How Many A--holes Do We Have on This Ship, Anyhow?
Oh, did you think the lockout was going to be over this morning? Did you somehow interpret the owners approving an agreement as a sign that this whole thing would finally end? Did you think all the progress made in recent days, all the points agreed upon made this ratification by the players a mere formality? Poor you. You underestimate the owners and their ability to be truly shady and miserable people. You got the sense all along that they thought the players were almost too dumb to be at the bargaining table with them, and now they are projecting their feelings of superiority onto the fans who they believed would fall for this latest power play.
I haven’t really bogged myself down in the details of this thing from the start. I’m an endgame guy. Tell me when it is over, but even I thought we were just a few hours away from what will be the most exciting late July and August in the history of the NFL. Forgive and forget, baby, just start free agency. Apparently, we were much further away from that than we were led to believe. Reading through the news it sounds like the owners convened to vote on a deal that they’d just spent countless hours hammering out with the players, but once they were left to their own devices they started tweaking it. The buzzword seems to be, “finishing points.” They changed things to their liking, without any consultation from the other side, approved the deal that they had just conjured up on their own, and then presented it to the media as if they were the good guys? “Oh, we’ve approved the deal. It’s on the players.”
It actually worked–for about six hours. Last night if you accidentally were on Twitter for example, you would have seen a lot of, “Vot 4 the deal NFLPA.” Things of that nature. There was the sense that the players just had to agree to what was already agreed upon. In fact, a couple of days ago it sounded like the few players involved in those antitrust lawsuits (Jackson, Mankins, etc) were the ones really holding things up. The owners could have used that to their advantage, maybe tried to gain an inch, but instead they tried to take a foot, which seems to be what they do. Like I said, they’re really a bunch of mutts.
Did they think the players weren’t going to look this thing over? It seems like the owners thought they could use the public’s demand for a deal and a little momentum to gain some victories at the finish line, but in a negotiation that got so heated, why would any concession come easily? It’s a move that seems to have offended at least a portion of the NFLPA, and now we don’t know if the players will ever vote on, or approve this deal. The owners have tacked a 72-hour deadline on her as well, because, why not?
It seems to me that the lockout is now destined to push on at least into next week. (Maybe I can reverse jinx it?) We’ve already lost the Hall of Fame game. Not that anyone cares, but that’s the first real casualty of this thing. Pretty soon we’ll be losing weeks of the pre-season and after that, you don’t even want to speculate. Ahhhhh, I hate the owners. Get it together, boys. For real this time.
3-Putt Territory 