Dave Pear's Blog

Remember this one? When some of the rhetoric first started coming out about the NFL’s revenue-sharing with the NFLPA and the players, Commissioner Roger Goodell’s standard answer was that those generous owners were handing over almost 60% of their revenues to those greedy players. Recently, the League has been demanding a 20% reduction in salaries as well as no salary cap on the top end of rookies’ and older players’ contracts. And now it’s also becoming clear that the NFL’s idea of 60% has never really been 60% of gross but some convoluted accounting that ends up actually being closer to 52%. The League’s PR flaks and shills (aka attack dogs) have been trying to spin out the idea that the NFLPA needs to open their books even as they continue to dodge calls for an audit of their own numbers. We believe that transparency is needed from both sides of the fence but right now the fact that the NFLPA has to file annual LM-2′s with the Dept. of Labor makes the Union more open than 31 of the 32 teams in disclosure (the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly-owned team and therefore required to open their books annually). As common sense goes, the NFLPA’s numbers will never be completely accurate if the NFL hasn’t actually been paying its real share all these years.

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There’s an old saying that the definition of stupid is doing the same thing over and over again thinking that the results are going to be different. You would think that with as many people from inside and outside sources telling him to keep his mouth shut, Gene Upshaw would finally learn to keep his mouth shut. Every time he opens it, his foot seems to have a nasty habit of ending up in there. But after years of running wild with no interference, Upshaw seems to be at a point in his life where he’s above it all; he knows everything and heaven help anyone who disagrees with him. He knows the law, he knows business and he understands how to stay in power at all costs.

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