Inside the NFL Annual Meeting

Have a bully day!

This week marks the annual congregation of a bunch of obscenely rich old men, coming together to decide how they can best steal money away from the fans to line their own finely-tailored pockets. There are a few major issues that should be discussed and possibly handled this week. Let’s discuss.

The Collective Bargaining Agreement

Apparently, 2010 could be an uncapped year if a new CBA isn’t completed by the end of 2009. This means that paying Albert Haynesworth $41 million guaranteed wouldn’t matter for shit, provided you can pony up the cash.  Agents are carefully positioning their members to adequately ram them up the collective owners’ ass if this should happen.  30% of a massive contract is a massive agent fee.  But while players and agents mentally masturbate to the thought of this (or physically in some cases), it is unlikely that 1) the owners would let it get to that point, and 2) that they would suddenly become outlandish in their spending (other than Daniel Snyder of course who apparently prints his own money).  Bob McNair is not going to suddenly decide that Demarcus Faggins is worth $15 million in guaranteed money, unless he has recently had a stroke. McNair, not Faggins. Who would pay a stroke victim anything?

Rule Changes

This is when the mythical Rules Committee decides to make it illegal for defenders to stand within 50 yards of a receiver, in the name of making the playing field fair. Fuck that shit. I believe defenders should be able to do anything short of de-pantsing a receiver in order to stop a completion. If you want to catch the ball, fucking earn it. Also, the inevitable pro-overtime-sucks-because-my-team-couldn’t-stop-a-field-goal-drive-that-happened-to-be-in-overtime-and-lost-a-game-because-of-it-why-don’t-they-fucking-change-it-to-college-rules? debate ensues. I happen to agree with this fine line of reasoning. I hate sudden death overtime, but the NFL will never admit that such a major rule is flawed, and that going down to the college ranks is the way to fix it.

Adding More Games

Because if you can’t raise concession or ticket prices any higher, just add another game. Never mind that most NFL fans do not consider the cost of purchasing tickets, beer, food, more beer, more food, giant foam fingers, further quantities of beer before making their decision to attend a game. Let’s get as much as we can before we’re in a recession!

Rookie wage scale

Veterans are complaining about untested rookies make more in their first contract than they might in their entire careers. Matt Ryan, not even the #1 pick in the 2008 draft, got $34.75 million guaranteed before he had even realized that he was going to Michael Vick’s former team. This outrages middle of the pack players who are cut without an afterthought because they make $150,000 too much in a certain year. I have to agree with this one. It places a huge amount of pressure on 23 year olds to come in and take a franchise to the promised land when they have a price tag on their head equivalent to the GDP of some island nations.

But what these veterans don’t realize is that they won’t be able to justify their extreme hazing of rookies if their contracts are limited to mere peanuts. The fact that the newbies make more than them provided interal justification that it was ok to strap them to the field goal posts and hurl fecal matter at them

In summary, owners are rich bastards. They’re meeting up to find new ways to squeeze more dollars out of us consumers, and to determine how to avoid being labeled as rich bastards (see community charity work, not including the fact that Vinny Testaverde still manages to occasionally find work in the NFL).

- Wanks MacGruber

Image pulled out of thin air

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