NFL Lockout: Why the NFL Season Will Start Before the NBA Lockout Ends

With the NBA Lockout officially underway and the NFL Lockout running well over its 100th day, the world of American professional sports now has two full-blown labor stoppages on its hands.

And while other sports leagues, like MLS, MLB, the NHL and the NCAA, might not mind the absence of professional football and basketball too much, millions of sports fans across the country are sure to throw a fit when fall rolls around and they find their local TV listings suspiciously devoid of entertaining sports options.

Though the general idea of each lockout may be the same—there's money involved, people are unhappy, something's got to change—the situations in the NBA and the NFL are quite different.

As such, the NFL Lockout figures to end quite a bit sooner than the NBA Lockout, and here's why. 

Everyone in the NFL is Making Money, Which Just isn't the Case in the NBA

First and foremost, the difference between these two lockouts is also the reason they're both happening in the first place—money.

In the NFL's case, everyone—from the players to the owners to the vendors and TV people—is making money. What makes the football lockout so unusual in the grand scheme of professional sports labor strife is the fact that the fight isn't about who's making money and who's not, but rather how much of the immense profit each side thinks it should be taking home.

The owners are making a fortune, but they want juuuust a bit more from the existing $9 billion pie, while the players don't want to give up any more of their share.

All of that is quite different from what is soon to unfold with the NBA, wherein 22 out of 30 franchises are running at a loss while running a collective $300 million in the red over the past year. Additionally, unlike in the NFL, in the NBA, the players, not the owners, make the bulk of the money—approximately 57 percent of it—with a median salary of $5 million.

So, while in both cases, the players are likely going to have to give something up, the NFL Lockout figures to require far less from the players than the NBA Lockout will.

The NFL Has Been Negotiating for Two and a Half Months Longer

Of course, money is correlated to time, which the NFL has spent much more of than the NBA at this point in labor negotiations.

The NFL's collective bargaining agreement officially expired at midnight on March 12, meaning that the league's owners and players have been dealing explicitly with the problem, both among their own ranks and together at bargaining tables, for more than two and a half months.

In that time, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA president DeMaurice Smith have tried just about every tactic to drive negotiations their way and have once again gotten around to some serious business in Minneapolis, where reports of progress have thus far been mixed, but seemingly better than before.

Such would ultimately suggest that the NFL is far closer to having its problems resolved than the NBA is, as the NBA's owners and players figure to take at least a couple weeks to themselves to strategize and craft proposals before the two sides meet again once the lockout is well underway. 

The NFL Season Starts Much Sooner Than the NBA Season

Sticking with purely temporal considerations, the NFL Lockout figures to end sooner because, well, the NFL season is slated to start and end sooner than that of the NBA.

The 2011 season kickoff game between the defending Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints is set to be played on September 8 at Lambeau Field, which means that mandatory training camps should, if the season is to go forward full-bore, begin sometime in July. On the flip side, the NFL season will conclude, come hail or high water, on February 5, 2012 with Super Bowl XLVI at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

Simply put, there just isn't that much more time for the NFL to mess around before the entire season is lost.

The NBA season, on the other hand, wouldn't get going until late October and would likely drag into June with the NBA Finals, giving David Stern and Billy Hunter a full four months more to fiddle about while they try to restructure the whole dang system.