This NFL lockout is intriguing to me.\u00a0 You must realize, I\u2019m a sports fan, a politics nut\u00a0 and have grown interested in financial markets.\u00a0 The NFL lockout hits all three.<\/p>\n
What really caught my eye is the anti-trust lawsuit.\u00a0 The NFLPA has decertified. Why?\u00a0 That\u2019s a complicated question, but one answer is so the players on an individual basis can sue the NFL (and then form a class-action lawsuit) claiming that the NFL is a monopoly.\u00a0 (The NFLPA cannot itself sue because it had collectively bargained an agreement, so in essence, it signed off on the monopoly.)<\/p>\n
The NFL doesn\u2019t agree.\u00a0 No, they (the owners) think that each of the 32 teams is a separate business and subsequently, players have 32 different places to work.\u00a0 What the NFL would like you to forget is that the marketplace as a whole is not just the NFL, but the whole sports landscape.\u00a0 As the Wall Street Journal put it, the NFL is a \u201cclassic cartel\u201432 individual entities working in concert with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n
The players are basically saying, \u201cthe NFL has locked us out, and there is nowhere for us to make a living because the NFL is the only game in town, and they are the only game town because they are a monopoly.\u201d<\/p>\n
You might be asking yourself, isn\u2019t it obvious that the NFL is a monopoly?\u00a0 I agree.<\/p>\n
The players are basically arguing that a cook can work at a number of restaurants and find comparable wages.\u00a0 A quarterback can only make his market value inside the NFL.\u00a0 The NFL is saying, no, you can work at 32 different places.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the mumbo jumbo portion.\u00a0 Now we get to a crucial point that I agree with the players on: the NFL\u2019s amateur draft is utterly anti-capitalistic and unfair to the players.<\/p>\n
A lot of you reading this will be graduating and moving into the job market soon.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say you are studying Nursing.\u00a0 After you get your degree, the local hospitals take turns picking Nursing graduates, and someone calls you and tells you where you\u2019ll work and\u00a0 how much you\u2019ll make.\u00a0 Sound fun?<\/p>\n
College players who wish to turn pro have no control over what company, in what city, they will work.\u00a0 The ability to choose is a fundamental right to a free society. (Politics!)
\nThat\u2019s a great example of why the lockout interests me.\u00a0 The problems being discussed can be intriguing if you apply them to your own life.<\/p>\n
Also at issue is the NFL\u2019s salary cap.\u00a0 In no way is a salary cap okay in a capitalistic society.\u00a0 Again, imagine you are a nurse, you are doing a great job, but you can\u2019t get a raise because all your potential employers have together decreed nurses can only be paid so much.\u00a0 Does that sound fair?<\/p>\n
The NFL must know it is a monopoly.\u00a0 The owners are not happy that the players brought this up again; billions of dollars are at stake as the courts debate the question.<\/p>\n
September is a long ways away, so don\u2019t expect any type of agreement until around then.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think either side will think about budging until they start losing money.\u00a0 After all, both of their business is playing football games, and I\u2019ve never seen an NFL game in April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This NFL lockout is intriguing to me.\u00a0 You must realize, I\u2019m a sports fan, a politics nut\u00a0 and have grown interested in financial markets.\u00a0 The NFL lockout hits all three. What really caught my eye is the anti-trust lawsuit.\u00a0 The NFLPA has decertified. Why?\u00a0 That\u2019s a complicated question, but one answer is so the players […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":229,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-1DH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/229"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6307,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6305\/revisions\/6307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}