Ron Borges

You can never underestimate the corrosive power of unadulterated greed.

That is the NFL's problem today, as its wealthy labor union negotiates with its wealthy owners to extend a labor contract that has made both of them wealthier. Considering what the NFL's labor agreement has achieved since it first went into effect in 1992, one might think "What's to negotiate?'' But that's the problem. You're thinking. They're greedy. The latter is often the counter weight to the former.

It has come to the world's attention that nine of the league's wealthiest owners have threatened to sue their partners if they are forced to accept a majority vote that would force them to share equally or at least in no small part the locally generated revenues teams have been allowed to hoard in recent years. As those numbers have swelled, the rich have gotten richer and the richer still have gotten richer still.

Where this has left the players, who are the guys generating all this revenue in the first place, is simply rich which, naturally, isn't good enough for them.

Union chief Gene Upshaw didn't get rich playing even though he was so adept a blocker he went to the Hall of Fame. But he did get rich once he became the head of the NFL Players Association. Now he's insisting, quite logically, that the 32 rich owners share their total gross revenues with their slightly less rich players, and not just the "designated gross revenues'' as in the past. It's a term that never did make any sense to people whose mothers raised them to think sharing meant sharing what you've got, not just some of what you've got.

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Upshaw has said repeatedly there can be no effective negotiation of an extension of the present work agreement, which has allowed the league to prosper peacefully for more than a decade, until the owners decide among themselves how they're going to cut up those local revenues.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft responded to that by saying Upshaw should worry about his union members and getting them a contract extension, and let the owners work out their internal problems between themselves.

The only problem with such thinking is that until those owners stop threatening to sue each other over the idea of sharing their incredible wealth equally the way they always used, Upshaw feels he can't make a deal. The union, you see, knows local revenues in places like New England, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Denver, Chicago, Houston and Dallas have skyrocketed, yet little of that money is thrown into the pot from which the salary cap emerges. Hence, his wealthy players aren't getting wealthier as fast as the owners are, and neither he nor they are happy about it nor willing to let that gap continue to grow.

The wealthiest owners, meanwhile, say they have different debt structures than long-time owners such as Lamar Hunt in Kansas City or the Mara family in New York, and aren't a publicly held trust like the Green Bay Packers. They argue that they're generating much more local revenue than some of their partners because they work harder at it than, say, Bill Bidwell, who owns the Arizona Cardinals, or Mike Brown, the long-time head of the penurious Cincinnati Bengals. Why should they share with guys who aren't willing to work as hard as they are at maximizing their business, they ask?

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What that leaves is the union setting an end-of-the-week deadline for completing an extension of the present collective bargaining agreement, or simply allowing the deal to go to its ultimately disastrous 2007 conclusion.

That would also be the end of sanity in the NFL because it would make that season uncapped, and end the golden goose that has made every owner fabulously more wealthy than they were when they bought these teams because each has functioned with guaranteed labor costs ever since the cap was instituted.

Those fixed labor costs have allowed the value of their franchises to skyrocket, but if the cap ends, so would that increase because everyone knows the NFL would soon become like Major League Baseball. MLB is a marketing disaster in most of its cities because before the first game is played most of the have-not teams have been eliminated from World Series contention. The absence of that kind of situation has been the great magic of the NFL. Because of the cap, anyone (well, perhaps not Bidwell) can create a team that can win the Super Bowl. But if the cap disappears, the NFL will become the athletic and economic version of a third world economy in short order, and both Upshaw and the owners know it.

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