By: Ray Rife

Is it just me, but are you tired of hearing about the economic troubles of billionaires and millionaires? Banking executives, real estate moguls, politicians, now we have to hear it from NFL owners and players.

While NFL owners and players pout about how to divide up $9 billion dollars, fans sit on pins and needles waiting, hoping, and praying that they don’t free up our autumn and winter Sunday afternoons. Therein lays the problem: the fans. We feed the beast.

When do we, as sports fans, get that most the players and owners don’t care about us…the paying customer. Granted, a big chunk of the money they are fighting over comes from television which gets their money from advertisers, but who are the advertisers trying to reach? That’s right, us, the paying customer.

It is us, the paying customer that pays for jerseys, cups, license plates, big stickers to put on our walls, TV subscription packages and whatever else our favorite teams’ logo has been plastered on. We also pay for tickets in the stadium, high priced concessions and parking and those prices keep rising. We feed the beast.

NFL owners decided a couple of years ago that offering season tickets wasn’t good enough. We as fans needed to pay for the RIGHT to purchase season tickets. They called them personal seat licenses (PSL’s). Seat licenses can range from a few thousand to tens of thousands. THEN you have to actually buy the tickets to the event. The beast is hungry.

NFL owners showed two decades ago that they didn’t care about us. Do you remember the scab games of 1987? This is when the owners figured that people wanted to watch the game more than individual players. They told themselves that a terrible product was better than no product. So they offered us a watered down version. So instead of Hall of Famers Jim Kelley, Walter Payton, Tony Dorsett, Howie Long and Lawrence Taylor we got Brian McClure, Al Wolden, David Adams, Rick Goltz and Warren Thompson. Yep, this is how the owners paid us back for our dedication, commitment and wallets.

Then players respond to our admiration by being terrible citizens. In just February of this year, here is a list of offenses and incidents associated to NFL players:

Public Intoxication

Resisting arrest

Stabbing

Assault

Drunk Driving

Theft by Deception

Felony Battery

Weapons

Yes fans, these are the guys that our kids admire, hell, a lot of grown men admire. The players have been coddled for so long that they forget that the same rules of society apply to them, as well. Yet, they continue to take that admiration for granted. Remember how Mike Vick replied when ask about the dog fighting charges by a local reporter? He said, “People love Mike Vick.”

Guess who had the #1 selling jersey at that time? We feed the beast.

It’s our fault, fans; we continue to feed the beast. We pay $70 for parking, then $80 for a ticket and another $130 for food and drink and we get repaid with a threat of a lockout and bad behavior. We continue to shell out more and more money for everything associated with the NFL.

Don’t get me started about fantasy football.

What should we expect though? We feed the beast and the beast is hungry.

Hmmm, wonder who the Cowboys are going to pick at #9 this year.