NFL Lockout: The Effect on American Sports Culture

This is becoming a restless topic.

By now, we all are aware (or should be) the NFL has been in lockout mode—twice—because of disagreements between players and owners over a new collective bargaining agreement. The discrepancy is simple: players want some of the cut of league revenues, and owners don't want to give up more than they already are.

And the dispute continues and continues and continues.

With that, we are seeing a total loss of faith in the NFL.

And with that, I'll illustrate an analogy: the NFL is to Americans as world soccer is to....well, the world. The National Football League is an increasingly popular league here. Super Bowl Sunday is a de-facto American holiday and even the non-sports buff will watch it, if only for the commercials.

A lockout should be the last thing on the minds of NFL fans. The league is making plenty of money, games are being sold out in stadium after stadium (unless you're in Cleveland) and the game has a rich history of great moments. 

Surely, this is not one of them.

The last time a collective bargaining agreement played a pivotal role in a professional sports league was in 2004, when the NHL suffered at the hands of the evil CBA. Of course, this didn't really play too much of a role in American sports culture, as the NHL has historically been the fourth of the Big Four. Fans just simply watched NBA instead. 

This is a whole different ballgame.

Ray Lewis hit the nail on the head when he mentioned that there would be more crime in the streets if there was no NFL season. Not only would this affect the inner-cities, as conjectured, but it would damage the larger markets.

Television networks would have nothing to show (although FOX could live off of "I Love Lucy" re-runs), and a non-existent Super Bowl could lead to damaging results for marketing, the workforce, and the Kingsford charcoal company.

And, more importantly, a damage to the NFL's reputation is imminent.

Think about it: with a very stubborn league crumbling under the pressures of collective bargaining, it creates the whole "it can happen to anyone" reaction. The NBA is next on the list of expiring CBA's, and if there's no correspondence between the league and the players, we could see the same thing taking place in basketball. Now that the fans are clued in to how important a CBA is to an intrepid sports league, the NFL will not be taken for granted much longer.

Aspiring football players, currently in the barracks of the NCAA, are now wondering if they will make it to the big time. Furthermore, our currently drafted young athletes are wondering if they will see a paycheck. 

This only creates a snowball effect that goes down to even community college and high-school football. The United Football League is trying to establish themselves as a fair replacement; a second incarnation of the UFL, if you will. 

Except there's no Super Bowl in the UFL.

Well, at least the Packers were able to win another Super Bowl, right?