They can’t possibly be this greedy.

Sure negotiations between billionaire owners and their millionaire players often come down to the last minute, but how could the NFL and its players have let it get to this point?

Both sides have agreed to hold the start of free agency until 12:01 Monday morning in order to avoid bloody Thursday, but if no agreement can be reached, the NFL salary cap will be about $10 million dollars lower than teams anticipated, which will cause many cap-strapped teams to cut their veteran players loose. Worse yet, they’ll have planted the seeds for a work stoppage in the future.

Veteran pro-bowl defensive tackles La’Roi Glover and Sam Adams were both cut Thursday in order to make cap room for their respective teams, and this is just the beginning if no deal is reached.

Those same veteran players that are clamoring for a larger share of the league’s revenues are the ones getting creamed by owners trying to unload salary. If an agreement can’t be reached, it would set up the 2007 season – the last year under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement – to be an uncapped year. And if this happens, Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Association, has said the players will never go back to a cap system.

The owners, on the other hand, would never live without one, thus driving a bigger wedge between the two sides.

Are these guys really stupid enough to screw up the most profitable sport in the country?

As we have seen in Major League Baseball and, most recently, the NHL – that’s what happens when greed overrides common sense.

Currently, the players make a percentage – 65.5 percent in 2005 – of a revenue pool made up of mostly ticket sales and television money. Both sides have already agreed to add revenue from local radio and stadium sales but the main disagreement is over a mere 3.8 percent of that money. The players are asking for 60 percent of the shared revenues, and the owners reportedly are offering 56.2 percent. Upshaw has said anything less than 60 percent means the players would lose money relative to their current agreement. Just to get an idea of the amount of greed involved, let’s look at just one piece of the NFL’s profit pie – television.

The league’s latest deal with its television partners totaled $23.9 billion over the next eight years. That’s more than $747 million per team spread out over eight years.

Now imagine adding in ticket sales, beer sales, jerseys, etc., and the pie quickly becomes big enough to feed everyone.

Under the current system, the players’ share is a percentage, so they’re going to see increases every year, as long as revenues increase. Judging by the health of the league, that trend should continue. The cap increases every year because the revenue does.

Basically everybody’s getting rich doing business with the NFL. Players, owners, coaches, even cheerleading coaches. You’d have to be utterly incompetent to lose money owning an NFL franchise. Red McCombs, for example, bought the Vikings in 1997 for $246 million. He sold the team last year for $625 million – a $379 million difference. Owning a franchise is as much a gamble as playing blackjack with a deck full of aces and face-cards.

Not only that, the fans are happy with the product, there is an insatiable appetite for more.

And here they are, squabbling over who loses 3.8 percent of an already large number. It’s like tearing a page out of War and Peace.

But the two sides are still having trouble splitting the pie.

That’s just insane. Why risk losing a system that has made the NFL such a success?

Ultimately it’s not the players or owners who get screwed, but the fans.

Dan Berrigan is a senior in Engineering and can be reached at [email protected].