So in between work, writing up player notes and watching the Auburn/Bama game for the 50th time (that’ll teach me to pick a game with no less than five pro prospects) I caught this piece over at Pro Football Talk.

Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross says that with the (alleged) costs of doing NFL business rising, the owners cannot give the players what they’ve had until this point - what Ross claims is 50% of the gross revenues.

I put the gross in italics for a reason and I’ll get to it in a minute. Here’s a quote from Ross, provided by Florio’s article via Omar Kelley of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

“Anybody who has been in business [knows] you don’t pay players the percentage of the gross,” Ross said.  “The expenses have just grown so great as compared to the revenues, there’s no real reasonable return to anybody’s bottom line.”

I’m not even sure where to start there, so many things are wrong in that one paragraph. But let’s start with what is (probably) right.

Costs have risen.

Everything else is spin.

Here’s how I feel in simplest terms.

Listen, I’m going to explain why the “Anybody who has been in business [knows] you don’t pay players the percentage of the gross” is crap but first I want to explain why the word gross here is inaccurate.

I know we all want to see this through our own prism - we say nobody reading this will go to their bosses and say ‘open the books’ if their paycheck got cut and get anything but a pink slip or giggles.

The players are not us. The owners are not your boss. Get over that notion right now. If you can’t, come back later this week and I’ll have draft analysis up.

The only industry comparable to the NFL in terms of money and how people get paid is the entertainment industry.

I spent 20 years working in and around that industry as a production worker bee and aspiring writer.  It’s one of the only industries that cuts its’ stars a direct piece of the profits, much less gross profits.

And it fights like hell to keep from paying those points. Like the owners are now.

See, here’s the thing. As Florio points out, it’s clear that the owners are mostly tired of cutting the players into their piece of the pie. And even the players have admitted the last deal was a sweetheart one for them.

So there’s room to move on both sides and both sides seem to know that the way things are must change to some extent.

But here’s the problem - like the studios, it’s clear you can’t trust them without seeing the books.

Remember when I put gross in italics? I did that because right off the bat, Ross is playing with words. The owners take a billion dollars of the top of the pile before anyone else gets paid.

In the entertainment industry, the rest of that money gets called ‘net profit’ - and by the way that used to be called ‘monkey points’. Because only a monkey would think they were ever going to see it.

So right off the top, Ross is telling us falsehoods. Gross is total - and taking a billion off the top mean you’re not getting total.

It’s a small thing in some ways, until you think about a billion dollars and realize that no, a billion dollars is never a small thing.

Here’s the heart of the player’s issue and - as I have said multiple times in multiple formats now - mine:  how can I trust you when you continually tell me things that are wrong and treat me like a moron?

I’m sorry but I don’t think it takes a MBA to see that what Ross is saying is disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst.

What’s worse is, he doesn’t NEED to spin to make his point. He doesn’t NEED to twist words to say they need to re-work the agreement. Everyone knows there should be some give.

All this does is add fuel to the fire that the owners aren’t hurting as much as they say. That they’re not going broke, but instead greedy.

Especially after the Doty ruling on TV contracts and reports that the 70% revenue share supposedly going to the players is a tad high - I mean how do you take a group’s word for it when they’ve repeatedly shown that word to be shaky at best?

Now, let’s give Ross the benefit of the doubt and instead of calling him a liar, I assume he misspoke.

Who do you pay to see? Tom Brady or Robert Kraft? Do you tune in on Sunday to watch Adrian Peterson or Ziggy Wilf?

Or to put it another way: do you pay good money to see Brad Pitt in a Martin Scorcese flick written by Brian Helgeland or do you pay to see a Warner Bros movie?

We pay to watch the players. Sure, we pay to watch the teams as well but if good players weren’t there, we wouldn’t pay what we are now any more than we’d pay top prices to see an independent film with people you’ve never heard of.

And yes, it’s not a perfect analogy - plenty of us see indie films and enjoy them. Those films (usually) don’t make the money of a star driven blockbuster either.

Either way - it’s ludicrous to say ‘Anybody who has been in business [knows] you don’t pay players the percentage of the gross.’ In fact, I’d go so far as to say it should worry Dolphin fans as it strikes me that someone who makes such a sweepingly incorrect statement is likely to screw his team up.

The statement should be:  ‘anybody who has been in the NFL business knows you wouldn’t HAVE a business without the players’. That you make millions on jersey’s with THEIR names on them. That you make millions selling ads based on the game THEY play. That you sell tickets to games in stadiums plastered with THEIR faces.

Listen, the former union isn’t blameless here. They’ve made their fair share of shaky statements.

However, at it’s heart the NFLPA argument is and has been pretty straightforward and at this point I can’t fault them for standing firm and demanding transparency.

The players aren’t stupid. The public isn’t stupid.

The owners keep saying things that make me think that either THEY are or they think the above two groups are.

Neither of those things makes me confident this will get done anytime soon.

So, in summary:

Owners. Stop talking out of both sides of your mouths. (And keep Jerry Jones and Jerry Richardson away from the negotiating, please.) Open your books because you’ve smoked any trust capital you had with both the players and public long ago.

To both sides - enough already. Spend less time in the press and more time at the table.

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