Over the past 20 years, 15,018 players played in the NFL, but only 631 (4%) played three or more years. The average career length is 3.7 seasons, but players do not receive benefits unless they put in four years, both stats according to the NFL.

Dallas Cowboys coach Wade Phillips said Wednesday that he was not bothered by the $55,000 bill rookie WR Dez Bryant footed for a meal with his teammates this week.

. . .

[Bryant's] agent told ESPN that his teammates got him back for his training camp reticence with the meal. The publicity for the $55,000 bill drew criticism from many circles, including ex-NFL coach Herm Edwards, who scolded the Cowboys for revealing the high cost of the meal.

Just stupid stuff.  The NFLPA needs to have all these guys on a email list and constantly remind them to stop looking like assholes in the middle of a recession (and the middle of CBA negotiations).

The NFL originally won the case because the lower courts decided that, when it comes to marketing hats and gear, the 32 teams in the league act like one big company, a “single entity,” and such an entity can’t illegally conspire with itself to restrain trade. The NFL-Reebok deal is worth a lot of money, and fans pay for it: If you want to show support for your team by buying an official hat, it now costs $10 more than before the exclusive arrangement.

. . .

The notion that the teams function as a single entity is absurd; the 32 organizations composing the NFL and the business people who run them compete with unrelenting intensity for players, coaches and, most of all, the loyalty of fans.  . . .  I also know about it because in 2006, after five years with the San Diego Chargers, I became a free agent and witnessed firsthand the robust competition among teams for players. Thanks to free agency, I had the opportunity to sign a six-year contract with the New Orleans Saints . . . .  I could choose to sign a contract with the Saints because of a crucial player-led antitrust lawsuit in 1993 that secured players’ rights to sell our services as free agents. Until that case, team owners had acted together to control players and keep salaries low, while the popularity of the game and teams’ revenues grew exponentially. Today, if the Supreme Court agrees with the NFL’s argument that the teams act as a single entity rather than as 32 separate, vigorously competitive and extremely profitable entities, the absence of antitrust scrutiny would enable the owners to exert total control over this multibillion-dollar business.

The argument is scheduled to be heard on Wednesday (1/13/10).  For more background on the case, check out the briefs here.

My sense is that the Court will uphold the Seventh Circuit’s ruling that the NFL acts as a single entity when licensing its intellectual property (logos on hats, in this instance).  Originally I had read the news reports to say that individual teams at one time licensed their own logos/brands to individual sports merchandising companies — but as I read the Seventh Circuit opinion, I find this is wrong.  Since 1963, the NFL itself had licensed all of its teams’ logos/brands under the umbrella of NFL Properties.

Because sports leagues are impossible to define as either solely competitive or solely cooperative, there is some leeway for courts to permit competing firms (here, teams) to cooperate (deciding who will play who, and when, each week, for one small example) where other industries would be prohibited from such agreements by the antitrust laws.  I see the licensing and marketing of the league as one area where the league can properly cooperate.  I imagine that the Supreme Court will uphold this narrow ruling.

This brings me to my last point — and a short one b/c I have yet to read through the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL amicus brief (though those other leagues aren’t ‘in’ the case, they were permitted to let the Court hear their views on the subject because the ruling could affect them):  according to several news reports (and my favorite antitrust professor/QB, Drew Brees), the NFL is asking the court to overrule our old friend, Radovich v. NFL, and declare that the NFL has a blanket antitrust exemption.

Like I said, that’s my sense from the news reports.  When I finish reading the leagues’ brief, I’ll have a better idea of what they’re asking for.

[also -- sorry for the long layoff. No promises on heavily continued blogging, but I'll update a little more as things interest me.  After getting shut out by the league and NFLPA for news, I decided they could stuff it and I'd just passively follow -- we'll see.]

Stefan Fastis, of A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL, pens an opinion piece in today’s New York Times about the issue of health care and injuries in today’s NFL.

N.F.L. players often get excellent medical treatment, but the primary goal is to return them to the field as quickly as possible. Players are often complicit in playing down the extent of their injuries. Fearful of losing their jobs — there are no guaranteed contracts in the N.F.L. — they return to the huddle still hurt.

I witnessed this play-first ethos when the Denver Broncos allowed me to join the team as a place-kicker during training camp in 2006 and write a book on the experience. One player told me that, the previous year, a team trainer had dismissed his complaints of a knee injury; a few days later, he tore an anterior cruciate ligament. Another Bronco, now retired, told me the team gave him a diagnosis of a minor calf strain; an outside doctor found it was a severe muscle tear.

Fastis recommends that the new CBA include a few common-sense provisions to give NFL players more opportunities to extend their careers:

1. Take away the team-employed doctors and replace them with a league-wide medical staff that focuses on the best interest of the players, rather than the team.
2. Doctors report their diagnoses directly to the players first before the team.
3. Require every team to report all injuries, no matter how small.  Good luck getting that one approved the Jets!

The case, involving a challenge to the league’s ability to enter into an exclusive headgear license with Reebok, turns on whether the NFL constitutes a single entityfor the purposes of the specific antitrust law at play in that case.

If the league isn’t a single entity, then the process of coming together and deciding to do business with only one company violates antitrust laws.

Munson fears that the league would then parlay a favorable ruling into an attempt to take the position that the league is completely immune from any and all antitrust claims under each and every antitrust law.  Most importantly, the league could take the position that the union would not be able to decertify and sue the league under antitrust law as an attack on various rules (such as the draft, free agency, and salary) that the league would then apply to all 32 franchises.

The problem is that such a position, in our view, would make it difficult for the league to avoid the argument in other legal contexts that players and coaches are employees only of the team, and not employees of the league itself.

We’re going to be breaking down the American Needle case in more detail soon.

Billick addresses the looming CBA talks between the NFL and the NFLPA in the book, and he views that as the key issue overshadowing all others facing the league. A work stoppage would mean, as Billick and MacCambridge wrote, “all the momentum that the league has enjoyed for the past twenty years is shot to hell.” When asked if the parties involved understand how high the stakes are, Billick said, “Absolutely, but the problem is that may not prevent them from doing what you typically do with these negotiations, which is take shots at one another. Both sides recognize the fans have no interest in hearing billionaire owners argue with millionaire players over their money.” Billick added he was surprised to find how many team officials are “comfortable with the idea that the salary cap can go away” following this season, a fact which may take away a key point of leverage for the players.

Without confirming a six-figure fine by the NFL, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones did confirm Sunday that commissioner Roger Goodell frowned upon Jones breaking the league’s gag order 10 days ago when he said the league’s revenue-sharing era is on life support.

Jones’ reaction to league’s reaction? “So be it.”

“The league and I won’t be confirming that [the fine] one way or the other,” Jones said. “My comments were to help out Minnesota in such a way to get some energy up there to possibly get some help on building a stadium. So, the fact that that type of subject matter can get over into the labor thing shows how they’re intertwined. So if I crossed the line, so be it.”

Before the Cowboys’ preseason finale at Minnesota on Sept. 4, Jones spoke to a Minneapolis reporter about the need for public support of a new stadium there and said, “Right now, we are subsidizing this market. It’s unthinkable to think that the market you’ve got here, with 3.5 million people, and have teams like Kansas City and Green Bay subsidizing this market. That will stop. That’s going to stop. That’s called revenue sharing. That’s on its way out

Owners and team executives are under a gag order from discussion pending labor issues. The league’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2010, and revenue sharing is a contentious issue among owners.

You’ll note that no other owner who has spoken to the media about the CBA process or NFL business issues has been fined — it’s because they’ve been towing the party line.  I think those journalists with access should be chipping away at this fault line to get to the heart of the matter.

Also, this punishment clearly shows (as if it wasn’t already apparent), that decertification by the union could bring the league a major antitrust headache.

If you’re interested in learning more (about waivers), check out Article XXII of the current CBA which governs the league’s waiver wire.