Collective Bargaining Agreement (No...Not Bill 5)

While working on an assignment for business law, I began to compare the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in the National Football League (NFL) to our relationship as students to our teachers and administrators. For those of you who may not know, the CBA is the agreement that the player’s union signs with owners of the NFL to ensure that they will be treated fairly. The CBA is currently being re-negotiated and there are several divisive issues between the two sides and because the two sides disagree on so many issues, there is the possibility that a CBA that satisfies both sides cannot be crafted. The absence of a CBA would then prevent the next NFL season from taking place. The NFL generates more revenue than other sports league in the world, so the idea of losing an entire year of profits for the players and owners has become an issue of importance in the sports world. Each year, the NFL earns approximately 8.5 billion dollars from advertising, ticket sales, and TV networks.

For the sake of this comparison, we will consider the students at Chagrin Falls High School to be the player’s union and we will consider the teachers and administrators to be the owners in the NFL. The major issue in the NFL is how to divide the profits between the players and the owners. Of course, like all human beings, both sides feel they deserve more than the majority of the revenue. The money involved in the NFL is like the distribution of grades in high school. Students always want to get an A and they feel they deserve an A in most cases. Teachers, however, cannot give A’s out to every single student. Instead, teachers must keep some of the A’s to themselves because otherwise an A would not mean nearly as much if everyone gets one. Another issue with the NFL is that the owners want the players to play an 18 game season (which would be 2 more games than the current 16 game season). This is similar to how Ted Strickland wanted to make the students go to school for 20 more days each year. I am actually in favor of this movement from the NFL and from the state of Ohio because first, I want to see more football, and second, I think students need to go to school more and become more educated. Granted, it is easier for me to say this because I will not be in school after this June. The third major issue with the NFL CBA is the rookie salary cap, which would limit how much money a rookie can make when he first comes into the league. Currently, rookies are coming in to the league and signing contracts worth five or ten times as much as the veteran players and the rookies have not yet proven themselves at the professional level. In almost all other jobs, salary increases with performance and experience. The comparison to a rookie salary cap is a cap on the amount of homework we are given each night. As a rookie, or a seventh grader, we would have a cap of say, 2 hours of homework each night. Then as we move up grades, that cap increases and eventually as seniors, we have no cap on the amount of homework we can be given. I have seen some articles that present evidence that students become too worn out with school if they are given to much homework at an early age. The last thing we want to do as a society is burn out our children before they get to college or graduate school. However, it is a very difficult situation because we also want to make sure that children are being thoroughly educated from a young age. What are your thoughts on this issue? Or any of the other topics presented? I hope you learned a little bit about the CBA in the NFL that occupies so much time on ESPN and many other sports channels.

Roger Goodell (Commisioner of NFL)         DeMaurice Smith (Head of Player's Union)