Most years, after the Super Bowl comes and goes, NFL fans turn their attention to April’s NFL Draft.
Not this year. In case you hadn’t heard, all the major offseason NFL story lines are revolving around one thing: the possibility of a lockout.
On March 3, the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire, after the NFL owners opted out of the old one. And it the NFL and the NFL Players Association don’t agree to a new collective bargaining agreement, well, there will be no NFL football in 2011.
First, a bit of background: The key point of contention appears to be how to slice up the league’s revenue pie. The current collective bargaining agreement sets aside the first billion dollars of total revenue to the owners, then approximately 60 percent of the remaining revenue to the players and 40 percent to the owners. Citing rising operating costs, the NFL owners want to take the first two billion dollars from the revenue pot, then split the rest with the players.
Within the general revenue-splitting debate, two more issues have come to the forefront of league talks: the possibility of a rookie salary slotting system and the possibility of an 18-game schedule.
After years of denying that head injuries can lead to conditions like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the NFL finally came down hard on head injuries in 2010. It assigned heavy fines to players deemed to deliver flagrant hits to the head and made concussion safety a point of emphasis all year.
It seems strange, then, that the same people championing player safety want to extend the regular season by two games. The rationale for doing that seems to be that reducing preseason games by two would cancel out the negative effects of a longer regular season.
That sounds good enough, but in reality, as any NFL fan can attest, preseason games are a far cry from the regular season, primarily because the regular players only play a fraction of the total game.
Still, there’s no denying the economic reality that an 18-game season would produce significantly more money, both in larger television contracts and in increased ticket sales.
As a fan, I’m all for a longer schedule, but on one condition — the NFL needs to expand health care coverage for retired players.
As it stands now, players need to accrue three years of service time to be eligible for health insurance in their first five years of retirement.
That needs to change. With an 18-game schedule, a rookie slotting scale (which has support from both sides) that could save owners millions of dollars, and the likelihood that the owners will take a larger percentage of the revenue pot in the new collective bargaining agreement, there should be a surplus of funds available.
That should go to providing insurance for players with at least five years of service time for 20 years after retirement, players with three years covered for 10, and everyone else covered for two.
If that seems excessive, consider the fact that it’s difficult for NFL players to get insured for reasonable rates after their careers end because they’re often in such poor physical shape. If you were an executive at an insurance company, would you want to insure someone with an average life expectancy of 50-60 years, according to different data points, and all the health problems accompanying that?
Barring sweeping changes to the game of football as we know it, football players will always face considerable physical risk.
Sure, they get compensated justly while they’re playing — but the numerous surgeries and rehab from those surgeries can cost millions of dollars. The NFL should do its part to ease that burden.
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