[hogwild]

WEAVER-ROONEY PROPOSAL MAKES SENSE

The more we think about it, the more we like the revenue-sharing proposal offered up by Jacksonville owner Wayne Weaver and Steelers chairman Dan Rooney.

The plan, which inexplicably has been ignored by the media since it was posted on the Jags' official web site on June 7, calls for teams to contribute 34 percent of their local revenues into a pool that would be distributed equally among the 32 teams.

Though it's expected that big-money guys like Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder will balk at the proposal, the move would not take much of a dent out of their bottom lines.

If, for example, the Cowboys make $100 million in local revenue and the league average is $50 million, the 'Boys would kick $34 million into the pot and get $17 million back.

So the total cost to the 'Boys would be only 17 percent of their currently unshared revenues -- not much of a sacrifice, in our view, in order to help preserve competitive balance.

In fact, we think that Weaver and Rooney should have come out of the gates with a higher percentage, since the Jones/Snyder crowd is hard-wired to negotiate everything. If, for example, the Jacksonville-Pittsburgh plan had initially called for half of the local revenues to be paid, pooled, and parsed out, negotiations then could have eased it back to 34.

By leading off at 34, there definitely will be an effort to knock it down to 25.

And that dynamic in and of itself highlights the current disparity between the members of the Billionaire Boys Club. Weaver and Rooney likely believe that owners shouldn't have to negotiate with other owners, if they truly are partners. But for Jones and Snyder, everything is business -- and every item of business is negotiable.