AdamJT13;3954536 said:
"Truly" means "absolutely," "completely" and "to the fullest degree." The players' concern for the league's long-term growth doesn't rise anywhere close to that level.
Then you're talking in relative terms instead of the absolutist terms you started with.
In the scenario I presented, after the demise of the NFL, the NFLPA would start a new league, with no competition and all of the world's best players. There are millions of pro football fans who spend billions of dollars per year on the game, fans who know and love those same players. A multi-billion-dollar market with no competition hardly seems full of barriers to entry, especially when the profitability of teams is of no concern. The new league would already have stadiums around the country in which to play, so what are the prohibitive startup costs? I don't see the demise of the NFL and the rise of a new league putting a significant dent in football fans' desire to watch the best football in the world and their willingness to spend money on it.
I understand that that's your hypothetical scenario. I'm saying your scenario is completely impossible, so it couldn't possibly affect the players' judgment. If unicorns and leprechauns carried the owners away to a far off city made of gold and rubies, they'd be just fine too -- but I'm not going to use that as evidence that the owners don't care about the league.
And for the record, no, the fans' desire to watch the best football in the world wouldn't automatically duplicate the NFL's profitability. Notre Dame football has been mediocre at best for over a decade, yet they're still perhaps the most valuable and profitable college program in the country. If you stripped away their brand loyalty and fielded a team with completely identical talent, stadium, and infrastructure, do you really think they'd have as much money to pay their employees? Likewise, the Cowboys are more valuable and profitable than lots of teams who have played better football over the last 15 years. If you took away their brand loyalty, would that still be the case? How about if you took away the brand loyalty of the NFL itself and all 32 teams at the same time?
I'm not sure what you mean by "timetable argument."
The (absolutist) assertion that the owners care about the long-term success of the NFL, and the players don't, because the owners stay around for a longer period of time.
Sorry, I can't do that, so you'll just have to speculate.
Why would I have to? You asked for an example of the owners doing it
at all, and I said "anything they're taking as personal income and not investing." You're the one trying to argue that the amount is too small to matter, which is pure speculation.
A 25 percent reduction in your gain is substantial harm.
I agree. Failing to maximize gain is harm. If you think the degree is only as substantial as eating a burger a week, then that's speculation on your part.
Nothing, which is why I said I'd be surprised if there were a lot of owners who took any personal income from their own teams or any who took incomes that were significant enough to cause harm to long-term growth. They already own the teams, and the teams are their means of making more money (along with other business interests, for many of them). You generally don't take money *out* of your investments to make more money, you put more money *into* your investments to make more money. Unless, of course, they're bad investments, in which case you try to sell them.
So you're really under the impression that people who own companies don't have salaries?
Because there are so few who have long-term interests (say 15-20 years again), and even those few players' long-term interests are outweighed by their short-term interests. They vote in the best interest of the majority, and the majority of them know that their NFL career is likely to be short and that they need to maximize their short-term benefits.
The NFLPA isn't a direct democracy -- they don't vote on specific trade-offs. They choose representatives and (indirectly) an executive director, who have an incentive to look out for both current and future players if they have any ambition to keep their positions for very long. Later, they vote to ratify the CBA although most probably don't bother to trudge through the legalese and just trust whatever the representatives agreed to.
Just look at the comments from the NFLPA's spokesman, George Atallah, about the NFL wanting mandatory five-year contracts for first-round picks and four-year contracts for all other draft picks -- "The average player plays 3½ years. So you make free agency five years, and how many people get to free agency? Almost nobody."
Given that this proposal wouldn't affect the total amount of money that goes to players, it would merely affect how much goes to which players -- essentially delaying some players' big payday for one year and leaving more money for the players who reached that fifth/sixth year. But the NFLPA was opposed to that because so many players wouldn't last that long. Atallah's statement that "almost nobody" would last five seasons in the NFL was obviously an exaggeration, but it shows that the players know that their window for maximizing their income is extremely short, so acting in their short-term best interests is their primary concern.
I don't see how that illustrates your point. If the players only do what the majority of the current membership wants, why would they want better rookie salaries at all? Everyone who'd be "voting" has already signed their rookie contract, and even the incoming class of rookies won't make up anything close to a majority of the several thousand NFLPA members. If
anything, haven't you provided an example of the players willingly accepting a smaller share of the pie for themselves in order to benefit future generations of players?
So you're saying that the players wanted better pensions, but that the owners' demands in short-term concessions were so great that the players decided that they'd rather take greater short-term benefits at the expense of their own long-term benefits? Hmm, why does that sound familiar?
I'm saying it's foolish to make a judgment about how much the players were willing to sacrifice without knowing what the owners were demanding in return.
If the players offered to make "significant" concessions (however you personally define it), but the owners would accept nothing less than "outlandish" ones, the players would have been complete idiots to have made the deal -- but not because they were unwilling to make significant sacrifices.
Right or wrong about what? My opinion? I didn't know opinions could be right or wrong.
Right or wrong in claiming that the owners are the only ones who care about the NFL's long term success. You used this opinion to back up that claim, which it can't possibly do.
In every way and in every fashion, I find the owners' long-term interests (by my personal definition) in the NFL's growth to be much greater than that of the players, whose long-term interests are minimal at best, and I find those things to be evident in many of the actions taken by both sides and many of the opinions expressed by both sides.
If you want to cling to the sliver of similarities between our opinions, fine, then we agree to some degree. (The degree of similarity in our opinions is impossible to actually measure, of course.)
Which is precisely what allows you to minimize it, like you have with lots of other things you previously spoke about in absolutist terms, by saying it's too small to matter anyway.
(Though more accurately, the degree of similarity is
not impossible to measure. We know exactly what we agree on, and exactly what we disagree on. All that's needed is a basis for comparison, which would be time consuming but easy. We don't, however, have the ability to read peoples' minds to find out exactly how much they care about something and how much they're willing to sacrifice, and we don't have the ability --legally -- to look at private financial data.)
:starspin
