King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The NFL avoids a labor disaster, proving that you don't get to be the NFL by acting like the NHL or MLB.

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March 9, 2006 | I don't know about you but I've been kind of half watching the clock-stopping NFL labor negotiations for the past week, figuring I'd pay attention when they worked it out.

I knew they'd work it out because -- and this is a core belief of mine, a fundamental piece of knowledge akin to understanding that if I drop something heavy it will fall down, not up -- nobody is as stupid as NHL owners.

For a week or so there, the NFL owners and players association were doing a pretty good impersonation of their hockey counterparts, but after pushing back deadlines a half-dozen times they finally reached agreement Wednesday on a six-year extension to the labor contract, through 2011.

What's that? Oh, sorry to confuse you. Hockey is an exciting game played on a sheet of ice. You can catch NHL games on the Outdoor Life Network whenever you get tired of watching poker on the big sports nets.

Some of you younger kids won't remember this, but the NHL used to be a pretty big league in the United States. Two, three, seven years ago, something like that -- who can remember? -- the league's owners thought it would be a good idea to shut down the league for a whole year to win some concessions from the players union.

They won those concessions, I'm told by Canadian friends. Now hockey's back, it's better than ever after some rule changes, and it regularly gets trounced in the ratings by informercials for nose-hair clippers.

Which, incidentally, have also improved lately.

Of course, hockey was struggling before its labor armageddon, thanks to years of mismanagement. In that way it was the direct opposite of the NFL, which has spent the last decade and a half solidifying its position as the superpower of American sports while, not coincidentally, enjoying labor peace.

There's pretty clearly something about the game of American football that speaks to the American psyche and all that, but there's nothing preordained about the NFL being the biggest sports league.

It was around for five decades before it became the biggest, and there's nothing to say that if things had gone a little differently at midcentury, baseball wouldn't have stayed on top, or basketball might have become the juggernaut. Those sports speak to us too.

The reason the NFL won the battle is because it was the best-run business. There were a lot of things the NFL did right, such as arriving at an early understanding of the power of television, but the key to its success was revenue sharing.

Next page: Wealthier owners wanted to follow the baseball model. Good idea, guys!