On the NFL inanities

I blame scripted entertainment, movies and television specifically. Earlier this week I watched the movie Wall Street in anticipation of watching the recently released sequel as if the first were a prerequisite. It is a perfectly entertaining pile of dreck that follows the typical narrative of corporate bad and unions good. Viewers have been allegorically beaten senseless by this narrative in just about every work related to either subject. In Wall Street corporate raider and general scumbag Gordon Gecko exploits the son of the uber-sympathetic everyman union representative Carl Fox. The problem with this narrative is that the characters are nothing more than fictional representations only useful for caricaturing a reality that cannot possibly be explained in 100 minutes. In the end this narrative shapes the perceptions of viewers causing them to view real-people as cheap, simple to characterize cartoons.

The current caricature of the moment is the “labor dispute” in the NFL with Commissioner Roger Goodell, 31 team owners and Green Bay’s shareholder representative as Gordon Geckos and Charlie Batch as the loveable Carl Fox union representative. Don’t believe me that this is the basic template? What about a poll on the Mike & Mike page showing 60% support for the players versus the owners? How do you explain a highly trafficked sports website’s resident columnist vomiting by keyboard the following:

Make no mistake, if you don't get to watch football next fall, it will be because 31 rich a******s (and whatever cheese-and-sausage co-op owns the Packers) have decided that they aren't rich enough. Period.

This type of opinion is nothing more than a reflection of the decades old narrative that has been spoon-fed to the public in television and movies. As if the NFL players association is in any way similar to any other union that has ever existed. As if the NFL as an enterprise is similar to any other company. Neither is and whatever division that exists between the NFL and the players association exists between those two entities and any agreement amongst them must be accepted by both parties as they decided to create a reality where both symbiotically exist. In a sense public opinion is important because they are after all the customer of the product and after years of subsidizing stadiums via tax dollars deserve to understand what’s going on. But as a private enterprise, the two parties must be allowed to negotiate in private. And as a symbolic stadium landlord (if your current municipality is so lucky to have subsidized such a thing) unfortunately you get to pound sand as your rent-seeking politicians are the ones who directed your contributions to building very large buildings that you have to pay ever increasing amounts to step inside of.

Perhaps it’s the contrarian in me but all this prototypical thinking; owners bad, players good makes me root for the owners. In truth I don’t blame nor do I cheer either side. The end result of no NFL is no good but at this point it is what it is. There was an agreement and in that agreement there was the ability to opt-out at a certain time. The party who could opt-out decided to do just that and now they have to re-negotiate the agreement. Both sides understand that there is a likelihood that prolonged negotiations could pre-empt sales of their product which could lead to angry customers doing considerable damage to the brand that is responsible for both side’s lucrative being. It seems reasonable to assume that in the end cooler heads will prevail and agreement will be reached. And if not, then they will face the consequences of their actions. But why think intelligently about it, when the sides can be split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ based on fictional caricatures?