Beasons tweet about the CBA

[Icege]

When firefighters, policemen, and other type of service workers can generate the kind of money professional athletes can, then they have a stage to debate.

Whether or not they "deserve" it is purely subjective and doesn't give the person taking that side much of a leg to stand on.

[Darth Bobo]

The NFLPA throws health benefits out there as an issue for veteran players, as if the owners haven't been investigating the problem and looking for a long term solution. That simply is not the case, the league is taking player injury very seriously, from making the concussion tests more stringent, to lengthening the time that concussioned players must sit before retaking the field, to reevaluating post-career benefits. The league understands that it is good PR , and worthy of additional expense to that end, to make sure that ex-playeres do not suffer untimely demise.

I feel it is reasonable to assume that the NFL will "yield" to the NFLPA on all of these ex-player health related issues. Not that they were ever disagreeable about it.

But on all the other issues that the NFL has confronted the NFLPA with(18 games, rookie cap, smaller cap) my hope is that owners are 100% victorious, and that the players do not win. Unlike others here, I don't care if the lockout goes well into the 2011 season as long as the resulting CBA is worth all of the trouble. Why? Because I care more about the longevity of the sport, than I do about any one season of it.

And I think that the league has been greatly improved by the various methods of creating parity, from the draft to free agency rules, to the salary cap. The owner's requests seem to do even more parity-creating.

Just my two cents, and I feel that all of the owner's requests would make the sport better for us fans, not worse. If instead, the players union somehow wins in these negotiations, then certain franchises are going to suffer more....In that case, I'd put the Panthers at the top of that suffer-more list. So, as a Panthers fan I am that much more pro-owner this time around. For the record, I felt the opposite in 2006.