The NFL owners and players are totally ruining my offseason.
I run a Kansas City Chiefs website here and this whole labor thing is really a fly in my football ointment. You see, we have a pretty solid structure of how we do things around here in the offseason. We’ve spent the last year turning AA into a well oiled machine. We post over 5 times a day a day on average. We have at least 2 opinion articles on the Chiefs M-F which is probably the most of any Chiefs site on the internet. Even when the good guys in red aren’t on the field, we’re here at Arrowhead Addict talking KC football.
Usually once the season ends, we immediately switch our focus to free agency. The draft is always there in the background but February and March early March are all about talking about what holes the Chiefs can fill in free agency. Once the bulk of free agency slows down, we turn our attention to the draft and then mini camps and OTA’s. We slog on through the summer months analyzing the schedule and so forth and then training camp starts up.
Well, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been much more heavy on draft talk this offseason than we have on free agency. That is because, simply put, we don’t know if there WILL be free agency and if there is, we don’t have a clue as to when it will be.
The NFL and the players have put us in this bind by not being able to come to an agreement before now. As much as we all love football, most fans could give two squats about billionaires and millionaires fighting over money. I can tell you all about the labor dispute and we have had a few posts about it but do you really want to hear about it? Of course not! I doubt anyone on this site, save maybe Jeremy who is in fact a lawyer, wants to site around talking about the legal ramifications of the players union decertifying or whether or not the tax payers who partially fund stadium upgrades have any sort of legal recourse if games are missed in 2011.
Some folks have theorized that a strike could drastically hurt the money generating juggernaut the NFL has created over the last 40+ years. While I am sure there will be some fans that will refuse to ever watch the NFL again should this thing drag out, the reality of the situation is, the NFL won’t miss a beat.
The NFL get’s more popular by the second and realistically all a strike would likely do is make the NFL even more popular when it finally comes back. It is Valentine’s Day and absence makes the heart grow fonder as they say.
There just isn’t anything like the NFL. It’s power and draw extends into the offseason like no other sport. The fact that we can come up with 5+ articles a day to write about the Kansas City Chiefs in February, let alone July, just means the NFL has done a fantastic job of creating America’s new pastime. I love baseball but this is a football country now.
We can spend our offseason being angry or placing blame but that isn’t likely to do us much good. Some folks will side with the owner while most will likely side with the players. Both the players and the owners have been carefully trying to manipulate public opinion for over a year now. The NFL keeps talking about how much they want to get a deal done while the player reps go on and on about how the NFL refuses to open their books and try their darndest to pain the owners as a bunch of money-grubbing Scrooge McDucks. They continue to dance in circles making the fans sick.
All we can do is hope that at some point, both the players and the owners will realize that the fans don’t want to pick sides. We don’t want to be brainwashed and we don’t want to be manipulated.
We just want our football because deep down, we’re all Addicts.
P.S. If a deal doesn’t get done, no matter how bad things get, we’ll keep grindin here at AA. Just understand that you may be subjected to more pictures of Shaun Smith in his bathing suit.