The NFL owners decided to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) which sets up the possibility of a lockout, a year without a draft and an uncapped year. Are the NFL owners and players association dumb or greedy enough to screw up a good thing?

The one thing that makes the NFL the number one sport in the country is parity. The fact that all 32 NFL cities (except maybe Detroit which is cursed with terminal stupidity in their front office) legitimately has a shot at a world championship. we have seen teams go from worst to first in a year. Parity or a least the perception of parity is what keeps people loyal to the NFL and spending tons of cash.

Baseball by comparison had every opportunity to remain the king of American sports but they squandered every opportunity to create a system of parity. Now baseball is divided into the haves and the have-nots and you can always count on the same teams in the playoffs every season (yawn). Essentially the MLB owners are completely content with the idea of the Yankees, Red Sox and maybe St. Louis on one tier and everyone else below. Yes, other teams win a championship every now and then but there are baseball cities where the ownership is perfectly content with being bottom feeders and farm teams for the higher tier ball clubs. When you add the baseball work stoppages and the performance enhancement drug era to the mix you have a sport that slowly dying out as older fans die off. Baseball is proof positive that tradition is not always a good thing.

Football has a great thing going and they would be incredibly stupid to have a work stoppage. From a Redskins perspective the idea of an uncapped year with Daniel Snyder at the helm is kinda scary. On one hand we would likely get all the players on Danny’s wish list but as we’ve seen before that does not guarantee anything except higher ticket prices.

So here we sit as fans while the billionaire owners fight with the millionaire players over the money we pay to both parties for an increasingly watered down product. We can only hope that these multi-millionaires figure something out that improves the product and keeps everyone happy. I’m sure they are finding it increasingly difficult to feed their families and afford gas with those paltry 7 and 10 figure salaries.