Professional Sports Lockouts

As "Enormously Funny!" as it sounds the NFL and the NBA both stand a solid chance of not even playing next year. As their respective bargaining agreements play out we are once again faced with the excessive greed of ownership in professional sports. The players, mostly multi-millionaires, are the underdogs against the billionaires that own the teams, so while I must contemptuously loathe both groups if I were to choose the lesser of two weevils than I'd stick with the players. Or rather I'd stick with play the damn season and profit on both sides and quit bitching about whether you get 1 or 1.1 billion from it.

For some strange reason while Labor disagreements are relatively few and far between in our present utopian flawless separate but equal society professional sports manages to have them every 5-10 years and almost every time there is a strike. The NFL is making an enormous amount of profit every year, this year's Superbowl was the highest rated one of all time, assuming we continue having close and competitive Superbowls it will only continue to grow. But the Owners want to push forward an 18 game season to concuss all of the players into retardation until they all have Parkinson's disease and die before the age of 50. As it stands the last few weeks of the NFL season are largely irrelevant most years, as only 1 or 2 games matter in the slightest, but to expand the season would make this only worse. The Colts could clinch their division in Week 14 and then sit on their asses for the last month of the season. Despite the enormous success and profit granted to the Ownership they still want more, ideally they have minimum wage paid players at the end of the deal and the owners make 5 billion a year or so individually to enable the true Capitalist spirit.

The NBA is not as baffling as the NFL, as owners are not making profits and I would say, arguably, that many of the players are in fact overpaid. I believe every organization except the Los Angeles Lakers and Celtics struggle to make a profit every year, with the vast majority of them not breaking even. What's more no one really watches the NBA until the playoffs since the players don't seem to care until the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter. The NBA does need some sort of restructuring and taking a year off won't hurt them all that badly as long as they come up with a few incentives to make the players more productive and regular season games more interesting. If the NFL lockout happens prior to the NBA season starting then David Stern would be wise to dictate that the season go forward, as the ratings opportunity would be much greater than ever before, however if it is still unclear when their Collective Bargaining Agreement is put in place (or rather endlessly debated) then perhaps the NBA could do without a season. Being "robbed" of one year of the Miami Heat isn't going to hurt the league that badly. As always the Lakers and Celtics are still pretty damn boring.

Worst case scenario: Start watching baseball! You can do it while doing a variety of other tasks and simply look when something interesting is about to happen. MLB.tv's season subscription is not all that expensive and the regular season is easily the most interesting throughout. In addition the league is much more competitive year in and year out between every team except the Pirates and Royals, a well-run organization can compete with one fifth the payroll of the Yankees. Yankees Red Sox games may take forever but many of the other rivalries do not and their is a variety of intrigue every year. Albert Pujols is one of the best players of all time and still has 5 or 6 really good years left (at least) for more people to fall in love with him. He's the anti-A-Rod! Not a huge douchebag but a nice guy who dominates the game on and off the field.

Edit: Upon further review I have discovered that I failed to review the Big Lebowski (though I did watch it) on accident so I will instead review it tomorrow and Silver Streak the next day, Apologies.