 Paul Tagliabue and Gene Upshaw, you are officially on the clock. As the hours tick away (the sides have until midnight tonight to ratify a new Collective Bargaining Agreement before the NFL heads into an economic Undiscovered Country), we have to welcome a new player to the table: ESPN. And here at the end of days, ESPN is hardly the innocent bystander they pretend to be.
Yeah, the Worldwide Leader has finally decided to pay attention to the NFL’s labor woes. We’ve noted Bristol’s decided inattention throughout the last months, and noted the marked conflicts of interest at play: the NFL is such a cash cow for ESPN, and for every media outlet that it touches, that no media outlet has any incentive to paint the NFL as anything but the gold standard of sports league management in the world today.
Nobody at Bristol wanted to raise a red flag, so here we are. Only, finally, today at the last minute, ESPN is hitting this story full-tilt, including going so far as to (shocking, we know) break into Bruce Willis’ hard-hitting stint on the Budweiser Hot Seat for Tagliabue’s press conference.
(An aside: in one episode of SportsCenter, Bruce Willis says that “all sports are team sports … except skiing…”; ESPN brings in Dick Vitale to answer questions about Duke favoritism among referees, which is like bringing in Kenneth Lay as a guest lecturer in business ethics; and, of all things, the Crocodile Hunter stops by to waste fifteen minutes in the history of the universe by predicting college hoops results. And I’m supposed to be surprised by ESPN’s falling ratings?)
Back on point: now that ESPN is paying attention to the collapsing NFL CBA, we’re hearing a spin on these talks as if everything has happened very quickly or has been compressed into the last minute; the truth is that these talks have been ongoing for the last six months, and, during that time, no public scrutiny existed to help propel either side into concession or discussion. By not covering the CBA breakdown, ESPN helped create an artificial sense of calm that has now come full circle to bit everybody squarely in the ass.
This morning, many many articles have been written on the politics and economics at play in these last-minute negotiations. Some of them will manage fully to explain the economic protocols in play, and you can bet that the programmers at EA Sports are sweating bullets trying to figure out whether they have to completely reformat “Franchise Mode” in time for an August release. But let’s think about the greater media component that has gone underinterrogated:
By most reports, one of the large sticking points in completing NFL/NFLPA negotiations is the owners’ inability to agree amongst themselves on a revenue-sharing agreement. Presumably particular owners in large markets (Jerry Jones, we’re looking in your direction) are trying to break away from the quasi-socialist flat-rate revenue-sharing agreement that, by all accounts, has been one of the foundations upon which the juggernaut status of the NFL has been built. This would push the NFL more towards the MLB model where owners in large markets gain more from media revenues picked up as a result of those markets (i.e. the Yankees’ relationship to YES).
But it’s important to remember that the NFL’s total media rights revenue is skyrocketing even as we speak. New deals with NBC and ABC/ESPN, combined with the long-form building of the NFL Network, mean that the NFL’s total revenue sharing pool from media rights is only going to grow at an increasing rate. Even if the owners’ nightmare comes true, and the NFL salary cap expires beyond hope of recovery, the pool of available resources for NFL owners is contractually set very high for at least the next five years.
A salary cap below $100 million for 2006-7 is an artificial and temporary blockade on team expansion, and only a function of some contractual clauses that will come into play at midnight today (if in fact the owners and players can’t at least rectify that specific provision). But beyond that immediate horizon, the money keeps rolling in; in fact, with the media money rolling in, and a salary cap set so low, NFL owners will be diving in Scrooge McDuck-sized silos of cash by this time next year, just in time for an uncapped free agency spending bazaar the scope of which we have never seen.
Let’s say that one more time: thanks to the billions of dollars streaming in from national media rights, nobody in today’s NFL gets to complain about insufficient funds – which is, of course, exactly what Paul Tagliabue is currently doing.
In the meantime, let’s call ESPN’s coverage what it is: Bristol waited until the last minute so that it could create a sense of cable-news-immediacy that should not actually exist; this crisis has been looming and pending for months.
The question ESPN should ask itself tomorrow is this: did their coverage, or lack thereof, actually help blind the public to the actual dangers at play, and thus keep pressure off of the NFL and NFLPA? In that case, if the NFL begins actually to look at a work stoppage, or a significant dropoff in quality of play, ESPN will have only itself to blame. |
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