Even if you're on the owners' side, they are not on yours.

I really don’t care whether or not you agree with the NFL’s now defunct players association or the arguments coming from the group of lawyers representing their interests. For the sake of this entire article, let’s just pretend that your feelings about the players, DeMaurice Smith and Jeffrey Kessler don’t exist and let’s just talk about the NFL owners and how preposterous saying you support them is, especially if you hail from Tampa.

The NFL owners care about money, not the fans. Getting those two things confused is possible because one comes from the others, but don’t believe for a second that any owner cares about anything outside of a fan’s wallet. It’s why ticket prices rise in times of economic downturn, it’s why we return from commercial breaks for a kickoff and then go back to three more minutes of ads. It’s ultimately why most of them care about winning.

Are there good owners? Yes. But at the heart of it the NFL is a business and to believe that the owners are negotiating for the fans is wrong, or at least misguided. They’re negotiating so they can get the most money out of the fans. If you think I’m being overly one-sided, again, none of this has anything to do with the players at all. Just give me five minutes…

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These three control the fate of the Bucs...

There has been no shortage of griping and complaining about the lack of expenditures from the Buccaneers’ owners over the last couple of years. I personally have been critical of the ownership at times as well. When the Glazers promoted Mark Dominik and hired Raheem Morris, I thought they were just being cheap. Bruce Allen and Jon Gruden were extremely expensive and weren’t coming off the books for a couple years and it looked like the Bucs had gone with a low-cost replacement.

It turns out they got both choices right, even at a bargain bin price, the two men have turned the Bucs around and completely revamped their roster in a couple of years. The question still lingers though, was that impeccable planning and business savvy on the part of the Glazers or did they just make a cheap move and get lucky? That questions plagues Tampa sports fans to this day. In fact it came up during at St. Pete Times live chat the other day and Gary Shelton seems to believe that despite the recent trends, the Glazers are ready to spend:

According to the Glazers, and I spent a half hour with Joel in New Orleans in late March, it’s a matter of cycles. They swear they will spend the money when the Bucs are ready to compete for the big game.

Much of it might be the differences in the sports. To compete with Man U, ownership has to pay international transfer fees. In the NFL, there is a salary cap. Also, when is the last great NFL team to buy itself a title? You win in the NFL by developing your own players. Ask Indy, New England, Pittsburgh.

That said, I think this is the year to augment with a player or two.

All of that sounds amazing, but there’s obviously a little bit of PR-work at play there as well. The Glazers have been beyond frugal recently with the Buccaneers and while I’m happy they’re ready to support a winner, I need to start to see it to believe it. I also don’t think this means that the Bucs will be players for Nnamdi Asomugha who will be 30 before the start of next season. We’ll have to wait and see.

Both sides deserve blame, but one side deserves more.

It may just be me, but in the days since the NFL and the NFLPA pulled what many writers have dubbed a ‘Thelma and Louise’ and ran their proverbial car off the side of a cliff, opinion seems to have swung against the players. The players union is a now defunct association that still functions suspiciously like a union. And the owners meanwhile are putting a full-on media blitz, releasing statements club by club that are visibly coordinated. Seriously, read the letters from the various teams and tell me a college professor wouldn’t catch one for plagiarism of the other.

Both sides, are at this point, big parts of the problem. Be it pride, greed or just miscommunication, things have been botched on both sides and they both deserve credit for letting it get to this point. But make absolutely no mistake about it, the only reason any of this is even an issue is entirely the fault of the owners. The CBA was not set to expire this year initially, it was set to expire two years down the road. The owners, despite the unparalleled growth and profitability of the NFL under the old CBA opted out of that agreement. They are the side that failed to live up to their end of a bargain that they negotiated and agreed to, that much is not disputed.

You can hide behind the contractual semantics all you want, and that’s fine there’s no morality or ethics in business. But to a man, the owners didn’t hold up their end of the deal. They opted out, then forced the players to renegotiate a deal that was profiting both sides. Everything from there is up to debate, but before consensus swings too sharply in the direction of the owners, it’s worth mentioning that they’re the group that reneged on their end of the deal and caused this whole situation at this juncture, to begin with.

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