn't use his right hand as he got older because of a tendon injury he suffered in 1968. He has two knee replacements and heart bypass was denied disability. Unitas died in 2002 but the denial of disability to the quarterback who put the NFL on the map still draws the ire of former players in tough spots.
In 2007, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, held a hearing because she wanted to have "an open discussion on the fairness of the system to severely disabled retired players." It was the start of drawing attention to the plight of retired NFL players. Johnny Unitas' widow Sandra was in Washington watching the hearings.
Huff in his Time magazine interview in 1959 didn't say anything new. A Life magazine had a cover story on December 3, 1971 "Suicide Squad Football's most violent men." Suicide squads have been given a more genteel name — "Special Teams" — but that's where rookies have to first earn their stripes in the NFL. Special teams are the worst assignments on the team and punt returns can be especially dangerous.
Football has been wrestling with players been injured and maimed for more than a century. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 told college presidents to clean up the game or he would ban football because of the number of deaths and injuries associated with the game.
New rules were implemented but the game remained violent and more than a century later, it seems that not much has changed. Players are still one play away from ending their career and that leads to the question.
Do the young players and some of the veterans who are about to go to camp know what they are getting into? If you listen to Dave Pear (and other older retired players who suffered life changing injuries playing football), the answer is no. Pear played in the NFL for six years as a defensive tackle between 1975 and 1980 with the Baltimore Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Oakland Raiders. He played in one Pro Bowl and was a member of the Raiders Super Bowl XV championship team in 1980-81. Despite all of that, Pear wished he never played football.
"They think they are but no they are not," said Pear who broke his neck during his career and is facing hip replacement surgery in the very near future. "I don't begrudge the active players one penny and I suggest to them save as much as you can because when they become 40, 45, 50, 55, if things don't change, they are going to need the money because the union won't support them."
Pear is uninsurable and depends on government support such as Medicare and social security disability for his medical needs. But he might be one of the lucky ones as he has his wife's support and seems willing to take on the NFL and the NFLPA in an effort to get access to his benefits. He is one of the few with George Visger, Brent Boyd, Conrad Dobler and Mike Ditka who are speaking out about what they feel is the NFL and the NFLPA's abandonment of broken down old players who are in need.
But a lot of former players are not talking, partly because they have been trained since junior high school to "suck it up" and "be a man" which is the football mentality. Most players who play college football have no skills when they leave college because they don't get an education as they are too busy playing football. Sunday's warriors have been beaten over their heads since they were small and are team players even in retirement.
Retired players face high rates of divorce, face bankruptcies and have to put up with the pain of serious injuries on a daily basis. Alzheimer's disease and memory-related diseases in former players between the ages of 30 and 49 are 19 percent higher than average in that population pool.
"Football players wear a mask," said Pear. "All people see is a number. We are just a number that is how football works. Nobody knows how many retired players there (in dire straits)."
The House of Representatives has been holding hearings and monitoring the head injuries situation around the NFL. In 2009, several House members did not think NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell or the league has done enough to care for players with head injuries — concussions — and that the league really has not made much of an effort investigating long time damage from concussions suffered by players who worked in the NFL as players.
Pear and other retirees have been after the league and the players association to do more and it wasn't until Congress stepped in and began hearings in 2007 that the league and the players association took notice.
The NFL and researches have been at odds over the sports head trauma and later cognitive degeneration. Researchers looking into the relationship between concussions and cognitive problems have seen a link while the NFL's medical committee on concussions has not. On December 3, 2009, the NFL changed the league's concussion policy telling teams that if a player shows any significant sign of concussion that player must be removed from a game or practice and cannot return to the field on the same day.
New NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith told the retirees that "the rift is over" between the old players and the union and that help for those in need is on the way. But Pear doesn't see any evidence that the rift is really over. "The NFL grosses about eight and a half billion dollars a year, so where is the dough? (Former Executive Director, the late Gene) Upshaw once said we could not receive a pension and disability. Now we have the Gene Upshaw Dire Need Fund, but nothing has changed. So (to today's players) save every penny because once they realize they need medical insurance and can't get it."
When the cheering stops for a good number NFL players, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Because of the injuries, a good many players became medical liabilities and are uninsurable. The National Football League does not guarantee contracts and if you are a marginal player who was injured, as soon as a doctor pronounces you healthy, you could be cut and your contract just ends with some severance pay.
Players of Pear's era got no severance and there was no guaranteed money given as a bonus. The bonus money is the only payment that a player will get, all players are then on a week-to-week basis. Virtually all of the players are replaceable on the spot.
"I know there is no pot of gold," said Pear. "In football, you are only a number. When you are a professional football player, you think you are invincible but when you get hit in the head, you injure your brain and life becomes different. We want our disability, our pension and future medical benefits. We don't want charity"
The football culture is different than real life. Football players grow up in a paramilitary setting as one long time NFL owner once said. That may explain why the National Football League Players Association has never been as effective as the Major League Baseball Players Association or the National Basketball Players Association or the National Hockey League Players Association in delivering guaranteed contracts to their members. The NFLPA seemingly has been pushing salaries up throughout the last four decades and not worrying about aftercare for former members until recently when the league and the players association were hauled before Congress to talk about the plight of former players.
"What they have done is create a myth," said Pear. "They have misled these young men telling them to be tough and work through injuries. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL guarantee disability, pensions and medical their career. They (the NFL and the NFLPA) have convinced up that we do not deserve it. They have not allowed us access to our benefits which is not right and that has hurt players and players' families."
The National Football league Players Association has not kept records detailing the difficulties former union members have had in their post-football lives. One of the problems is that most players last 3 1/2 years in the league and pensions for players with three years in the league is not much. But the 3 1/2 year average is deceiving. Running backs may last 2.2 years and not be eligible for a pension or benefits as an example. The NFL may be recognized as the National Football League, but people in the NFL know the initials NFL as Not For Long. A good number of players never make it to where they can apply for a pension or disability and by the time they get to the NFL, after surviving high school and college ball, they probably have had some injury baggage. There is a disability benefit plan but according to Pear, it is more lip service than reality.
Congress, for the most part, has left the NFL issue behind although the House could call the NFL and NFLPA before them at any time. Pear is of the opinion that Congress, a class action suit by former players and chipping away at the NFL's image are three areas where the retired players can make the most strides.
The class action suit demanding compensation for injuries would need a law firm with deep pockets willing to take on the NFL and would require players to step up and talk about their problems. It might be easier to find a law firm than getting macho tough guys to go public. There is still a stigma attached even in retirement for players who don't toe the company line. Congress can go after two of the league's antitrust exemptions, the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 which allowed the NFL to package all of the league's teams (14 in 1961, 32 in 2010) and sell the league to over-the-air and cable TV networks as one entity and undo the 1966 American Football league and National football League merger. That is highly unlikely but the NFL can be vulnerable there. The NFL does a remarkable job selling the product — football — but can the NFL afford images of broken down old stars and grunts who are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s parading around with ailments suffered in games?
It is unlikely that NFL media partners, Sumner Redstone's CBS (or any of the Redstone's holdings including Showtime), General Electric's NBC, Disney's ESPN or Rupert Murdoch's FOX businesses (including Fox News Channel or the FOX Business Channel) would tackle the issue. Newspapers are not partners with the NFL but newspaper sports sections depend on the NFL to fill up space for content and hope that readers will pay attention to ads and some of the ads are football related wrapped around Thanksgiving, weekends and playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl. A reporter sniffing around might lose access to the NFL and most writers would rather give up their right arms than be denied NFL access. The NFL controls the narrative and while Time Warner (the cable TV programmer and channel stock side not the stock side that owns Time Warner Cable) no longer has an NFL TV contract and could do pieces on CNN (a news network that hardly covers news), Time Warner might not want to show the NFL in a bad light. Image or perceived perception is everything to the NFL.
Pear fits into the study of short term memory problems. "There is a problem, you don't know what it is, as a player you are taught to work through it, but as you get older....I wished I never played. I enjoyed playing football when I was not injured. I played with a broken neck for two years. It wasn't worth it."
The image of the NFL, the romance of training camp, the start of the season goes fully on display by Aug. 1. The question for the 2,560 players who are in training camps is simple? Do you know what you are getting into? It is a question that only they can answer and perhaps instead of worrying about how much money they can get in the ongoing collective bargaining agreement, the players should check off safety concerns for both active and retired players (even though retired players don't pay the salaries of NFLPA staff) as their top priority in the next CBA.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator and speaking on "The Politics of Sports Business." He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The 18 percent solution won't fly
The 18 percent solution won't fly
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m1d27-The-18-percent-solution-wont-fly#
By Evan Weiner
January 27, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- Peter King has been around the National Football League as a reporter for a long time so there should not be any reason to doubt his January 18, 2010 CNNSI.com column which stated that National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith sent out an e-mail to his players that ownership wants to cut players compensation 18 percent and that a management source confirmed the figure. The 18 percent figure has not filtered down to the teams yet but it sounded about right according to one NFL person who is not involved in the day-to-day talks. Not every owner is filled in daily on the bargaining, which is a normal business standard.
The owners and players have about 13 months until the present collective bargaining agreement ends and it is highly unlikely that the players would even consider an 18 percent pay decrease but this is the starting point in the negotiations.
The owners want change, the players want status quo. Something will have to give or the National Football League owners will simply lockout the players sometime after February 28, 2011 and the work stoppage which ensue meaning that some or all of the 2011 NFL season will be canceled.
The players in some way are collateral damage in an on going fight between the high revenue teams and the low-end teams and economic realities. Before Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the New York Giants/Jets ownership decided to build new stadiums, the high revenue owners like Dallas’ Jones, Washington’s Daniel Snyder, New England’s Robert Kraft, Houston’s Robert McNair and Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Lurie were arguing that the owners revenue sharing system needed to be changed and that Jones, Snyder, Kraft, McNair and Lurie among others should be keeping a lion’s share of locally produced revenue so they could use that money on their teams. Small market owners like Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson and Cincinnati’s Mike Brown reminded the big revenue guys that the National Football League was built on a sharing system that made sure the small market Green Bay Packers could compete (in the 1960s and beyond) with New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Wilson and Brown wanted to keep the revenue sharing rules in line with league financial history since the 1960s but times have changed. Wilson paid $25,000 for his American Football League franchise in 1960 and does not have the debt problems as other owners but his market, Buffalo, is one of the NFL’s smallest and his local revenue potential is limited compared to New York, Washington, New England, Philadelphia and Dallas. Brown’s Bengals cost was about $7.5 million in 1967 when the team joined the American Football League, presumably the franchise is in good financial shape in terms of debt but Cincinnati is another revenue limited market.
Brown’s Bengals have played in two publicly funded facilities; Wilson’s Bills also play in a facility that used a lot of taxpayers’ dollars for a renovation in the late 1990s. But Jones, Snyder, Kraft, McNair and Lurie have put up a lot of money to either buy the franchise or build new facilities and in some cases have had to put a lot of their own money into the new venues. Jones paid for about half of his new Cowboys Stadium (Arlington, Texas taxpayers have kicked in the other half through a sales tax hike) and one of Jones’ plans to help pay down the debt of the new place fell through. He was unable to sell naming rights to the stadium.
Snyder paid a bundle for the Redskins and while one magazine claims the team is the most valuable franchise in North American sports, Snyder still has to pay off the debt. Kraft used a lot of his own money to build his new Foxboro, Massachusetts stadium, Lanier paid well over $700 million for the Texans expansion franchise in 1999 although he got a taxpayers funded stadium and Lurie had to kick in money for his new Eagles stadium.
There will be more owners tales of woe in the future. The combination Mara/Tisch family-Woody Johnson new East Rutherford, New Jersey football palace is costing according to estimates at least $1.3 billion and while New Jersey is picking up infrastructure costs and given Mara/Tisch/Johnson all sorts of tax breaks and incentives, there is still a debt that needs to be paid and the new stadium naming rights are still up for sale.
The York family’s San Francisco 49ers franchise may be singing off of the same music sheet sometime this year. The Yorks would like to build a new football venue in Santa Clara, about 40 miles south from Candlestick Park in San Francisco and the plan is to get minimal taxpayers support for the facility.
The NFL and the Yorks have been in contact with the Raiders Al Davis about possibly being a partner in the venture to help the financial burden.
The 18 percent solution according to King’s column comes out to about a billion dollars in additional revenue for the owners.
There is one area that the owners and players probably can agree upon for cost reductions.
Entry-level contracts.
First round draft picks cost a lot of money and players like the New York Jets Vernon Gholston is a perfect example of where costs can be reduced. Gholston was the sixth overall pick in the 2008 NFL Draft. He signed a five-year contract for a reported $32.5 million and was guaranteed over $20 million. Gholston has been a bust so far but he will get his bonus money whether he is with the Jets or out of football.
The Raiders quarterback JaMarcus Russell was the top pick in the 2007 NFL Draft. Russell has done little in his career to justify the deal which reported was for six years and $68 million with a guarantee of $31.5 million.
The NFL and the NFLPA can negotiate a rookie wage and not worry about the consequences of harming a third party, in this case entry level players, because of labor laws. But veteran players would want the money shifted from the rookies to them.
The owners will have some leverage in the battle with the players. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (FOX), General Electric’s NBCUniversal, Sumner Redstone’s CBS, Disney’s ESPN and Liberty Media’s DirecTV (NFL Sunday Ticket) will continue paying the owners under the terms of their broadcast/cable/satellite agreements with the league whether the league locks out the players or not.
The NFL’s deals with News Corp, NBCUniversal and CBS end after the 2011 season. The TV deals bring in more than $3 billion annually for the 32 owners.
NFL players went on strike in 1987 but the NFL owners had a backup plan and offered replacement players contests. The games went on after the league shut down for a week. A number of top names including the New York Giants Lawrence Taylor, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, the Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Randy White along with Seattle Seahawks receiver (and future US Congressman) Steve Largent crossed the picket lines and the strike collapsed after four weeks. The NFLPA had no war chest to support the players, not learning any lessons from the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, the players and owners had a strike fund or insurance in that battle, or the 1982 NFL Players strike. The players picked up a little money in 1982 from two NFLPA “All-Star Games” in Washington and Los Angeles.
“In 1982, Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting stepped forward and funded the strike games and put the two games on TBS which allowed the players to go forward. There was enough money raised at that time to field a mini season of 10 teams with the teams owned by the players had the strike continued. But the players voted against having their own league,” said Sheldon Saltman, the NLFPATV consultant who created and organized the two All-Star Games under the aegis of then NLFPA Executive Director Ed Garvey and former Redskins All-Pro defensive back Brig Owens.
After the players crumbled, the NFLPA decertified and the players led by New York Jets running back Freeman McNeil sued the NFL, challenging the league’s free agency rules. By 1993, the owners and players settled their disputes.
The game has changed though for the owners and players. Three prominent people are no longer at the negotiating table, Paul Tagliabue, the former NFL Commissioner who retired, the late Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the association and former Pittsburgh Steelers boss Dan Rooney who rode off into the sunset and is now the United States Ambassador to Ireland. Tagliabue and Upshaw had a very unique relationship that was unlike other league commissioners/negotiators and players associations’ executive directors in that they worked together in an amicable fashion and resolved differences and extended the 1993 agreement five times. The players trusted Rooney as a voice of reason.
The owners’ 18 percent solution is not going to fly this time around.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m1d27-The-18-percent-solution-wont-fly#
By Evan Weiner
January 27, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- Peter King has been around the National Football League as a reporter for a long time so there should not be any reason to doubt his January 18, 2010 CNNSI.com column which stated that National Football League Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith sent out an e-mail to his players that ownership wants to cut players compensation 18 percent and that a management source confirmed the figure. The 18 percent figure has not filtered down to the teams yet but it sounded about right according to one NFL person who is not involved in the day-to-day talks. Not every owner is filled in daily on the bargaining, which is a normal business standard.
The owners and players have about 13 months until the present collective bargaining agreement ends and it is highly unlikely that the players would even consider an 18 percent pay decrease but this is the starting point in the negotiations.
The owners want change, the players want status quo. Something will have to give or the National Football League owners will simply lockout the players sometime after February 28, 2011 and the work stoppage which ensue meaning that some or all of the 2011 NFL season will be canceled.
The players in some way are collateral damage in an on going fight between the high revenue teams and the low-end teams and economic realities. Before Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the New York Giants/Jets ownership decided to build new stadiums, the high revenue owners like Dallas’ Jones, Washington’s Daniel Snyder, New England’s Robert Kraft, Houston’s Robert McNair and Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Lurie were arguing that the owners revenue sharing system needed to be changed and that Jones, Snyder, Kraft, McNair and Lurie among others should be keeping a lion’s share of locally produced revenue so they could use that money on their teams. Small market owners like Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson and Cincinnati’s Mike Brown reminded the big revenue guys that the National Football League was built on a sharing system that made sure the small market Green Bay Packers could compete (in the 1960s and beyond) with New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Wilson and Brown wanted to keep the revenue sharing rules in line with league financial history since the 1960s but times have changed. Wilson paid $25,000 for his American Football League franchise in 1960 and does not have the debt problems as other owners but his market, Buffalo, is one of the NFL’s smallest and his local revenue potential is limited compared to New York, Washington, New England, Philadelphia and Dallas. Brown’s Bengals cost was about $7.5 million in 1967 when the team joined the American Football League, presumably the franchise is in good financial shape in terms of debt but Cincinnati is another revenue limited market.
Brown’s Bengals have played in two publicly funded facilities; Wilson’s Bills also play in a facility that used a lot of taxpayers’ dollars for a renovation in the late 1990s. But Jones, Snyder, Kraft, McNair and Lurie have put up a lot of money to either buy the franchise or build new facilities and in some cases have had to put a lot of their own money into the new venues. Jones paid for about half of his new Cowboys Stadium (Arlington, Texas taxpayers have kicked in the other half through a sales tax hike) and one of Jones’ plans to help pay down the debt of the new place fell through. He was unable to sell naming rights to the stadium.
Snyder paid a bundle for the Redskins and while one magazine claims the team is the most valuable franchise in North American sports, Snyder still has to pay off the debt. Kraft used a lot of his own money to build his new Foxboro, Massachusetts stadium, Lanier paid well over $700 million for the Texans expansion franchise in 1999 although he got a taxpayers funded stadium and Lurie had to kick in money for his new Eagles stadium.
There will be more owners tales of woe in the future. The combination Mara/Tisch family-Woody Johnson new East Rutherford, New Jersey football palace is costing according to estimates at least $1.3 billion and while New Jersey is picking up infrastructure costs and given Mara/Tisch/Johnson all sorts of tax breaks and incentives, there is still a debt that needs to be paid and the new stadium naming rights are still up for sale.
The York family’s San Francisco 49ers franchise may be singing off of the same music sheet sometime this year. The Yorks would like to build a new football venue in Santa Clara, about 40 miles south from Candlestick Park in San Francisco and the plan is to get minimal taxpayers support for the facility.
The NFL and the Yorks have been in contact with the Raiders Al Davis about possibly being a partner in the venture to help the financial burden.
The 18 percent solution according to King’s column comes out to about a billion dollars in additional revenue for the owners.
There is one area that the owners and players probably can agree upon for cost reductions.
Entry-level contracts.
First round draft picks cost a lot of money and players like the New York Jets Vernon Gholston is a perfect example of where costs can be reduced. Gholston was the sixth overall pick in the 2008 NFL Draft. He signed a five-year contract for a reported $32.5 million and was guaranteed over $20 million. Gholston has been a bust so far but he will get his bonus money whether he is with the Jets or out of football.
The Raiders quarterback JaMarcus Russell was the top pick in the 2007 NFL Draft. Russell has done little in his career to justify the deal which reported was for six years and $68 million with a guarantee of $31.5 million.
The NFL and the NFLPA can negotiate a rookie wage and not worry about the consequences of harming a third party, in this case entry level players, because of labor laws. But veteran players would want the money shifted from the rookies to them.
The owners will have some leverage in the battle with the players. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (FOX), General Electric’s NBCUniversal, Sumner Redstone’s CBS, Disney’s ESPN and Liberty Media’s DirecTV (NFL Sunday Ticket) will continue paying the owners under the terms of their broadcast/cable/satellite agreements with the league whether the league locks out the players or not.
The NFL’s deals with News Corp, NBCUniversal and CBS end after the 2011 season. The TV deals bring in more than $3 billion annually for the 32 owners.
NFL players went on strike in 1987 but the NFL owners had a backup plan and offered replacement players contests. The games went on after the league shut down for a week. A number of top names including the New York Giants Lawrence Taylor, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, the Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Randy White along with Seattle Seahawks receiver (and future US Congressman) Steve Largent crossed the picket lines and the strike collapsed after four weeks. The NFLPA had no war chest to support the players, not learning any lessons from the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, the players and owners had a strike fund or insurance in that battle, or the 1982 NFL Players strike. The players picked up a little money in 1982 from two NFLPA “All-Star Games” in Washington and Los Angeles.
“In 1982, Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting stepped forward and funded the strike games and put the two games on TBS which allowed the players to go forward. There was enough money raised at that time to field a mini season of 10 teams with the teams owned by the players had the strike continued. But the players voted against having their own league,” said Sheldon Saltman, the NLFPATV consultant who created and organized the two All-Star Games under the aegis of then NLFPA Executive Director Ed Garvey and former Redskins All-Pro defensive back Brig Owens.
After the players crumbled, the NFLPA decertified and the players led by New York Jets running back Freeman McNeil sued the NFL, challenging the league’s free agency rules. By 1993, the owners and players settled their disputes.
The game has changed though for the owners and players. Three prominent people are no longer at the negotiating table, Paul Tagliabue, the former NFL Commissioner who retired, the late Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the association and former Pittsburgh Steelers boss Dan Rooney who rode off into the sunset and is now the United States Ambassador to Ireland. Tagliabue and Upshaw had a very unique relationship that was unlike other league commissioners/negotiators and players associations’ executive directors in that they worked together in an amicable fashion and resolved differences and extended the 1993 agreement five times. The players trusted Rooney as a voice of reason.
The owners’ 18 percent solution is not going to fly this time around.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7463
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2009
3:00 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- You don't need a crystal ball to know that 2011 is going to be perhaps the most intriguing sports year in North America ever. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association may not be operating because of labor actions.
Both leagues and their players are two years away from the end of their respective collective bargaining agreements. The football players are acting as if they except the owners to lock them out of training camps in 2011, the National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern said earlier this week that at least half of the NBA's 30 teams are money losers, the NBA has reduced the salary cap for team payrolls slightly for the 2009-10 season and there is a thought that the cap will be tightened more so in the summer of 2010 with the worsen economic conditions finally being felt by the league.
On Wednesday the new Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association DeMaurice Smith took some of his labor association members to Congress to discuss the economics of the National Football League. Smith's tactic is a new dimension for football players in their talks with the owners, he wants Congress to understand the players side of the story, that the owners are making a lot of money thanks to acts of Congress, including the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act and the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger and that the players, who are the game, continue to get a fair shake in divvying up the NFL money pie.
It is an interesting but risky ploy by Smith and raises the question of whether he wants to help or hurt his membership. Undoing the 1961 and 1966 legislation would ultimately have a crippling financial impact on the players. Additionally Congress has never sought to unravel either of those pieces of legislation. Scrapping the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act will impact not only the NFL, but Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA and college sports along with golf and tennis tournaments as TV revenues, whether they come from over-the-air network TV or cable, provides the financial underpinning needed to run sports successfully and performances salaries are pegged to TV dollars along with ticket sales and marketing partnerships.
The National Football League Players Association has always been considered the weakest of the four major league sports players groups in North America. Whether it was Ed Garvey or Gene Upshaw at the head of the table, the main criticism is that the association leadership always looked for money first and did not look after pension benefits, health benefits for players on the field and retirees nor did they bother with getting contract guarantees. Talk to players who were part of the 1982 or 1987 labor actions and they think the strikes were pretty much a waste of time that accomplished very little.
NFL players get paid significant salaries but the way contracts are structured, players can keep salary bonuses but if they are cut, they get a slimmed down severance which is different from the other sports whether it is Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League.
Smith has to be aware that the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act allowed the 14-team NFL to pool it's resources and gave NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle the ability to sell the league as one entity in a bidding war between the two major broadcast entities of the day (1961), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) with CBS winning. Because CBS was constantly beating out NBC for the NFL rights in the early 1960s, NBC said enough was enough and funded the American Football League with a lavish TV contract prior to the 1965 season. NBC's money gave the AFL additional credibility and eventually the leagues would agree to merge.
The merger required an act of Congress. That happened in October 1966. The two pieces of legislation rocketed the NFL into the upper stratosphere which enabled the sport to blast past baseball in popularity.
In the 1980s, two Congressional bills inadvertently created new and lucrative revenue streams for sports although the NFL did not jump into the cable TV game until 1990 some six years after the Cable TV Act of 1984 which allowed cable companies to bundle networks such as ESPN, WTBS, CNN and the Weather Channel into basic expanded tiers and sell the package as one entity to consumers instead of offering a la carte choices. The Congressional legislation saved ESPN from going under along with the other networks and quickened the migration of sports from over-the-air TV to cable TV which was able to pay leagues and teams more money than networks because there were two sources of revenue streams, cable TV fees and advertising instead of the one stream, advertising, which was available to over-the-air TV networks and stations.
The 1986 Tax Act had revisions which changed the formula of paying off municipally built stadiums and arenas and limited the amount of money municipalities had available to pay off debt from events inside of new stadiums and arenas built after 1986 to just eight cents on the dollar. The stadium and arena game became a nuclear arms race between cities throughout the United States as political and business leaders wanted to make sure they satisfied owners wallets and egos by building the best facilities they could on the public dime, facilities which upped potential (and untapped) revenues streams to unimaginable levels prior to the Reagan era or even in the first five years of the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
The cable TV and tax bills opened the door for billions of dollars to be captured by the owners of NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams in the 1980s and now Major League Soccer is taking advantage of the changes in the tax code dating back to 1986.
NFL owners want to keep more of the revenue coming into the league because of high debts that have been incurred but various owners who overpaid for a franchise or put too much into the building of a new stadium. The owners still have not come up with a sufficient revenue sharing mechanism that will keep Dallas' Jerry Jones happy or Cincinnati's Mike Brown enthused. It is a little more than seven months to the Super Bowl but the NFL's real big game will take place after this year's championship game as the league and players need a deal struck by the start of free agency in March or the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement change. The owners will no longer have to abide by a salary cap while the players give up two years of free agency from four to six years. If there is no deal by March 2010, the likelihood that the owners will lock out the players in 2011 increases expediently.
Expect the rhetoric from both sides to increase as well with the looming March free agency period.
Meanwhile NBA owners and players will soon get to the bargaining table to discuss life after the 2010-11 season and it might get very ugly long before the end of the current bargaining agreement. NBA revenue streams from marketing partnerships are down, ticket prices are being dropped and that means basketball related income will be less, the players get 57 percent of basketball related income at present. NBA owners say they are losing money and for the first time in ages, players salaries will go down in 2009-10.
Sitting on the sidelines are Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. In 2004, the NHL owners locked out the players for an entire season and got a salary cap as part of the new deal. The NHL labor negotiations seem to set the tone for the NBA and Major League Baseball as the two players associations came up with new deals without a labor action because the theory goes the players saw the owners meant business in hockey and because of various cross ownerships in the three leagues, the players paid far more attention to the hockey lockout than they would under normal circumstances. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL are joined at the hip because of ownership overlaps in the various leagues and in the ownership of regional cable TV networks. Baseball's collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2011 season. The NHL's deal could end as early as September 2011 or September 2012.
It is doubtful that Bill Hunter, the National Basketball Players Association's Executive Director, Paul Kelly, the NHLPA Executive Director or Michael Weiner, who is succeeding Donald Fear as Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director, would seek out Congress and ask them to change the playing conditions by reviewing the laws that have strengthen the owners' pocketbooks, but DeMaurice Smith is going down that road, at least he has put Congress on notice that he might need help. Smith might have been on President Obama's transition team and might know how Washington works but Bill Clinton could tell him a little something about sports collective bargaining. President Clinton tried to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to end the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed. Neither the owners nor the players wanted to listen to the president. It took a United States District Judge in March 1995 to end the strike after that judge ruled the owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by ending the free agency and salary arbitration systems and the judge ordered the reinstatement of the old collective bargaining agreement after finding that the owners (the owners chief negotiator at the time was Richard Ravitch who recently was named by New York Governor David Patterson as the state's lieutenant governor) did not bargain in good faith. One of those owners was Texas Rangers Managing General Partner George W. Bush.
The District Judge? Sonia Sotomayor who is President Barack Obama's choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2009
3:00 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- You don't need a crystal ball to know that 2011 is going to be perhaps the most intriguing sports year in North America ever. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association may not be operating because of labor actions.
Both leagues and their players are two years away from the end of their respective collective bargaining agreements. The football players are acting as if they except the owners to lock them out of training camps in 2011, the National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern said earlier this week that at least half of the NBA's 30 teams are money losers, the NBA has reduced the salary cap for team payrolls slightly for the 2009-10 season and there is a thought that the cap will be tightened more so in the summer of 2010 with the worsen economic conditions finally being felt by the league.
On Wednesday the new Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association DeMaurice Smith took some of his labor association members to Congress to discuss the economics of the National Football League. Smith's tactic is a new dimension for football players in their talks with the owners, he wants Congress to understand the players side of the story, that the owners are making a lot of money thanks to acts of Congress, including the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act and the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger and that the players, who are the game, continue to get a fair shake in divvying up the NFL money pie.
It is an interesting but risky ploy by Smith and raises the question of whether he wants to help or hurt his membership. Undoing the 1961 and 1966 legislation would ultimately have a crippling financial impact on the players. Additionally Congress has never sought to unravel either of those pieces of legislation. Scrapping the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act will impact not only the NFL, but Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA and college sports along with golf and tennis tournaments as TV revenues, whether they come from over-the-air network TV or cable, provides the financial underpinning needed to run sports successfully and performances salaries are pegged to TV dollars along with ticket sales and marketing partnerships.
The National Football League Players Association has always been considered the weakest of the four major league sports players groups in North America. Whether it was Ed Garvey or Gene Upshaw at the head of the table, the main criticism is that the association leadership always looked for money first and did not look after pension benefits, health benefits for players on the field and retirees nor did they bother with getting contract guarantees. Talk to players who were part of the 1982 or 1987 labor actions and they think the strikes were pretty much a waste of time that accomplished very little.
NFL players get paid significant salaries but the way contracts are structured, players can keep salary bonuses but if they are cut, they get a slimmed down severance which is different from the other sports whether it is Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League.
Smith has to be aware that the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act allowed the 14-team NFL to pool it's resources and gave NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle the ability to sell the league as one entity in a bidding war between the two major broadcast entities of the day (1961), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) with CBS winning. Because CBS was constantly beating out NBC for the NFL rights in the early 1960s, NBC said enough was enough and funded the American Football League with a lavish TV contract prior to the 1965 season. NBC's money gave the AFL additional credibility and eventually the leagues would agree to merge.
The merger required an act of Congress. That happened in October 1966. The two pieces of legislation rocketed the NFL into the upper stratosphere which enabled the sport to blast past baseball in popularity.
In the 1980s, two Congressional bills inadvertently created new and lucrative revenue streams for sports although the NFL did not jump into the cable TV game until 1990 some six years after the Cable TV Act of 1984 which allowed cable companies to bundle networks such as ESPN, WTBS, CNN and the Weather Channel into basic expanded tiers and sell the package as one entity to consumers instead of offering a la carte choices. The Congressional legislation saved ESPN from going under along with the other networks and quickened the migration of sports from over-the-air TV to cable TV which was able to pay leagues and teams more money than networks because there were two sources of revenue streams, cable TV fees and advertising instead of the one stream, advertising, which was available to over-the-air TV networks and stations.
The 1986 Tax Act had revisions which changed the formula of paying off municipally built stadiums and arenas and limited the amount of money municipalities had available to pay off debt from events inside of new stadiums and arenas built after 1986 to just eight cents on the dollar. The stadium and arena game became a nuclear arms race between cities throughout the United States as political and business leaders wanted to make sure they satisfied owners wallets and egos by building the best facilities they could on the public dime, facilities which upped potential (and untapped) revenues streams to unimaginable levels prior to the Reagan era or even in the first five years of the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
The cable TV and tax bills opened the door for billions of dollars to be captured by the owners of NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams in the 1980s and now Major League Soccer is taking advantage of the changes in the tax code dating back to 1986.
NFL owners want to keep more of the revenue coming into the league because of high debts that have been incurred but various owners who overpaid for a franchise or put too much into the building of a new stadium. The owners still have not come up with a sufficient revenue sharing mechanism that will keep Dallas' Jerry Jones happy or Cincinnati's Mike Brown enthused. It is a little more than seven months to the Super Bowl but the NFL's real big game will take place after this year's championship game as the league and players need a deal struck by the start of free agency in March or the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement change. The owners will no longer have to abide by a salary cap while the players give up two years of free agency from four to six years. If there is no deal by March 2010, the likelihood that the owners will lock out the players in 2011 increases expediently.
Expect the rhetoric from both sides to increase as well with the looming March free agency period.
Meanwhile NBA owners and players will soon get to the bargaining table to discuss life after the 2010-11 season and it might get very ugly long before the end of the current bargaining agreement. NBA revenue streams from marketing partnerships are down, ticket prices are being dropped and that means basketball related income will be less, the players get 57 percent of basketball related income at present. NBA owners say they are losing money and for the first time in ages, players salaries will go down in 2009-10.
Sitting on the sidelines are Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. In 2004, the NHL owners locked out the players for an entire season and got a salary cap as part of the new deal. The NHL labor negotiations seem to set the tone for the NBA and Major League Baseball as the two players associations came up with new deals without a labor action because the theory goes the players saw the owners meant business in hockey and because of various cross ownerships in the three leagues, the players paid far more attention to the hockey lockout than they would under normal circumstances. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL are joined at the hip because of ownership overlaps in the various leagues and in the ownership of regional cable TV networks. Baseball's collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2011 season. The NHL's deal could end as early as September 2011 or September 2012.
It is doubtful that Bill Hunter, the National Basketball Players Association's Executive Director, Paul Kelly, the NHLPA Executive Director or Michael Weiner, who is succeeding Donald Fear as Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director, would seek out Congress and ask them to change the playing conditions by reviewing the laws that have strengthen the owners' pocketbooks, but DeMaurice Smith is going down that road, at least he has put Congress on notice that he might need help. Smith might have been on President Obama's transition team and might know how Washington works but Bill Clinton could tell him a little something about sports collective bargaining. President Clinton tried to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to end the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed. Neither the owners nor the players wanted to listen to the president. It took a United States District Judge in March 1995 to end the strike after that judge ruled the owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by ending the free agency and salary arbitration systems and the judge ordered the reinstatement of the old collective bargaining agreement after finding that the owners (the owners chief negotiator at the time was Richard Ravitch who recently was named by New York Governor David Patterson as the state's lieutenant governor) did not bargain in good faith. One of those owners was Texas Rangers Managing General Partner George W. Bush.
The District Judge? Sonia Sotomayor who is President Barack Obama's choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
eweiner@mcn.tv
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