A Post That Shouldn't Have to Be Written

While NASCAR is getting its season off to a rollicking start, the other sport covered on a regular basis on this Web site is heading into a tailspin.
By now, unless you're living in a cave, you've heard about the problems the National Football League and its players have had trying to divide $9 billion of revenue. Words that should never enter the vocabulary of sports stories, like decertification and plaintiff and lockout and boycott, are becoming as common as upside and OTA.
Another unfortunate side effect of this battle of wills is the way fans are being asked to choose sides. Poll after poll asks the people who provide all that revenue which side should be allowed to get more of it. On behalf of sports fans everywhere, we at the People's Pigskin would like the people who put these polls together to borrow a tactic from the Richard Pryor movie "Brewster's Millions" and add another choice to these polls.
"None of the above."
Asking us to say we like one side because we don't like what the other is doing is kind of like asking us to enjoy a toadstool breakfast simply because we don't want to eat skunk. Asking us to choose between someone who signs an eight-digit contract and then talks to us about the costs of health care or someone who takes a billion dollars from the taxpayers for a stadium and then talks to us about revenue distribution is as false a choice as we can get. In the immortal words of Buffalo Springfield, nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Which side are we on? We're on the side of the fans. They provide the revenue that the players and owners are having trouble dividing. They are the ones buying the tickets, the jerseys, the concessions and the satellite TV packages. They are the ones making the Super Bowl the highest-rated show in the country year after year. They are the ones passing the bond or tax measures that finance the construction of new arenas.
And they seem to be the only ones without a seat at the bargaining table.
Roger? DeMaurice? Whether you realize it or not, you work for the fans. Because their revenue also funds those paychecks you're so cavalierly declining in an empty and futile gesture to convince us that you're right.
If you ignore them or take them for granted, you do so at your own peril. Just ask Gary Bettman.