3 and Out- Lessons From The Last Work Stoppages in Each League:

This article was supposed to come out within hours of the expiration of the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement. Originally the CBA was set to expire at 12:00 tonight. But the NFL and the NFLPA agreed to extend the deadline 24 hours. Since it was assumed they were months away from a deal, some people of have seen this as an encouraging sign. To me, it’s a rather underhanded tactic: they’re pushing it to the weekend, when people don’t listen to talk radio or read newspapers. They’re hoping they can lessen the blow of the first NFL work stoppage in 24 years by doing it when people are working on their cars and going to the movies. Because make no mistake, 28 hours from now, the NFL owners will lock out the players.

I know I’ve been promising a more in-depth piece on the issues surrounding the lockout. And that’s coming, I promise. Starting Sunday I’ll attack some of these issues one by one. I also don’t want this blog to be about nothing but the labor situation, so I’ll still do some fun stuff as well. But today, I wanted to talk about the last major work stoppage in the other 3 leagues: the NHL, NBA, and Major League Baseball. As I thought about each one of them today, I thought about the fallout each league suffered, and how the NFL owners and players need to be careful to avoid a similar outcome from all of them. Because each league was severely damaged by their stoppages in a unique way, and the NFL cannot afford a repeat of any of them.

You can make the case the 2004-2005 lockout helped the NHL in the long-run. Missing a season is still a huge blow to your league. And a huge insult to your fans.

The One That Killed An Entire Season:

NHL Lockout, September 2004-July 2005

This one is admittedly the one where you can argue the lockout was good for the long-term future of the league. When hockey finally did come back, the fans more or less returned in full. They changed some rules to make the game more exciting to the casual fan, and a few new stars have taken hold of the game, with an electrifying brand of hockey.

But still, they missed an entire season.

From June of 2004 until October of 2005, almost a year and a half, there was no pro hockey in North America. It just fell off the map for an entire year. Hockey fans are usually die-hards, so they didn’t desert the sport, but ESPN dropped their package, and the NHL was left with the Outdoor Life Network (now Versus) showing basically everything until the last few games of the Stanley Cup Finals. If you weren’t looking for it, the next few NHL seasons would have been invisible to you on television.

The NFL is not in danger of losing TV rights, and they already have a hard cap in place (up until last year) but they very well could miss an entire season. And if that happens, all bets are off. Even if they only get a deal done in 10 for a game season next year, the damage will likely be minimal because people will still have 3 or 4 months of football. They can do some damage control, and go right back to injecting the methadone that is the NFL right until the collective veins of the American people. But if they miss an entire season, people are going to start to chaff, no matter what the issues in question are. I think people are approaching this with a fairly level head, until games start getting missed. Then the frustration of these two groups not getting a deal done, when they’ve known there would be an issue for years, will really start to stick in the fans’ craw.

Some fans came back angry in 1995. Even more stayed away.






The One That Really Pissed The Fans Off

MLBPA Strike, August 1994-March 1995

Maybe it’s because baseball is the National Pastime, and people have always pretended that when they were kids it was just a game and not a business (unless they were kids literally the month baseball was invented in the 1850’s, this isn’t true), but this strike specifically angered fans much more than any other sports work stoppage in history. The players walked out to avoid a salary cap, and ultimately ended up winning. The 1994 playoffs were cancelled. Baseball was basically destroyed in Montreal (the best team in baseball in 1994), Toronto (2 time defending champions), Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Minnesota. When baseball resumed in 1995, some fans stayed away, and others showed up to heckle players and throw things on the field. Outside of Cal Ripken in Baltimore, baseball in 1995 was basically one big hate-fest. There are people who still have not gotten back into baseball because of what happened in 1994. It wasn’t until the amazing season of 1998 that most fans got back on board with baseball.

It can’t be stressed enough how different a strike and a lockout are. Still, the NFL had a rabid fanbase and had realistically been our “National Game; for 30 to 40 years. So, people from 20-50 will likely feel just as scorned by a prolonged NFL work stoppage as people felt by baseball. Some teams, Jacksonville, Buffalo, San Diego and Arizona to name a few, might be permanently damaged. The NFL can’t totally control how the fans react to this current situation, but they need to realize the possibility exists. If fans are chanting about greed and throwing batteries when the NFL comes back, it’s indicative that they have not done a great job of public relations. Because for every fan screaming at the stadium, there’s probably going to be 5 or 10 more at home, not even watching the game, because they feel so burned. This time though, they won’t be screaming at players about greed, they’ll be screaming at owners about Personal Seat Licenses, 50 dollar parking fees, games on Thursday nights on premium channels, and treating the fans like cash registers.

This shot was the end of the NBA's run of the 1990's. A lockout followed immediately after. An offensive foul should have been called for a push-off.







The One That’s Eerily Similar

NBA Lockout, 1998-1999

In June of 1998, the NBA was riding high. Michael Jordan had just won his 6^th title in 8 years, in an epic series against Utah. The league was still filled with the huge stars of the 1990’s: Barkley, Shaq, Ewing, Malone, Stockton, Pippen, Rodman, Mourning, Reggie Miller, Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson. Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan were young players on good teams. The NBA had been the dominant pro sports league since the end of the wildly successful Magic-Bird era of the 1980’s, right through the MJ era. Even with Jordan leaving the stage, the NBA still had reason to be optimistic about the future. Jordan had retired once before and the league still maintained an incredible level of popularity during his year and a half hiatus.

For the purposes of this piece, the reason for the lockout doesn’t really matter. But the gist is that the owners wanted a harder cap, and won in limiting player’s salaries (the “Max” deals guys get today). The NBAPA succeeded in getting some of those weird exceptions (like the Larry Bird Rule and the Mid-Level Exception) worked into the deal. It was seen as a win for the owners.

But when they came back for a 50 game season in January of 1999, the average fan’s outlook was suddenly different. Whereas before middle-aged white men made up the NBA’s base, suddenly they were deserting the game. Suddenly those stars from the 1990’s were being replaced by Allen Iverson, Lattrell Sprewell, Rasheed Wallace, and a lot of corn rows and tattoos. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t really about that. The NBA had always had elements of young black culture that 50 year old white men didn’t like, but it never seemed to hurt their enjoyment of the sport. Michael Jordan, with the shaved head, the earring, and the baggy shorts was every bit the trendsetter these guys were, but now it was rubbing people the wrong way. Throughout the next 10 years, a huge bit of “middle America” stopped watching the NBA. Although most wouldn’t trace it back to the 1998-1999 lockout, the fact is people lost the opportunity to get caught up in the excitement of the game, followed the labor stuff, and couldn’t see past the “thuggery” when the league came back.

This is where the NFL needs to be most careful. If this thing goes on too long, and players start making comments, it’s going to irritate people who watch Jay Leno. NFL players haven’t exactly been a model of civic behavior the last few years, and your Dad may start wondering why in the hell he’s watching these guys. That’s when you start hearing the excuses about the “purity of the college game” or how it’s just not as exciting as it used to be. Whether consciously or not, work stoppages make people look for an excuse not to care anymore. The NFL has been on a run comparable to the NBA in the 1990’s and it’s hard to imagine its popularity diminishing anytime soon. But give middle-ages fans enough time, and they’ll start to conjure up reasons why they don’t care as much anymore. The lockout may not be directly the reason for people to leave the flock, but it could be the spark that starts it.