Now that the Super Bowl is over and the offseason is fully upon us there is only one thing on people's minds; will there be a lockout? And the answer is no. Sure, at this point the two sides are miles apart, but that doesn't mean anything. Let's take a look at the last two sports leagues to have a lockout, the NHL and MLB. In both of those situations the two leagues were at potentially their lowest points of popularity in league history. This differs from the NFL, which is currently more popular than ever before. Sunday's Super Bowl was the most watched program in television history at 111 million, beating last year's super bowl between the Colts and the Saints. With league popularity at its highest point there is no way that the Owners and the Players Union aren't going to find some agreement. There is simply too much out there for them to gain and too much that can be lost by missing some of the season due to lockout.
Also the past two days there has been a lot of talk about the Owners walking out of negotiations yesterday and then canceling meetings for today. The thing that these people must not understand is the fact this is a negotiation and that this is the way that these things work. This is going to happen multiple times in a negotiation of such magnitude and it is probably good news that this is happening now as opposed to July. At least we all now know that serious negotiations and it may end up being a good sign that an agreement will happen sooner rather than later.
Now I'm not saying that because of this walk out that we can definitely expect an agreement to be reached before the current collective bargaining agreement runs out on March 5th. I do however think it will be reached long before we have to worry about missing part of the regular season. One last thing that people need to keep in mind when reading about the negotiation process is that never before have negotiations taken place in an era of sports media the demands constant news updates, like the one that we are in today. So journalists must look for any headline that they can find so anything that can be considered a break in negotiations is going to be reported as if it is the potential downfall of the NFL.
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