There won't be a lockout. If there is, Roger Goodell should be institutionalized, examined by a team of psychiatrists, removed from office and replaced by Pacman Jones.
Starting today -- with NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith's Super Bowl press briefing and culminating with Goodell's Friday address -- you're about to be inundated with stories about a looming lockout.
Ignore them. The owners -- and their paid mouthpiece, Goodell -- are not nearly as stupid as they'll sound and look over the next year.
Yeah, they hired the genius attorney, Bob Batterman, who oversaw the "successful" NHL lockout that helped make professional hockey more irrelevant. Yes, the NFL negotiated TV contracts that pay the league even if there is no 2011 season. And, yes, there are a handful of owners -- Buffalo's Ralph Wilson, Jacksonville's Wayne Weaver and Minnesota's Zygi Wilf -- too incompetent to turn a large profit in a league that prints money.
But short of Wilson, Weaver and Wilf executing an assassination plot of Jerry Jones, Daniel Snyder, Paul Allen and most of their other peers, there is zero chance of a lockout.
You don't hit the eject button at the very moment the league is about to land on the moon.
That's the message Goodell should be and will be communicating privately to the owners whining about the "bad" collective bargaining agreement his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, and Smith's predecessor, Gene Upshaw, struck in 2006.
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