Shouldn't the NFL Be Recession-Proof?

This isn’t new news, just something that’s been eating at me for a while now.

A person I respect told me recently that when the going gets tough in the private sector, the good companies rally around their employees and do whatever it takes to keep them.

After all, every successful company needs good employees, especially during the hard times.

It’s a good philosophy, but one I’m not sure many companies in the real world follow. Take the NFL for example. They’ve been raking in money hand over fist for the last couple of decades.

They’re undoubtedly the most popular and lucrative professional sport in the United States. Their owners are all millionaires, some billionaires.

And unlike baseball, most NFL owners aren’t exactly struggling to keep their team afloat.

Given that, there’s something wrong with the NFL laying off employees.

The NFL is taking in $6.5 billion a year. After player salaries, they still end up with about $2 billion a year. And yet they can’t make it through one year of an economic downturn without laying off more than 10% of their workforce?

Meanwhile, do you think Roger Goodell considered taking a paycut to help keep some of these people employed?

Goodell is making approximately $10 million per year. They laid off 150 employees. If each one of those employees made $65,000 per year (doubtful), they still wouldn’t have cost the NFL as much money as their commissioner.

How about laying him off and keeping 150 of their hard-working employees instead?

Not an option, I guess. As always, the rich get richer, and the middle class can go screw.

I’m one of those people who hate to be reminded that my favorite sport is a business. But it is a business. A cutthroat business. With the same type of crooked, me-first, CEOs running them as your average mortgage company.

It’s not just the NFL’s corporate offices either.

Back in November, the Patriots quietly laid off 60 employees from their Gillette Stadium workforce. That amounts to a 5% workforce reduction.

The Redskins have laid off employees over the last couple of months as well.

These are businesses that have made billions of dollars over the last 10 years. Businesses that are worth over a billion dollars. Businesses with owners who have more money than God.

Yet at the first sign of a slowdown they’re throwing their employees, the same ones who presumably helped make those billions, out on the street.

It’s ridiculous.

This article originally appeared on the New England Patriots Examiner page. To read more articles like this one, check them out here.

Sean Crowe is the New England Patriots Examiner and a Senior Writer / NFL Community Leader at Bleacher Report. You can email him at [e-mail] can check out his Bleacher Report archives here.