NFL Rumors: Collective Bargaining Agreement

Fourteen days—that's all that remains before the NFL's current collective bargaining agreement comes to an end, immediately following with a lockout, something the league hasn't endured in a generation.

The issue between the NFL owners and the NFL players association has gotten out-of-hand. 

NFL owners are claiming that their business has begun to take a worthy of attention downturn. 

They make these claims but refuse to show the player's association their books that could prove they are taking massive hits in their bank accounts.

The players' union simply wants proof that the owners are losing money—are some teams making a significant more amount of money then others?

It is plain and simple if the owners are losing money they wouldn't be so stingy about hiding their books. 

In business, you have partners and those partners get together, exchange financial papers and in the end, meet in the middle with a negotiation.

So why don't they treat this like a business, if that is what the NFL is?

The owners are simply tired of paying all this money to players who, at times, find themselves getting into trouble due to having such large sums of money.

They want to know that their money isn't going to waste.

In this article on ESPN it talks about how the Player's Association has been allowed to look at the Packers' books, due to Green Bay being publicly owned.

It shows the Packers have lost some money since 2006 but not enough to make it seem the league is as a whole.

At the end of the article there is a talk about a possible solution that sounds feasible.

Why not get a third private party to look over all the books with a set of ground rules that would be determined ahead of time?

This sounds like a good idea and makes plenty of sense.

What do you think?