Meh..you'd still be on the leagues minimum wage, and be able to call yourself an 'NFL Player'. Hell, I'd do it.

I hope they are just designed to distract from the labour talks, and none will actually be enacted.

You know, other than that fuckbag who calls himself the owner of the .

Are you the kind of person who loves hearing the bug zapper?

Who likes it when the highway paves over a few neighborhoods? Who secretly wants the tank to flatten the kid with the flower?

Then you're going to love the NFL owners in this mess.

It's hard to find anybody to like in this coming distraction known as the NFL lockout. But look closely. Yes, some of the players are millionaires. But half of the owners are billionaires.

Their estimated combined net worth is well over $40 billion, which is more than the GNP of 150 nations. Paul Allen, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, has a 414-foot yacht called "The Octopus" with two helicopters, two submarines, a swimming pool, a music studio and a basketball court. He also has two backup emergency yachts.

You're really worried about his wallet?

Yes, many of the players are diamond-coated knuckleheads. But have you ever met Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder? He's worth $1.1 billion and yet, two years ago, the Redskins sued a 73-year-old grandmother for not keeping up on her season-ticket package payments.

This man also got caught buying stale peanuts from a defunct airline and reselling them at games.

For the owners to lock out the players at this time in American history is unconscionable. You don't like the players? Fine. There are still nearly 9 percent of Americans out of work. Think of the people who've lost their homes, lost their cars and can barely pay the rent. Watching an NFL game on a Sunday -- and getting ready for it all week -- is sometimes literally the only thing keeping them going.

Do you realize what having no NFL season would do to the economy? According to the NFLPA, it's estimated it would cost each NFL city $160 million and 3,000 jobs. That's 93,000 jobs nationwide. For what? Another Aspen chalet?

Question: In 10 years, do you think you're going to find New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft wandering the streets because of the 200-plus concussions he didn't know he had from his time in the NFL? You figure Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford will end up with ringing in the ears and depression the way former Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson did? Within the past year alone, two former players killed themselves.

You recall any NFL owners killing themselves lately?

The players aren't asking for more money. They deserve what they get, and they get it for an average of only three years. The Bidwills have owned the Cardinals for 79 years. The Rooneys have owned the Steelers for 78 years. Nine NFL owners inherited their teams. There's no easier path to permanent hot-and-cold running jets than your dad handing you an NFL team.

On the other hand, nobody hands NFL players anything but a chinstrap. With what we know about the dangers to brains now, would you exchange jobs with an NFL player?

This isn't baseball. These guys go to a job every day in which safety is Job 1,379.

The people asking for more money are the owners. They want $1 billion more out of the deal they have now.

They say they're losing money. But if you were losing money and were asking for $1 billion back, wouldn't you slap some proof down on the table? The owners are more secretive with their books than KFC is with its recipe.

Take our word for it and just fork over the billion. Oh, and play two more games for free. Thanks.

In this, the greediest and most shameful era in American business history, the NFL owners would steal the cake. No set of sports owners in U.S. history has known this kind of popularity, love or cash. If there is a lockout, the day the 2012 season starts, every fan ought to pelt the owners' luxury boxes with pennies.

Jeffrey Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, owns an 18-bedroom estate with a three-hole golf course, two-lane bowling alley, two-story recreation center and indoor tennis court. He's really going to lock players out? For what, his own ski hill?

Stan Kroenke, owner of the St. Louis Rams, owns four homes, four ranches and three vineyards. He once ordered his employees to destroy $3 million in wine because he didn't think it was up to his standards. His wife is a Wal-Mart heiress.

Are you really fretting about his future?

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the other day that the owners need this money to build new stadiums. And who profits from new stadiums? The owners. A new stadium doesn't make the team any better. The seat under your butt isn't any bigger. But a new stadium, usually built with vats of your tax dollars, funnels millions more per game into an owner's pocket via luxury boxes, concessions and advertising. That's money that isn't shared 32 ways. What Goodell is saying is, "We need that billion so my owners can buy new Bentleys. Theirs are dusty."

Locking out the players now would be unjust, unfair and as indefensible as Al Davis' wardrobe. There is so much to go around, it's obscene. A billion back? These guys have that in cash.

Malcolm Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, once bought a $14 million Palm Beach mansion and never moved into it. He later sold it for $24 million.

Bud Adams, owner of the Tennessee Titans, has 10,000 head of cattle.

Jennifer Lopez, part owner of the Miami Dolphins, has offered to auction off her twins' clothes because they're not allowed to "repeat" outfits.

When's the telethon?

Fixed, they're all fuckbags. 'Cept the Packers owners. :p They don't even get dividends

THE PEOPLE VS. DANIEL SNYDER
Before any of our more intellectual readers here run away screaming for fear that this case brought against the Play-Doh-brained owner of the Washington Redskins is about sports, please hear us out, for this is not a sports case. Daniel Snyder drew the Supreme Court’s attention thanks to his decision to file a $2 million defamation lawsuit against the Washington alt-weekly City Paper and its reporter Dave McKenna, after McKenna wrote a hilarious and viciously accurate piece called “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Daniel Snyder.”

The issue here, as presented by Justice Drew Magary, is simple. What Daniel Snyder seemed to show in this case is that if you piss off a rich asshole, he can fight back by bankrupting you with a frivolous lawsuit, where he’ll win even if he loses, no matter how wrong he is. Thus the court was asked to consider the following question: Is any rich person who seeks revenge through frivolous-litigation-by-attrition automatically an asshole?

Here’s some background on this lawsuit. In it, Snyder alleged that McKenna published four material “misrepresentations” in his article. But all of these alleged “misrepresentations” seemed merely to be funny rhetorical takes on absolutely true facts.

An example: Snyder at one point apparently used his influence to get a National Park official to cut down 130 trees on a hillside between Snyder’s sweeping Potomac estate and the C&O canal. McKenna’s wry take on this was that Snyder “made a great view of the Potomac River for himself by going all Agent Orange on federally protected lands.” To which Snyder, in his lawsuit, responded by contending that McKenna had written “that Mr. Snyder caused Agent Orange to be used to destroy trees.”

The example I liked even better was this: Synder’s lawsuit complained that one of the misrepresentations in McKenna’s piece was that “Mr. Snyder bragged that his wealth came from diabetes and cancer victims.” But this appeared to be exactly what Snyder did. In a PBS program called CEO Exchange Snyder was shown with fellow sports owner Mark Cuban in a Q&A with Jeff Greenfield at Northwestern University in 2000. In that Q&A he talked about how at Snyder Communications, his marketing company, they huddled up to decide which demographics to target for marketing campaigns.

"We'd make jokes, each niche would be a $5 million niche, and we'd go after each one," Snyder says in the program. Then, when asked for examples, he says this:

"We were looking at trend lines…We saw that the aging baby boomer demographics were coming on strong. That meant there's going to be a lot more diabetic patients, a lot more cancer patients, etc. How do we capture those market segments?"

If anything, it seems to me that McKenna understated his rhetoric about Snyder here: While he only wrote that Snyder bragged about scoring big on cancer patients and diabetics, he could have written that Snyder joked about it, which is probably even worse.

That particular example highlights why Snyder is such a good choice of defendant for this Court. The Redskins owner is one of the prototypical assholes of modern American capitalism – a completely bloodless, money-grubbing narcissist who will sink to any depths in search of a buck (he took expired peanuts bought off a defunct airline and sold them to fans at Redskins games; he also sold beer in the men’s bathrooms at the Redskins’ stadium), and constantly pushes regulatory and ethical boundaries to gouge customers (the company he owned before the Redskins was fined millions for switching phone customers’ service plans without authorization, a practice called “Slamming”). He also grossly insulted all real victims of anti-Semitism when he accused McKenna and the City Paper of targeting him for his Jewishness, claiming that its cover depiction of Snyder with horns growing out of his head was an anti-Semitic caricature. As numerous writers have pointed out, the notion of a guy who owns a team called the Redskins crying foul about ethnic slurs is beyond preposterous; from this Justice’s point of view the reflexive accusation of racism or anti-Semitism whenever one suffers criticism is also often an indication of assholeness, although the Court was no asked to consider that issue in this case.

I ruled Snyder an asshole and gave him 4,999 points, which I calculated as the highest score a non-violent asshole who is not George Will can receive. If in the future counsel can demonstrate to me that Snyder’s callous business practices somehow resulted in deaths and/or injury, Court will be moved to reconsider its judgment.

As to the question of whether or not a rich person who takes revenge by filing frivolous litigation with the intent to bankrupt his or her critics, I vote absolutely yes. This is an increasingly common practice and anyone who indulges in this activity is, to me, forever an asshole. This ruling would cover for instance Chabourne Park attorney John Squires, who a few years ago filed a cease and desist letter on behalf of Goldman Sachs against a blogger named Mike Morgan. Morgan had been blogging on a little-known site called GoldmanSachs666. Another characteristic of such lawsuits is that they almost always involve very small publications or websites without the legal means to right back effectively; since the actual damage that alt-weeklies and obscure websites can do to one’s reputation is negligible, one has to assume that the major motive behind such suits is prophylactic, i.e. scaring future critics at such outlets into thinking twice about risking their meager personal fortunes to say a word or two about the Dan Snyders and Lloyd Blankfeins of the world.

Justice Drew Magary first brought Synder to the Court’s attention and, voting to convict, summed up the situation thusly: “The reason the McKenna case is important is because it demonstrates that, if you piss off a rich asshole, he can use a friviolous lawsuit to bankrupt you. You don't have a choice. You have to hire lawyers to defend yourself again and again until your resources have been exhausted. You can be dragged into the legal system against your will by some fuckhead like Snyder and even if he loses, you’re still ruined for life.”

THE RULING
Court ruled unanimously that Daniel Snyder is indeed an asshole. Vote is 8-0 (Schmid, Sirota, Kourkounis, Taibbi, Magary, Whitmer, Rees, Kreider). Justice Jenny Boylan recused herself on the grounds that she did not know who Daniel Snyder is.

Many Justices took pains to point out that Snyder’s assholedom has little or nothing to do with the fact of his having been one of the most incompetent owners in the history of modern professional sports, and I think many Justices showed great benevolence in not bringing up names like Albert Haynesworth, Donovan McNabb, and Vinny Cerrato. In fact, many Justices were anxious to point out that they did not even consider his sports history in their decision.

Some opinions:

Justice Timothy Kreider said Snyder is an asshole, but “primarily because of this lawsuit. His assholery in the field of sports is a more frivolous matter.”

Justice Jessica Kourkounis gave Synder 5000 points and said that “doing business with Tom Cruise is grounds for automatic assholedom in my book.”

Justice Adam Whitmer gave Synder 6800 points and chimed in on behalf of Redskins fans. “Someone who repeatedly shits on a fan base this loyal to their team and city is an asshole,” he wrote. “But the amount of ‘Scratch my Back, I’ll scratch yours’ that Dan Snyder has displayed just shows that he just doesn’t care about the game, only the money that comes with the game. People like that don’t deserve to own teams.”

Justice Mara Schmid was careful to point out other examples of this behavior, including the Pillsbury company suing a Salt Lake City bakery for use of a “My Dough Girl” campaign and the Monster Cable company for going after basically everyone who’s ever used the word “Monster,” including the TV show “Monster Garage” and the Boston Red Sox for their “Monster Seats” section above the Green Monster at Fenway.

Justice David Sirota was succinct in his summation: “As an NFL owner, he's almost automatically an asshole. And on top of that, he's an asshole among assholes.”

Justice Kreider summed things up for us. “Somewhere in an incredible string of invective unleashed against a foppish servant in King Lear, The Earl of Kent uses the epithet, ‘action-taking,’ meaning ‘litigious,’” he wrote. “Suing someone was then considered despicably craven and effete -- what you were supposed to do, of course, if you were any kind of man, was kill them with your fucking sword…It's still a pretty contemptible activity to involve oneself in litigation voluntarily unless it's to redress some serious injustice or injury. This kind of behavior is just an abuse of litigation -- the goal is not proving that you're in the right but a victory through attrition due to an overwhelming advantage in resources. It's also a defining asshole tactic, like a big drunk picking a fight with the littlest guy in the bar.

THE SCORE
Interestingly, Synder’s aggregate asshole score was right around where I had it – the average of the seven justices who sent in scores was 4,697.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- After a five-day tryout proved that he was a good teammate who lacked enough soccer skills, NFL star Chad Ochocinco got what he was hoping for Tuesday -- a spot on the reserve team for Sporting Kansas City.

Now, he'll work out a couple of times a week with the MLS team's reserve squad, which is what he was hoping for all along.

"This is so awesome I'm an honorary member of SportingKC and can train with the reserve team as long as I want," Ochocinco said in a tweet. "Totally awesome ILuvKC."

As an honorary member of Sporting KC who plays for the reserve team, the six-time Pro Bowl wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals will not be given a contract or be paid. But soccer will be a great way to stay in shape until owners and players work out their differences and the NFL lockout is lifted.

Coach Peter Vermes said Ochocinco had proven himself a hard worker and a good teammate and was never a distraction.

"This is a positive outcome for everyone involved," said Vermes. "It's been great to have Chad here and we'll welcome him back when he's ready to return. He's been a true professional throughout his tryout, he has fit right in with the other players and he has been a great presence in the locker room. He has definitely earned the right to be an honorary member of the squad."

The Ochocinco experience has also been good for soccer, Vermes believes.

"For our sport, it's great because I think there's a lot of people out there who question how hard it is to play this game and it's very, very difficult."

Ochocinco left for home after getting the good news and said he would return "in a week or two."

"I had a great six days here ... just to be able to grace the pitch with these guys was awesome," Ochocinco said. "It's always been a dream of mine to play the game of soccer. Manager Vermes was kind enough to allow me to stay here at will to train with the reserves and continue to get myself in shape."

Ochocinco had appeared to be realistic about his chances of winning an MLS contract.

"I've been away from the game since I was a little kid. I'm just having fun," he said after Monday's practice game. "The skill set is not there like it should be. All I can do out here on the pitch is probably just run fast."

Ochocinco said his grandmother helped persuade him to give up soccer and focus entirely on football after the 10th grade. If he had stuck with soccer, Vermes said, he would have been a star in that sport.

"There's no doubt in my mind he would be a professional player today," Vermes said. "No doubt in my mind. We've had guys in here with lesser physical tools than he has. He brings something to the field, his attention to detail and he's very conscientious about the game. When you bring that every day onto the practice field you're just going to get better."

Its been 3 hours and i still cant believe we wasted our 1st rounder on Jake Locker.

I :lol: watching this online

COuldn't believe Gabbert got left until 10 !

We passed on Gabbert and Fairley to get a guy that probably should have been drafted in the 2nd round. The Vikings were the same, Ponder was 2nd round for sure. We passed on Gabbert, and our division rival, The Jaguars, trade up and get him. If we made the wrong decision, we'll be reminded of it twice a year for the next 10 seasons.

I use to be a Titans fan going back 10 years ago and if i still was i'd be heavily disappointed in this pick.

Gabbert was definitely what they needed and why they passed i'll never know. However there is no gaurantee that Gabbert will start as Gerrard is the incumbent. Be a good fight between those guys.

Keeping with Gabbert, he was easily the biggest loser of the day. His $$$ earning fell sharply the further he went down the list.

What are you talking about?

with the lockout, or have they fixed that and i didn't watch sportscentre that night?

Matthews is a machine. already pumped for next season. Those rings are beautiful. Can you buy replica's of them? Out of interest, if New England win one again.

Those rings are beautiful. Can you buy replica's of them? Out of interest, if New England win one again.