I know we beat the NFL to death last night, but watching last night’s Ravens-Pats game, I was stunned by how awful the scab officiating was. There were uncalled offensive and defensive holding penalties on every single passing play. A ball was mis-spotted worse than I’ve ever seen a ball mis-spotted in all of my years watching college, pro, and high-school football.
There is no way it can be a sensible business position to let this continue, given that the total cost of caving into the demands of the locked-out referees is only $2 million a year, in a league with $8-9 billion in annual revenues.
This is about crushing unions. Nothing more, nothing less.
What I don’t get about these Galtian motherfuckers is who the fuck do they think is going to buy all their Rearden metal after they’ve turned us into a nation of serfs?
Lit3Bolt
The purpose of the aristocracy is to be the aristocracy.
In other words, it was never about voting rights, wars, healthcare, economics, money, academia, religion, or politics. All are a means to an end, which is:
I’m better than you, fuck you.
If I can’t have it, neither can you.
Shawn in ShowMe
At that point, the 1% will own 99% of the wealth and feudalism will displace capitalism as the reigning economic system. Which is what they wanted all along, not “free markets.”
Omnes Omnibus
Don’t you know it’s wrong to cheat a trying man?
It is MBA, penny wise pound foolish thinking.
Violet
I was trying to come up with ways for fans to have an impact on the owners. My suggestion was a boycott–empty stadiums, no one watching TV, boycott of advertisers, online shaming, picketing outside stadiums, etc.
Then someone commented on the fans shouting “Bullshit” in a game last night after some bad officiating. That seems like an even more successful strategy. Get the fans to shout profanity and hold up signs with profanity on them. Make it difficult for networks to show the game because of all the profanity. That will hit the networks and will be difficult to ignore. A concurrent online campaign would also be helpful.
Steve
In overtime of the Detroit-Tennessee game, Tennessee ran a play from their own 44. They completed a pass, and there was a penalty tacked on after the play.
Then the completion got reversed on replay. So at first they were just going to go back to the line of scrimmage. Then they suddenly realized that the penalty still applied. So they walked off the penalty from the 44 and put the ball there. Except they walked it off from the Detroit 44, instead of the Tennessee 44. 12 free yards.
Anoniminous
A wee bit of union solidarity by the players, such as turning the games into farces, would end the lockout.
Doug
$9.5 billion projected in 2012.
Zifnab
@Anoniminous: That’s what gets me. The players’ union went into their battle arm-in-arm. Solidarity was practically overflowing.
Where’s the love for the refs?
Spaghetti Lee
What I don’t get about these Galtian motherfuckers is who the fuck do they think is going to buy all their Rearden metal after they’ve turned us into a nation of serfs?
Easy. All money gets replaced with credit. It’ll be like a Logan’s Run sort of thing. Once you hit $1 million in debt, they’ll kill you, repossess everything you ever owned, and wipe your credit and give your card to someone new. See, it creates continuous economic growth and rewards the rich for their hard work! I swear, you libruals just don’t know how to think outside the box sometimes.
danah gaz
“What I don’t get about these Galtian motherfuckers is who the fuck do they think is going to buy all their Rearden metal after they’ve turned us into a nation of serfs?”
I’ve said similar many times.
My hypothesis is that their arrogance outweighs their intelligence. I base that on my understanding of human nature, and the work of David Dunning and Justin Kruger. =)
Cassidy
Well Cole for one. He’s made that clear. Don’t get in the way of that terrible towel.
robo
Any organization that would pay real money to Tim Tebow to throw a football has no bottom range limit to incompetence.
Let us weep for the lost innocence of playing at sport.
hildebrand
@Anoniminous: Bingo. Why won’t the players make a very visible stand in solidarity with the Refs? This would be over in a heartbeat if the players refused to play.
KG
@Anoniminous: I think we’re getting closer to that point. The NFLPA has sent an open letter to the league about the lock out and unsafe work conditions. I could see them threatening a walk out if things don’t change in another week or so. Maybe.
danah gaz
@Spaghetti Lee: lol =)
chopper
ah, clash rules everything around me.
The Other Chuck
Yet still you watched the game. The owners win when you do.
kim walker
@Violet: I love that idea, but I also like the traditional tactics (although I think folks will continue to watch games on the tube). Why not hurt the advertisers? Do any of these advertisements have a connection to union workers that can be exploited? Just my 2 cents, I don’t really like football, but I like workers, unions and pensions.
kindness
The Gazillionaire Daddies owning NFL teams don’t care about anybody but themselves. Sadly, I am not shocked.
eemom
you did what I see there
Butch
@robo: Did you catch TBogg’s description of him as the league’s most expensive novelty player?
chuckles
Might as well ask who’s going to buy all the locomotive engines. Everybody knows Rearden Metal was always going to be too good for us. But as Galt’s Gulch DEFINITIVELY PROVED, Galtians only need a target market of a couple hundred very very awesome consumers to make a society more awesome than the billions of us
working togethermooching off each other could even conceive of.DougJ
@Anoniminous:
I think they’re doing that a bit.
Spaghetti Lee
@Lit3Bolt:
You know, it’s funny. I watched Captain Planet when I was a kid, and fixated on the idea of the rich, powerful villain who was just evil for evil’s sake. The sort of person who would go out of his way to dump barrels of toxic waste into a river because he just enjoys killing nature. Well, that’s the reason that show gets made fun of today, if it’s remembered at all. Real people aren’t like that obviously. It’s more about conflicting goals and ideologies in the real world than some battle between Good and Evil. But then I started following politics! And not only do Captain Planet villains exist in the real world, but they’re mostly pretty well-respected by the public at-large. Quite a depressing conclusion, but I can’t come up with a reason for why these people act the way they do other than “I must control everything and destroy all resistance.” Or maybe they act that way by accident in their addictive quest to simply gain as much money as they can. Either way, fun times all around.
Rommie
@Violet: TV can mute the sound and keep the cameras off the crowd, if, um, they were nudged into doing so by the NFL. So that won’t work.
Either the fans have to stay home (not likely unless your favorite team is awful) or the players, coaches, and/or some maverick team owner make a public stink to get the regular refs back. Because it sure looks like the league itself is just fine with the status quo; burying the referee’s pensions is FAR more important than the integrity of the games.
The TV networks could turn on the league, but they run on C.R.E.A.M. so it’ll take people not *watching* the games to get them riled up. And that’ll take a long-term viewership drop to happen before the broadcasters get involved.
flukebucket
Somebody educate a guy here in a right to work state and who has no idea what a union is.
What is the difference in a strike and a lock out? I saw it mentioned earlier that the reason there is no solidarity is that there is no strike.
Huh?
Violet
@kim walker:
I agree with the advertiser idea. “Company X had problems with unsafe working conditions before (example) and now they’re supporting unsafe working conditions for NFL players. When will Company X stop hurting workers?” Etc.
Plus a standard boycott of advertisers. “Why is Company Y supporting the NFL players getting injured? Stop buying Company Y product until they insist proper refs be returned to the games.”
Spaghetti Lee
@hildebrand:
I believe (not certain) that their own union contract forbids them from doing so. They can and have been openly criticizing the replacements, but they can’t refuse to play.
Although… I don’t know what would happen if they did refuse to play. The NFL sues them for breach of contract? Leading to what, every active NFL player getting fired and replaced? Yeah, that’ll work.
Geoduck
The players’ contract specifically forbids joining in solidarity strikes, so they have to somewhat creative in terms of protest.
EDIT: A second too late. So.. a strike is when the workers walk off the job. A lock-out is done by the employer to keep the employees off the jobsite.
different-church-lady
@Violet: Yeah, except the “bullshit” chant was over one of the calls they managed to get right.
Seth
This is a classic bit of officiating as well.
http://bloggingthebeast.com/2012/09/24/replacement-official-comedy-from-the-eagles-cardinals-game-with-pictures/
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Don’t forget the switch to the gold standard, also, too.
(Beneath all the rhetoric, the gold standard is essentially about freezing the money supply to destroy class mobility).
DecidedFenceSitter
Listening to the local NPR show – and there was a good bit, if we could organize a million people to boycott, it wouldn’t make a considerable dent. If we could get two players from each NFL team (assuming the right two players) to boycott that would make an amazing difference. Of course, then you get into specific contracts for the players, which I have no actual information about.
different-church-lady
@Spaghetti Lee:
Personally I’m starting to feel like I’m ready to volunteer for it at the 20k level.
Culture of Truth
The NFL is a stellar product, highly anti-competitive, totally antithetical to the free market, quasi-socialist, and dictatorial, plus it has thrived with a strong union. These oligarchial fuckers do know how their bread gets buttered, so pay up and keep enjoying that free money.
Seriously, has any group in US business so jealoulsy guarded their image lately as the NFL? They piss it all away over this? I thought they were smarter.
Dennis SGMM
Agree with those who commented that, in this instance, it isn’t about the money. Union busting these days is rarely about the money. Seems to me that the reason our putative Galtian overlords devote so much effort to union busting is that they’re terrified that unionizing may once again catch on and every union serves not only as an example, but as a possible point about which organizing will crystallize. It is against the laws of heaven that the one percent get only, say, half of the nation’s wealth for doing fuck-all.
srv
If the players took a more appropriate percentage of team revenues, there would be plenty of money for the refs. You can only rape the owners so much Doug.
Violet
@Rommie:
I know they can, but that’s not how games are broadcast. If the networks start broadcasting game after game with zero shots of the crowd it’s going to look really odd. And people will talk about it. Not to mention it’s impossible in some cases, when the ball is thrown and the cameras have to have some crowd shown in the background. Maybe there is technology that can do it, I don’t know. But I’m all for making it much, much harder on the networks. Just the fact of them having to try to figure out challenging workarounds would be something.
patroclus
The scab referees are terrible, horrific, abominable and abysmal all rolled into one. I think the real refs deserve a defined benefit pension plan, a huge raise and need to get back on the job right bloody now!
KG
@different-church-lady: it was still something to behold, it was so loud and sustained that Al Michaels mentioned the “manure chant” and that there was no seven second delay on that.
Here’s the thing though, season tickets have already been purchased, as have most ads for the rest of the season, so the money is in the register whether people show up or not and whether they watch or not.
curiousleo
My understanding is that because of the terms of the CBA, the players can’t strike/not play in solidarity. But the NFLPA can file a “not safe working conditions” type thing to set the stage for something they are allowed to do in terms of not safe working conditions reason for not playing.
Culture of Truth
I don’t know if people care enough to boycott. The football is still well-played, it’s just the records that are open to question. If it weren’t for the injuries, dumbass officiating might make it *more* entertaining.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Spaghetti Lee:
So that pretty much kills off LBOs, no?
piratedan
@Anoniminous: from what I understand, it’s part of the CBA agreement that they cannot picket or demonstrate in sympathy. It’s almost as if the Owners had contemplated this and added the condition spitefully. Not that NFL ownership would ever look to impede and circumvent national labor laws.
The NFLPA has sent a letter to the Commissioner’s office expressing their concern about player safety with the Replacement refs, which is just about the only card they could play legally.
dr. bloor
@hildebrand: As others have mentioned, their contract prohibits it, which you can be sure was a must-have as far as the owners were concerned during their last CBA.
Moreover, given the life span of the average NFL career, missing a game check constitutes a measurable deduction from projected career earnings. As long as the likelihood of getting a game check for showing up outweighs the likelihood of suffering a significant injury specifically due to subpar officiating, you’re going to have a hard time selling a walkout to them.
Zifnab
@Seth:
/Head As-plode!
curiousleo
@Culture of Truth: Right. See Steve Young’s “NFL owners don’t care” almost a rant from last week. Demand for the game isn’t going to shrink enough to impact the owners.
Culture of Truth
Kevin James and Adam Sandler as replacement refs. Shit writes itself.
El Cid
Galtians shouldn’t concern themselves with ‘the future,’ because it doesn’t exist yet, and there’s no need to be altruistic with those moochers who are their own future selves.
They should concern themselves with grabbing everything they can right now, and let their own future selves deal with the consequences when it’s time.
We need to stop punishing the job creators for the needs of the chronologically pre-existent.
thefncrow
@Steve: That whole thing was made even crazier by the fact that there was essentially no basis whatsoever for the completed pass to be overturned. It was actually a case of the refs getting the call on the field right, then going into a replay challenge to study the video footage and walk away having overturned the correct call.
The fact that they got the spot wrong on the penalty was just the cherry on top of that shit sundae.
Chris
@danah gaz:
It’s funny. I’ve seen all these movies and TV shows where the bad guys are those megalomaniacal nutjobs who destroy themselves through their fatal flaw, arrogance and overconfidence (Bond villains, Emperor Palpatine, the Goa’uld…)
Always thought it was a lazy way for the writers to make the good guy win and wrap it up with an after school special (“don’t be overconfident, children! It’s something bad guys do and it makes them lose, m’kay!”) It’s impressive to see how often it actually holds true in real life.
Chris
@Spaghetti Lee:
Fuck. I swear I didn’t read this before making my own post @ 51.
Amir Khalid
@flukebucket:
A strike is when employees “down tools” — i.e., refuse to work — usually as a result of a union vote. (A strike not authorized by such a vote is a “wildcat” strike.) A lockout is when the employer refuses to let employees work.
Laertes
@Shawn in ShowMe:
This. They’re not trying to revive feudalism so that they can sell more Rearden metal. They’re selling Rearden metal so that they can revive feudalism.
The size of the pie is irrelevant. What counts is having the biggest share.
“I would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome.” – Julius Caesar
Spaghetti Lee
@Chris:
GMTA!
J R in WVa
@flukebucket:
In a lock out, the ownership refuses to negotiate with a union, and locks all the workers out of the facility, in this case a football stadium. Payroll stops too, of course.
In a strike, the union and the owner(s) negotiate until the union decided the owners are not really bargaining fairly, and at some point they take a strike vote. Later on in the process, they may threaten a walk-out, or even commence a strike. But negotiations usually continue even during the strike.
I have heard that occasional negotiations are taking place in the NFL Officiating Lockout, but that the owners are standing by their decision to end defined benefit pensions for their Referees. Which is the point at which negotiations broke down in the first place. Not about just the money, in other words.
About screwing people out of their pensions, that they planned their lives around. Fuck the owners and their scabs. Once someone is injured due to poor officiating, the soup in in the fire. This may have happened when that guy was injured in the Raiders game yesterday.
ETfix mispelled work, amazing that it worked this time!
Culture of Truth
I think the NFL caves if people start laughing at them. There’s no inherent reason people watch sports, and they do know this. That’s why they’re such jackasses about touchdown dances and such.
Or they never cave if people get used to blown calls or the replacement refs get better.
SatanicPanic
@hildebrand:
The league can find scabs for them too.
Violet
What happens if the players show up and then play really slowly. Like just walk down the field with the ball, while the people on the opposing team who are supposed to tackle them, just kind of mosey around and then gently nudge the guy with the ball, who slides to the ground. Lots of delay of game, shoelace tying, helmet-strap-fixing, etc. I know there are penalties for that, but maybe one team does it, then the other team does it, just to keep it even. Just stuff that annoys everyone, but doesn’t mean they aren’t actually playing the game.
lol
I believe the player’s association is laying the groundwork for their current contract to be declared invalided on grounds that it’s an unsafe work environment. At that point, they can credibly threaten to strike to get the refs back.
flukebucket
@Amir Khalid: Thank you.
Anton Sirius
@Rommie:
Based on how livid he seemed after the game last night, I’d say Belichick could end up being the refs’ Norma Rae.
Chris
@Laertes:
More TV-from-my-childhood wisdom – I remember catching reruns of Dukes of Hazzard and wondering why a massive crook like Boss Hogg was spending his entire life in podunkville instead of moving up to Atlanta or even Washington where the real power is.
In retrospect, it seems obvious – better to be the undisputed king of a hovel than to have to compete with others in a palace.
sagesource
@Spaghetti Lee: Everyone wants to make a mark on the world. If you are secure, you can do that by doing good. If you are insecure, good isn’t good enough. After all, it doesn’t demonstrate your power. People want it, they like it, they might even confuse things by helping you. But if you do evil, hurt people, it’s a pure expression of YOU. No one likes it if you shit in the soup, no one will want to take credit for it. And if you can force people to drink it and smile — that’s power that even the insecure understand. Orwell pointed this out long ago.
El Cid
@Chris: What’s even more ironic is that the GOP as a whole really does mirror comic book and movie super-villains.
Really — to just cite one super-villain plot, they fight to destroy human civilization and the entire planet’s ecological balance because it would keep lots of and/or lots more money going to the various fossil-fuel producing and using and based industries, and do so by attacking and denying the science of global thermal regulation (i.e., global warming).
That in itself is a fucking Saturday-morning cartoon-level or 1960s spy-serial or modern Bond movie plot.
Literally.
We literally (in the literal sense of “literally”) have our nations just-recently-and-still-potentially-ruling-party dedicating itself to the exact goals and functions of a comic book or movie super-menace.
In reality. Not in fiction. And if they get what they want, it really could have those effects: if really nothing got done and in fact more protections and regulations rolled back, the Earth could heat up so fast as to cause the oceans thermohalocline cycle to change or similar effects plunging Western Europe back into an Ice Age.
That is a fucking comic book / movie super-villain plot.
But no, it’s fucking real. And we can’t talk about it in these plain and simple terms.
And if that weren’t bad enough, that same super-villain party is staffed by men who don’t know where babies come from and how. Literally. Who believe completely imaginary nonsense anti-science myths about how ladyparts work and how babies get made. Literally. Above and beyond the patriarchal and woman-hating policies.
They’re comic-book / movie super-villains plotting to plunge Western Europe into a new Ice Age, and they don’t know where babies come from.
Chris
@Spaghetti Lee:
For serious!
Jamey
I wrote what’s blockquoted beneath in an earlier thread.
Feel free to check my math, in case I’m missing some obvious point about worker rights and CBAs. Best of my understanding, no class group can be compelled to bargain away rights guaranteed by law that govern safe working conditions, fair wages, harrassment-free work environments, EEOC, etc. Again, I may be wrong, but the NFL/NFLPA labor agreement can proscribe SOME activities, such as striking because the players don’t like the terms. But the NFL doesn’t have jurisdiction over the law… yet.
Good to see that the NFLPA is coming around… They walk out over unsafe working conditions and the NFL will have no choice but to come to terms with the refs. The NFL refs are smart in letting public opinion catch up to them; they have the ill-starred 1999 MLB umpires labor action as a template of what NOT to do.
flukebucket
@J R in WVa: Thank you too! It just amazes me that guys who have more money than they can count would nit pick shit like this. It is crazy.
Sly
You don’t get it because you assume this is about making money, when it is actually about the psychological necessity among solipsistic narcissists for (a) managerial control over others and (b) status competition with other solipsistic narcissists in which money is just a way to keep score.
Chris
@El Cid:
Good point. (The “literally” repetition literally made me LOL, in a quiet section of the library, also too. Good work, my man).
Maybe I should’ve said Kim Possible villains instead of Bond villains.
sagesource
@Chris: The Chinese have a proverb, “Better to be the beak of a chicken than the asshole of an ox.”
Anton Sirius
@Culture of Truth: Gimme twenty minutes and I can have a script banged out and Fedexed to Sandler’s agent. I’ll give you a ‘Story by’ credit.
J. Michael Neal
I think it’s very generous for the owners to add a comedy show to the proceedings at no additional cost to you, the consumer.
stratplayer
It may turn out that the owners did the real refs a huge favor by hiring these incompetent scabs. I don’t think they anticipated how badly their product would suffer and how intense the fan and media pressure on them to fix it ASAP would become.
trollhattan
St. Ronaldus certainly understood he couldn’t take on the UAW but he got his scalp courtesy of PATCO. We’re still cleaning up that mess, and I’m sure the Patriots(tm) of the US COC, Heritage, AEI, etc. toast his accomplishment yearly.
Perhaps the league’s assault on the ref’s union is a backdoor assault on the players union.
eemom
Someone needs to ask Romtron to opine on the situation.
Culture of Truth
To be fair, they also think you can open a window in airplane.
Rommie
@Culture of Truth:
I know, really Mr. Goodell? Really owners? The Referee’s Union is the ground you are willing to die on? I know it was all a calculation that the regular refs were disposable and replaceable – but we’ve hit the Never Admit A Mistake wall again I think. They’ve made the old referees look almost Super-Heroic now, the same guys that the fans would have thrown fruit at, given the ammo in stadiums.
kc
Stop watching. Boycott NFL sponsors. Tell them why.
Otherwise ….
Brachiator
Owners don’t want to pay players. Owners don’t want to pay refs. Owners want the best broadcast and cable news possible.
How is this news?
Spaghetti Lee
@eemom:
“I was at a wine-sampling with Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones yesterday, and they told me they actually don’t care about player safety at all! And I think he’s right! If we didn’t have to worry about keeping them safe, maybe poor people could actually amount to something useful!”
Don
I don’t know where the Packers management sits with this thing, but it might be different if more team organizations were community-owned as are the Packers. Diffusion of ownership and the innate egalitarianism that arises from that model could shed a different light on such conflicts in future. As it stands, the many egomaniacal (Jerry Jones, anyone?) NFL owners have been unmasked as considering their players as if they were cattle to be consumed.
MattR
A couple random points
1) You have to remember that at least 27% of the population is rooting for the owners to break the refs union.
2) There is an additional percentage of people who argue that regular refs make mistakes too without noticing the difference in the number of mistakes. Part of this is the regular refs fault since they are historically against the release of any info related to how they are graded or the mistakes that they made. But ProFootballTalk had a league source who said that the regular refs average single digit mistakes per game while the replacement refs averaged about 30 mistakes a game in week 1
3) IIRC there were at least 4 fumbles yesterday that were blown dead initially but then reversed on replay and given to the other team under the immediate recovery rule even though the whistle blew. At least 3 of those had a very good chance of being returned for a TD. (Going back to my point #2. The immediate recovery rule was created in response to Ed Hochuli blowing a call a couple years ago. Those who support the owners will bring this up to point out that both sides do it, but they ignore the fact that it might have happened a couple times a year with the regular refs, not 4 times in a week)
EDIT:
4) Oh, and from what I understand, the majority of the problems relate to the league trying to force the refs from a defined benefit pension to a 401K type defined contribution plan. The union even tried to sell out future refs as long as they could keep having a pension, but the league refused.
Geeno
@Spaghetti Lee: Actually that’s more like THX 1138.
Joey Maloney
@Anoniminous: Right. I understand that sympathy strikes are ruled out by the players union’s own contract. But what if (say) every team just took a knee for the first series of downs in all the games next Sunday?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Joey Maloney:, @Violet:
Some Galtian asshole on the other team would find a way to take advantage of it.
suzanne
@kc:
I have been told that this is absolutely impossible, and that a boycott without the players simply will not work. Still not sure why that’s the case. IMO, a drop in viewership and ticket sales is the ONLY thing that will work. (Interestingly, I was also told that a 1987 players’ strike was brought to a swift end when viewership took a nosedive, which only seemed to prove my point that viewers are the only ones with the real power here.) The owners have no incentive to change their product if it’s still selling.
I conclude that the reason it “won’t work” is because some people would sooner die than give up football, at least temporarily. But what do I know? Football is apparently different from every other consumer product in some ephemeral way.
MattR
@Joey Maloney: After the hits taken by Darrius Heyard Bey, Tony Romo and Matt Schaub among others, I think the NFLPA does have a chance at an unsafe workplace action like Jamey suggested above.
A PS for Jamey – Jonathan Vilma’s defamation lawsuit has not been dismissed yet. The decision for a temporary restraining order was put on hold when the NFL’s appeals board threw out the suspensions until the Commissioner clarified which authority he was using to justify the suspension. In fact, just today the NFL asked the judge in the case to block Vilma’s attorneys from seeking additional info from the league via discovery until the motion to dismiss is heard.
max
This is about crushing unions. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yeah.
What I don’t get about these Galtian motherfuckers is who the fuck do they think is going to buy all their Rearden metal after they’ve turned us into a nation of serfs?
Um, you? Seriously, I started to say something last night, but the thread was already hip deep – I don’t generally watch very early season NFL anymore to begin with, but the union busting gives me a strong disincentive on top of that. And while, in the old days, it didn’t matter to the ratings so much if any person watched a given broadcast, if you have a cable box, it does matter. Those boxes track everything you watch (but they don’t track when you mute things), down to the minute.
So the NFL gets reports of how many people are watching on a minute by minute basis. So it becomes very simple to do very little (not watch football) and have it register. So I ain’t gonna watch football via my cable TV box til they quit fuckin’ the refs, because I am tired of this dicking with pensions bullshit.
If you want the replacement refs to go away, join them on strike. You know what to to do. (If you have regular old broadcast TV, feel free to go on ahead watching.)
max
[‘And I like the Ravens! But you know… I can watch Law and Order reruns or the Britcom channels or baseball, or I can just leave the damn thing off. And I have.’]
ranchandsyrup
I asked my fave objectivist. He said that the goal is to have people feel so much pain that they start “trying” again.
I have no idea why my head didn’t explode.
Omnes Omnibus
@Joey Maloney: I think the filing the paperwork to support a walkout based on unsafe working conditions is the best option. Perfectly with the their rights under their contract. Hard to argue against.
MattR
@max:
How does this work? How do they know if the TV is on and someone is watching? I leave my cable box on all the time so my DVR will record what I want. Do they really think I am watching ESPN that whole time just because that was the last thing on before I went to sleep?
J. Michael Neal
@suzanne:
Actually, the 1987 strike ended when the owners hired replacement players and then a number of stars returned to the field in spite of the strike. Viewership may have tanked; I don’t know. But what ended the strike was a complete collapse by the union. There is zero evidence here that a fan boycott had any effect. Maybe it would have, but the owners got pretty much everything they wanted.
trollhattan
Attn DougJ: Pierce is lifting a piece of your portfolio–smacking around the Tory Git.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/andrew-sullivan-obama-second-term-13030006
suzanne
@J. Michael Neal: Hmmm. OK. Seems to be some difference of opinion here. I fully concede that I don’t know.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@suzanne:
But you left out the part about the person doing the telling pointed out that the viewership declined because the regular players were on strike- that is, it was an example of an effective strike, not necessarily an effective boycott. Fans didn’t pressure advertisers (as in, ‘Quit advertising with the NFL or we won’t buy your products!’), they just stopped watching the advertising that had been paid for, and that’s because the scab football was a trainwreck that the fans didn’t want to watch.
eric
Interesting that everyone misses the 800 pound gorilla — gambling. that is the one thing that should scare the NFL over all else. The “replacements” know that this is a very limited gig and the potential to affect games for money is there, particularly when things are so badly officiated that an “inadvertent whistle” might be one of many bad calls. It is not that a game has to be thrown, but only the point spread affecting. that is the thing that would scare me were I the owners.
Another Halocene Human
@Violet: I approve this message. More in your face angry fan response. Embarrass the motherfuckers and fuck their shit up.
Geeno
Unfortunately for the boycott idea, the vast majority of tickets for the season are purchased by mid-August. Between season ticket holders who paid in April, and early buyers when game tickets went on sale in July. And that’s for the Bills who have sucked for the last decade – a premier team probably sold out completely by early August. I was a 20-year season ticket holder in Buffalo, and you’d have had a hard sale trying to tell me to just burn the $1500 I already spent for my 2 upper deck seats. The only people being hurt by an attendance boycott are the parking companies/attendants and the concession companies/attendants. Well, the guys who collect returnable bottles and cans from the parking lot would take a hit, too.
As for TV – well the owners already have that money from the network contracts in their pockets. It’s the networks that might stand to lose money on the ad revenue they lose.
The owners bank their money ASAP. The product has been sold already. There’s nothing to boycott monetarily.
I think amping up the ridicule is the best that can be done. Tarnish their product for the future. it will take a while before that sinks in to them, but it will if the jeers and general disdain become common enough. I think the announcers’ constant state of disgust is helpful to this.
Omnes Omnibus
@eric: I don’t gamble on sports, so it never even occurred to me. It is the kind of thing that puts horse’s heads in people’s beds though.
raven
How many of these dumb threads are there going to be?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@J. Michael Neal:
No, they didn’t, because the NFLPA decertified, which led to the next agreement in which the players got the free agency for which they were pushing. Long-term win for the union.
BTW: Roughly 15% of the players crossed the picket line. Not a miniscule number, but not enough to make the NFL watchable during the strike.
Uncle Cosmo
@Rommie:
CW said all NFL fans hate the “zeebs” &/or think they’re incompetent, so why should they notice if you handed the whistles & stripes to a slightly more incompetent crowd?
Instead the fans have been treated to an object lesson of what a travesty the game becomes when you go from one or two blown calls per game to one or two blown calls on every series–underscored by long stoppages of play due to the Refplacements, bless their scabby hearts, actually wanting to get the calls right (they are after all drawn from officiating crews in lesser leagues) & taking their sweet time in an (not often successful) effort to do so.
@kc: No need to stop watching–just boycott the sponsors & tell them why. Advertising is less than worthless if no one buys what it’s trying to sell. Someone needs to compile for each team a list of sponsors of the broadcasts & publish it for the public to do its part.
ETA: Another way to put pressure on the teams is to boycott those businesses that have paid for the privilege of calling themselves the “official [insert unrelated business activity here] of the [insert NFL franchise here]” until & unless they issue a public appeal to the franchise to do everything in its power to restore the regular officiating crews ASAP.
raven
The NFL doesn’t give a rats ass about ticket sales. The new stadiums are smaller so they can sell out and be on the tube.
suzanne
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): If what you’re saying is true, the fans weren’t pressuring the advertisers, they were pressuring the NFL itself. The NFL was offering a crappy product, and the fans stopped consuming it. That’s pressure.
(I also think the first portion of my sentence, the “a 1987 players’ strike was brought to a swift end” part, acknowledged that the players were on strike. Apologies if I misrepresented your position.)
Anyway, if what you’re saying is true, the NFL was compelled to end the strike because the fans had no interest in watching crappy football. Ergo, if the fans exhibit similarly little interest in watching crappy football because of crappy refereeing, I contend that once again, the owners will be more likely to re-hire the good refs, just as they became persuaded to re-hire the good players. If, however, what J Michael Neal is saying is true, then perhaps I’m wrong.
MattR
@suzanne: It was so long ago that I think people remembers the lack of enthusiasm for the replacement games and automatically assumes that was the reason the strike was resolved. They forget that after some players crossed the line, the union as a whole came back with its tail tucked between its legs having received no concessions from the league.
@eric: This could be a huge deal, but at the same time I don’t think the owners care too much about a ref potentially flipping point spread bets as long as the actual result is not affected. I am sure it will not make them happy, but I am not sure it is enough to create a change of heart regarding the refs. OTOH, it is the sportsbooks and casinos that have the most to lose when it comes to games being influenced (either intentionally or not). If anything, I see them exerting whatever pressure they can on the NFL to get things resovled (I am not sure how much leverage the casinos really have, but I am guessing that there are some agreements between the two that could come into play. Not really sure what, but there could be certain things that the casinos have held off on at the request of the league). Through two weeks, Vegas oddsmakers said the replacement refs gave the home team an extra half point advnatage but they were nto sure if they were going to incorporate that into the spread they publish or if they think the refs will adjust so that it returns to the typical three point advantage to playing at home.
raven
Ergo! There’s no ERGO in football!
1badbaba3
@raven: As many as it takes to make the world safe for democracy.
Other than that I’m staying out of it. Don’t want to get yelled at by Cole & company again.
MattR
Reposted to avoid moderation since I forgot about a certain bad word. Hopefully this works better.
@suzanne: It was so long ago that I think people remembers the lack of enthusiasm for the replacement games and automatically assumes that was the reason the strike was resolved. They forget that after some players crossed the line, the union as a whole came back with its tail tucked between its legs having received no concessions from the league.
@eric: This could be a huge deal, but at the same time I don’t think the owners care too much about a ref potentially flipping point spread bets as long as the actual result is not affected. I am sure it will not make them happy, but I am not sure it is enough to create a change of heart regarding the refs. OTOH, it is the cas1n0s that have the most to lose when it comes to games being influenced (either intentionally or not). If anything, I see them exerting whatever pressure they can on the NFL to get things resovled (I am not sure how much leverage Vegas really has, but I am guessing that there are some agreements between the two that could come into play. Not really sure what, but there could be certain things that the cas1n0s have held off on at the request of the league). Through two weeks, Vegas oddsmakers said the replacement refs gave the home team an extra half point advnatage but they were nto sure if they were going to incorporate that into the spread they publish or if they think the refs will adjust so that it returns to the typical three point advantage to playing at home.
1badbaba3
@raven: As many as it takes to make the world safe for democracy.
Other than that I’m staying out of it. Don’t want to get yelled at by Cole & company again.
Gindy53
@hildebrand: They won’t get paid so they won’t strike for the refs. As usual, it all boils down to money. That is until one of the players gets seriously injured or killed due to a blown call or lack of control of the game.
Gindy53
@hildebrand: They won’t get paid so they won’t strike for the refs. As usual, it all boils down to money. That is until one of the players gets seriously injured or killed due to a blown call or lack of control of the game.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Don: As a shareholder in the Packers (1 share, bought it in February) – I certainly hope the management of GB does something.
Gindy53
@hildebrand: They won’t get paid so they won’t strike for the refs. As usual, it all boils down to money. That is until one of the players gets seriously injured or killed due to a blown call or lack of control of the game.
Geeno
Re: the ’87 strike. For season-seats the price was less than a quarter what it is now. You could’ve talked me into wasting $300 back then. Also, because the scab teams were thrown together at the last minute, it was like watching a bad team at practice.
Here, we still have the top-of-the-line athletes that you paid to see.
It’s a much different proposition.
MattR
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): The league decertified in 1989 because of the impotency of the 1987 strike (and their losses in court after the strike ended)
1badbaba3
@raven: As many as it takes to make the world safe for democracy.
Other than that I’m staying out of it. I don’t need Cole & Company raging on like they were last night. Yikes.
Alphonse de la Guerre Victorieuse Pour La Liberte et La France
Two weeks of twitter-based boycott of Coors, Bud and Miller would bring back the real refs.
Mnemosyne
@Geeno:
Sort of — TV advertising is sold on the basis that the advertiser will receive X amount of eyeballs in return for the amount of money they spend. If those eyeballs don’t materialize, the network has to “make good” on their promises to the advertisers by giving them free ads elsewhere in the schedule. IIRC, there’s usually a clause in the contract that if the programming provider (aka the NFL) promises X eyeballs to the network and that doesn’t happen, the network can get some of that money back from the NFL to help with the cost of the make-good ads.
(Note: IANAL, this is just what I remember from my various classes for my screenwriting MFA.)
arguingwithsignposts
@raven:
And Texas Stadium, or whatever they call Jerry Jones’ substitute p3nis, is not smaller.
JoyfulA
@piratedan: Could the players demand increased disability and life insurance policies? Some of them will be too disabled to play football by the end of the season, the way things are going.
J. Michael Neal
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Maybe, but it became clear that that 15% was going to turn into 25% and then 50% and then everybody. No amount of pointing to what happened after the next labor stoppage changes the fact that the NFLPA absolutely got its ass kicked in 1987. More specific to suzanne’s question, the reason the strike ended really had nothing to do with declining TV viewership and everything to do with the owners getting everything they wanted in the new CBA. Even if I thought you were correct with regards to it being a long term win, it is irrelevant to this particular question.
MattR
If anyone is interested (or still paying attention), here is Charles Pierce’s take on the situation (I have not read it yet)
Greyjoy
I have a different interpretation of what happens when the Galtian overlords have all the money and no market for Rearden metal: The 99% stops using money and goes back to barter, creating a market for themselves which doesn’t depend on Galtian middlemen to profit. Maybe that’s the black market, maybe it’s just turning the 1% into Enron and making their paper worthless.
It infuriates me that the idea is to make everyone else start “trying” again, considering every time people “try”, others swoop in and find a way to negate any progress. Oh, the minimum wage is meant to provide a base for a standard of living? Let’s just quit raising it. Oh, college education helps people get ahead? Let’s raise tuition. They’re getting loans to pay for it? Let’s jack up the interest. Now people can’t afford college again and enrollment is falling? Let’s make every bullshit job require a degree. (While paying minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up more than two bucks in 20 years.) It’s endless. These people look at the 99% as nothing more than a money-making ant farm. Time to cut them out of the loop. After all, most of their money’s in investments anyway. We all saw what happened when it became so many Post-it notes during the mortgage crisis.
When people can’t afford to buy into the system anymore, they’ll find other ways to accomplish their goals, be it growing food to sell or fixing cars or building houses. (I’m not suggesting that will be easy or fun.) The 1% don’t need to be a part of that. In fact I’d love to see them fucking fix a car. They think they’re Dagny Taggart but in reality they’re James Taggart–no real skills and utterly dependent on the people who can actually DO things.
suzanne
@Mnemosyne: Ironically, I used to work in advertising, and had a number of pro teams (no NFL) on my client roster. And that’s EXACTLY how it worked (within a margin of error). If the game viewership was dramatically less than expected, the programming providers had to make it up to the advertisers. That almost never happened, because the “on paper” estimate of viewership was typically low on purpose, and if they ever did have to make good, it was usually only one :30 or :60 spot. But yes, that’s how the advertising worked. And it’s amazing how precise the viewership counts would be. I have no idea how they (whoever “they” are) actually go about tracking it, but they can definitely tell how many people are watching, and then those viewers tune in and out.
Kathleen
@Dennis SGMM: I heard NPR’s sports reporter (don’t recall his name) opine that the owners were sending the players a warning about how “implacable” they could be in labor negotiations. He agreed with (I believe it was) DougJ that considering how much owners make, the money they would have to pay to resolve the issue is insignificant compared with what the billions they rake in. His opinion was that owners felt no pressure yet because the TV ratings were still high. Also, too, the only concrete measurement so far of the impact of the replacements is that the average game time has increased about 15 minutes. I am not an All Things Considered fan but I enjoyed this discussion.
Robert Green
this is not complicated, as steve young pointed out two weeks ago: if we continue to watch it as is, with the vicious injuries and concussions and so on, the owners will do what they do. only by actually boycotting as viewers and fans can we expect anything to change.
there was a great bit this weekend on robot chicken where two kids were complaining about how horrible everything was environmentally, and captain america appeared on the scene. he told them to turn the thermostat down to 68 degrees, but they said “no way, our feet get cold…” it went on that way until in the end the kids say “fuck it, things may suck but at least we don’t have to make any sacrifices” as captain america rolls his eyes and gives up.
stop watching the fucking game doug. just stop. it’s not acceptable any more.
JoeShabadoo
They don’t care about how good the game is.
They damn well know most everyone is going to keep watching so what do they lose? You guys bitch but your ass is still on that chair come game day and the owners know it.
The refs (and the game) needs either fans to tune out or players to back them up because bad refs are DANGEROUS for the players.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@MattR:
My favorite part.