NFL Owners playing Russian Roulette, Mr. Goodell.

The NFL is now well into the third month of a management-imposed lockout, and both sides are waiting on a ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis to see which side has leverage.  Both sides want the dispute settled.  The players need their paychecks.  They know that they cannot make up the lost wages because a pay raise won't be part of the mix and they know their careers are all day-to-day.  The owners want to get the players back on the field before overwhelming negative publicity turns into a long term dip in revenues.

The NFL is the most successful, most profitable, most popular sports league in the world.  The owners have had it so good for so long that it appears they have gotten greedy.  Consider that in 1995, the LA Rams moved to St. Louis, into a state-of-the art domed stadium.  The lease has included an out-clause in which the Rams can terminate the lease if the stadium fails to be considered to be in the top 25% of league stadiums.  When the building opened, the stadium fit nicely in the top tier of NFL stadiums.

Took about two years for that to not be the case anymore....

A multitude of publicly financed stadiums have pushed the Edward Jones Dome into the lower tier, arguably the bottom 25% of stadiums in the NFL.  One only needs to attend a game at the Ed to realize what a sterile, uninviting atmosphere the facility provides.  The new stadiums have incorporated more natural light (or open air), better acoustics, better sound systems, fancier luxury boxes, wider concourses, and better access and egress.  Really, there is nothing that can be done to the Ed to put it in the top half of stadiums, much less the top 25%.  St. Louis' best course of action for using the dome is to incentivize St. Louis University to start a football team and to book more conventions and trade shows.

The Rams will need to move out of their mausoleum, and they will want jillions of public dollars to pay for it, even though their owner is worth billions and so is the owners wife.....

And there is the crux of the situation....the NFL owners realize that they can virtually no longer bilk public governmental agencies to build the profit-palaces.  No longer will tax payers stand for such folly.  And they shouldn't stand for such folly.  Now if an owner wants to lock in a promise of low ticket prices for the life of the loan, then we can talk.....

Owners are looking forward 20-30 years at how they will be able to generate more and more revenue without public stadium support.  The owners who want new stadiums are pitted against the ones who already have them. 

And the best they can come up with is to take it out of the pockets of the employees.

Clearly, the objective of any business is to make as much profit as possible.  There must be an appropriate level of compensation for the employees to make the formula work.  For so long, owners were able to pocket so much money without accounting for the huge capital expense of stadium construction that the compensation formula got out of whack.

This is where we are now with the NFL lockout.

Recently, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated that this lockout is for the fans, too.  How is that, exactly?  No one has asked the fans for our opinion.

Mr. Goodell, since you haven't yet asked me, I will go ahead and give you my input for what the fans might want; things that could very well benefit the NFL long term upon the conclusion of all this labor mess.

First and foremost, Mr. Goodell, the NFL needs to be on the field, with a well-prepared product ON TIME this fall.  If the lockout cancels games or delays them, the public backlash will be severe.  You can kiss your TV blackout rule goodbye for a long, long time if the work stoppage interferes with the season.  College football is incredibly popular in all regions of this country except the media-heavy northeast.  Fans will get their football fix from college games, some of which will be switched to Sundays if there is no NFL, from high school ball, and from the UFL.  The NFL does not want to northeast to become college football territory and they do not want to give the UFL a toe-hold.  Many fringe NFL players will be playing in the UFL just to get a paycheck while the NFL is on hold.  That will subtract from the depth of the teams, and will lessen the NFL product.  Most fans won't notice the difference, but wait until a couple of DBs get hurt and a coach is trying to play an effective dime coverage....

Next, Mr. Commish, we the fans do NOT want an 18 game regular season. NO.  NO.  NO.  The current season is so physically difficult on our favorite players now that we just cannot, in full conscience, allow you to extend their burden.  We like seeing players extend their careers into their early 30s.  If you increase the workload in a brutal sport, you shorten those careers and, again, water down the product.  An 18 game season is a brutally bad idea.

Along those lines, tell your owners, sir, that we do not want to have to pay for two pre-season games at the full rack rate.  That has got to be the number one thing that ticket holders complain about....you don't want to go to two home pre-season games, and you certainly don't want to pay full price for them.  Heck, you can't even GIVE those tickets away, much less sell them to recoup some of your investment.  I understand the league has gotten used to that money, and I have thought of an alternative plan to help you get good, enthusiastic crowds into stadiums for these games and to expand your league's reach....

Let's have each team give up one pre-season game at home for a neutral site game.  This reduces every season ticket holder's investment from 10 games to 9, which will make season tickets easier to sell in every NFL market.  Literally, this would bring more people into the conversation for being able to hold season tickets.  What you get on the other side is 32 opportunities to sell NFL product (even in pre-season form) to millions of people who live outside of an NFL market.

A city like Orlando could get one game from each of the three Florida teams and sell a mini-ticket plan of their own.  The beauty of it is that many college stadiums are bigger than NFL stadiums, so if you can sell out, you have a terrific chance to make money.  I believe that if Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts were to play a pre-season game in Knoxville, TN, that you might have a pretty good crowd.  How far is Tuscaloosa, Alabama from an NFL stadium?  Do people there like football?  They draw 92,000 for the spring game there....yeah those folks would show up.  San Antonio?  Sellout.  Los Angeles?  Someone will take their teams to play there.  Lincoln, Nebraska?  Sure....bring the Detroit Lions and Ndamakong Suh to town and we will paint the town red.  This set up would give the NFL plenty of chances for international outreach, too.

While we are at it, let's take an idea from baseball and relocate the first five weeks of training camp in pods of activity in the northern part of the United States.  Expand the Cheese League idea, and include all 32 teams.  The folks in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Idaho, etc. would trip all over themselves for the chance to get 4-6 teams training there.  Stuff is always moving south to better weather.  This allows teams to go north to train in weather that is more hospitable for hard work.  Think about what this would do for tourism?  Not that NFL owners care, but the folks living in those areas would surely become bigger fans of the league if the league threw them a bone this way.  Heck, you might even get public money to help with this intitiative.  The players will favor this as a safety issue, too.  Training camp at 75 degrees and low humidity is a lot safer than training camp at 95 with muggy conditions, especially when a guy is busting his ass on every rep to earn a half million dollar a year (or more) job.

Let's go ahead and move the NFL draft around, too.  Let the city with the 1st overall pick host the draft.  New York is the epicenter of the Universe.  I get that.  However, the TV cameras are going to work from every city.  Radio City Music Hall is nice, but there are great venues to host this event in every NFL city.  This would give fans in the hosting city a reason to hold out hope and think about the NFL more.  You might even be able to leverage tickets to the draft into season ticket purchases for that downtrodden team.  St. Louis had to endure three seasons of 6-42 football, capped off by a dreadful 1-15 season in 2009.  Football fans in the Lou would have been quite excited to come to the Scottrade Center with all the bright lights, cameras, celebrities, to see the Rams select Sam Bradford.  Such a spectacle would have been a feeding frenzy for the Rams, and great PR for the league.

All of these things to appease fans, and not once did I mention reducing ticket prices.....

If you need a focus group for real NFL football fans, Mr. Goodell, I am available and willing to serve.  My number is (904) 629-7222.  I will be waiting for your call.  Just tell the owners not to cut off their noses to spite their face in the mean time.