OT - Appeals Court Likely to Rule for the NFL Lockout to Continue
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/football/nfl/06/03/labor.ap/index…
The arguments came before a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals whose two earlier 2-1 decisions have sided with the league and upheld the lockout.
Judges Steven Colloton and Duane Benton wrote for the majority then that "the league has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits." Bye dissented both times, favoring the players.
Colloton and Benton - appointed by Republican President George W. Bush - were outspoken Friday, peppering Olson and Clement with requests to elaborate on legal points and precedents. Bye, an appointee of President Clinton, a Democrat, offered the opening welcome to the crowded gallery, but remained mostly quiet.
Clement (NFL lawyer) insisted the Norris-LaGuardia Act bars court injunctions in cases arising from a labor dispute, which he maintained was in play here. He said Nelson's decision ran afoul of that statute.
"Ultimately, collective bargaining is a much better way to resolve these disputes than antitrust litigation," Clement said.
Maybe I'm alone here but as long as I have football on Saturdays I'll be alright.
So this makes three.
6
I have no use for the NFL.
7
Still like the game in general, owners impossible to stomach
8!
Bo said it the best; The Team, The Team, The Team.
It would kill me if there was no NFL. It finally looks like the Lions have a decent-good team and a lockout would hamper that.
I'm actually looking forward to this year as a fan. If it doesn't happen I'll be disappointed.
Yes, that and the fact that we've known this has been coming for at least two years.
Without going too far into it, I watch an awful lot of appellate oral arguments. While that may in fact be the result, going by who is asking questions is not a good way to predict. Some judges just have a better grasp of certain areas of law and know which questions to ask. Some judges simply don't ask questions. (Clarence Thomas hasn't spoken in court for five years.)
The more relevant point in the article is all 3 judges will continue with their original lines of thinking and rule the same way as they did for the temporary injunction.
There better be something in the fall!
I think you want the thread next door, this one is for lawyertalkin'.
Although I am a college football fan, it would still be disappointing if the 2011/12 season was canned. Both college and pro football are highly entertaining.
But I thought this was the year that the Lions were gonna make the playoffs!!!
awww hamburgers.
Thus, the universe created equilibrium by making the lockout.
I'm new to the legalities of lockouts...is there anything preventing the players from just forming their own league (like the AFL)?
Besides the fact that that would be unbelievably insane? I don't think so, no.
it would take an incredible amount of capital to secure stadiums, sell tickets, get coaching staffs.
The big kicker is money comes from the networks, who would be pressured by current owners to avoid entering any agreement with the startup league.
If 30 some new billionaires wanted to start a league it would be possible, just extremely difficult. The lockout would (should) be resolved before something like that would ever occur.
Fighting Zuckerbergs.
Save us from ourselves! Buy out the NFL!
I would think with the formation of a new league, stadiums would be DYING to give cut-rate deals so they don't sit there empty.
Networks and coaches may be pressured by the league, but in the end, all the NFL is really is a brand. It's the players that people pay to see. The money would follow the players. If CBS/ESPN get pressured by the league to not do TV contracts, I'm sure a TBS or some other network would step up. Yes, it would be a fraction of the current costs, but maybe the short term loss would be worth it for the long term reward of having these disputes every few years.
I agree the lockout will be resolved, but I just wondered if legally they could do this. It seems to me the players hold more leverage than they are exercising. But maybe that's my biased opinion since I side with the players, not the owners.
i disagree that players are the only things that put fans in the stands. Some people are simply fans of professional football, while others are tied to their hometown teams.
Take the lions of the past 10 years, at various times people went to games to see out of town teams, the new stadium, or merely support their traditional team. These teams had few identifiable players, and yet people still paid attention to the lions by going to games or investing 4 hours watching on the tv.
Stadiums would seek new tenants from the new league, but that would have to be after the NFL would dissolve, most are leased by their respective franchises, i merely was pointing out that there would be anumber of hurdles to starting a new league.
In short it takes money to make money, and professional sports is a business. I don't see players forking out their own money to try to start a new league.
Your opinion is correct of the two IMO. While you can't deny that some fans come out to see certain players, team loyalty and other factors, along with simply watching great athletes play at the highest level, are much more of a reason for pro football's stature than a few star players. It's the same in college, to an even greater degree IMO. You could replace the entire starting lineup of Michigan's team with unknowns, and there would still be 105,000+ in the seats.
Holy wall of text, Batman!
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I can't stand lawyer mumbo jumbo.
Shut up and tell us what it means, smarty-pants.
A court won't inject itself into a labor dispute, i.e., a dispute between an employer and an employee, especially when there's a governing collective bargaining agreement. The most a court will do in this scenario is construe that agreement. So even if there's an antitrust issue (e.g., restraint of trade [though I'm not sure that this is the exact issue here]) lingering beneath the surface, the court will stay out of it.
The question here is whether there is an employer-employee relationship/dispute in light of the alleged dissolution of the players' union.
If the employer-employee relationship persists, then a court will not hear the antitrust issue. If not, then the court can hear the antitrust issue. So right now, it's a threshold issue. At least based on this article.
It's Friday - fuck this, I'm supposed to be forgetting about this kind of shit until Monday.
You mean that was in ENGLISH?!?
I loved that amicus curiae briefs were filed from the NHL on behalf of the owners and the NHLPA on behalf of the union. NHL lockout on the way?
From all this I think with a strict interpretation I agree technically the owners should win. But I myself am more of the opinion that if you reach a ruling without considering the rational and actual consequences of a decision you haven't done your job as a judge at all. I would rule in favor of the players union because of the greater damage they receive from a lockout.
Still I can't really blame the two judges for thinking different than me. Hope it all gets worked out and we have a season.
This has gotten ridiculous. It has become a big pissing match between the rich and the richer. If this isn't resolved soon there will be a continued lack of interest by fans. There was already an article about fans not visiting NFL sites and lack of interest in this years draft. The longer it continues the more they will end up hurting themselves.
And their near-suicidal lockout. Fan interest is hard to rebuild.
Of course, the players can always say forget it and sign up in the CFL. Great...er, great...er...
Anyway it's football. Kind of.
I run a printing press that prints beer cartons for companies like Miller and Budweiser. Every year we make a large sum of money printing several different NFL team cartons. This morning I learned that due to the lockout the beverage companies may not be ordering these millions of dollars worth of cartons. Obviously you can't blame the beverage companies but stuff like this does really upset me that the NFL's minimum salary of $350,000 per year is just not enough. Not saying they haven't earned it but for crying out loud shut up and get out there and play some football or step aside and I'll do it for half that.
Sad to hear about your potential business loss.
That said, it's a lockout by the owners and not a strike by the players. I won't go through the rationale on the lockout other than to say that it was clear for about two years (given the timeline of the labour negotiation) that the league's intention was to lock out it's players and effect a new economic agreement more favorable to their smaller market teams.
At this point, the owners do not have a uniform revenue sharing agreement and "secondary revenue" such as that accrued via stadium revenue streams is not shared. Accordingly, teams like Dallas with newer and flashier venues make money like crazy while teams with smaller markets and less local revenue opportunities make less money. Since the owners seem unwilling to work it out among themselves on these issues they have determined to look at solidifying their revenue streams via player compensation and making this more clear and more consistent with previous agreement(s).
At the end of the day, the average player's career is 4 years; even at $350k per year that's not a lot of time to earn a lot of money given the long term effects, physically, of an NFL career. As much as I feel for your business loss I think your anger is perhaps a bit misguided. It's not the players who appear to have chosen this road; rather, the owners saved a giant war chest to fund the lockout and essentially break the union (has worked out less well then their plans).
Dude. The lockout does have to do with compensation to players.
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<br>And in a 4 year career making the minimum you would have roughly 1 million dollars after tax.
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<br>That is absolutely plenty to pay for amazing health care for the rest of your life barring some major catastrophic issue. Not every 4 year bench warming dude is a cripple at 30.
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<br>While those cases are sad I do not hear Drew Brees and Payton paying for medical care for the retired players. Their salaries are directly related to those old guys who worked off season jobs to play in the league just like how the owners profits increased because of those guys.
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<br>The debate is getting silly, and the players would have gone on strike, the owners used a lockout to preempt it.
I don't have much patience for the argument that the players should just take what the owners offer because they make plenty of money already.
This argument overlooks two things: (1) that the owners' current bargaining position is that overall player compensation should be cut; (2) the owners are making plenty of money too.
The labor dispute is about how to fairly allocate the enormous profits that the NFL generates -- not about whether NFL players' salaries are enough to live on (and buy lifetime health insurance with).
Considering how much owners make and how much their franchise value continues to increase, I'd rather see the players keep the share of revenue that they're currently receiving.
I'm not on either side here, but I don have some general thoughts. Both sides are greedy as hell (taking sides and arguing about which side is less greedy is pretty silly, in my opinion). I want to feel bad for the players and jump on their side, but they are making it extremely difficult. They already had an extremely favorable deal (which is why the owner's opted out as soon as they gained some leverage and the players just want things to stay the same) and seem unwilling to give anything. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the owners are moving from their originial demands as much as they claim; but by all accounts, the players aren't moving at all on their demand that everything stays the same. There were rumors yesterday that the owner's were going to back off their demand for an extra $1 billion. Hopefully, that is true and we can get a deal sooner rather than later.