Kill the Umpire?!

                                                                NFL Imitating Life?

As I sat and watched possibly the worst NFL game in the history of the world I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what life has become and why we just can’t seem to get along and fix anything anymore. Have we all gone crazy? First I thought that the NFL referees were on strike but my son set me straight last week and informed me that they were being locked out of their jobs by the NFL owners. The referees have a contract and it is valid for this year!

Who cries foul louder than an NFL owner when one of their players refuses to honor their contract and demands a renegotiation before, during or after their contract has legally expired? A contract is a contract they say and must be honored by all honorable men. Negotiations can take place when a contract is fulfilled! And yet here are the owners refusing to honor a valid contract by locking out the referees.

And all of the fuss is over about 40 million dollars worth of additional compensation that the two parties are disagreeing over. That sounds like quite a lot to you and me but when you consider that each NFL franchise is worth an average of 1.04 billion dollars then the extra amount that they would have to pay to the officials when compared to their total annual revenue is about 0.2 percent! Not 2 percent but point 2 percent. That’s 2 tenths of one percent!

Do you think that anyone in the NFL (owners, coaches, players, trainers, anyone???) will have to downsize their lives should the referees receive the extra compensation they are asking for in a new contract? I’ll bet most of you who are reading this know all about downsizing one’s life in this difficult economy. We NFL lovers have even had to downsize our expectations when it comes to watching the games! But will the owners suffer? Do they ever? So what’s it all about? And why is there no one with any power or outrage or sense to do anything about it?

It’s just a game I know but All the fans would have to do is skip one game to make their feelings known and solve the problem but of course they’ve not only invested in a seat license for every game already but have also already been sold all of their tickets (clever owners). How about the NFL players association? They have one of the richest unions in the world. Why aren’t they supporting their union brethren and refusing to take the field? That would solve this problem in a heartbeat. Or how about the networks who have invested 27 billion dollars for the TV rights to the games. They could black the games out for one Sunday (probably for just 1 minute!) and demand that the owners put the complete product that was paid for on the field. At the very least I would think that the gamblers and bookies and odds makers of this country would be tearing off their own arms in solidarity, demanding an end to this fiasco so they could place a proper bet for crying out loud.

But no! And perhaps the most puzzling phenomenon of all is that here in a free country none of the players or coaches or networks or gamblers or anyone even seems to want to talk about the lock out or its unfairness publicly for fear of what? Is the money that everyone has invested in the NFL that important? So important that reason and sanity have to be shoved aside for fear of losing one lousy buck or .2 percent of our bucks? And Is what we are seeing in the NFL, in this silly game that was once a simple recreational college pastime, a mirror image of what life has become in the richest country in the world? Paralysis by wealth? Too much much? Too much desire for a silly thing that we like to do to care about why something else is happening?

Is that why we can’t seem to do anything sensible around here any more? We just love our money and our things and our petty entertainments too much to put them aside for a few minutes and restore some sanity? How can we not have proper healthcare and food distribution and housing and education and human services for everyone in our country when we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on football?… And not even football is happy!!!!!