NFL owners have spending Jones

Wednesday brought the latest round of roster cuts in the National Football League, a cold reminder of how America's most profitable major sports league conducts business.
There's no loyalty between players and owners in the NFL, and the fans have been reaping the benefits of the adversarial relationships since the league broke the NFL Players Union and instituted a salary cap in 1987. The parity created by the cap makes every game and every week entertaining, forcing each team to be under the spending threshold by certain dates during the calendar year. March 1 is a highlight on that calendar thanks to the roster bonuses that are routinely paid to players who are retained.
Consider Major League Baseball, the NFL's chief rival in overall revenue. I'm fortunate enough to one a fan of one of the league's haves, the Boston Red Sox. Some of you, if you're willing to admit it, might be devoted to the Kansas City Royals or the Pittsburgh Pirates. What's the difference between me and you? I actually look forward to spring training because the team that I root for has a chance to win the World Series every year.
The Red Sox have the second-highest payroll in baseball, trailing only the New York Yankees, and can patch any hole in their roster with a big free agent signing or a trade that adds a large salary. Only about 12 such teams exist in the big leagues. The Royals and the Pirates? They're left to take a shot at one expensive free agent every two years thanks to the money kicked their way by the league's revenue sharing package and fill out the rest of their respective line-ups with young players. They have no chance to play deep into October.
The lesson to be learned here is that competitive balance takes a beating when the owners are allowed to spend their millions without limits. It's a lesson that the NFL learned years ago, but Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones made a disturbing statement on Monday that could change everything. According to published reports, Jones believes that his fellow owners will opt out of the current labor agreement and create total anarchy. The NFL would not have a salary cap in 2011, giving Jones the freedom to spend the rest of the league into oblivion.
Jones and his peers have made billions thanks to the NFL's lucrative television contract, and fellow owners like the New England Patriots' Robert Kraft and the Washington Redskins' Daniel Snyder were extremely rich men to begin with. They would be able to bury a small market team like Green Bay or Buffalo with no salary cap, upsetting the current power structure in the league by snapping up every player that they wished to have on their respective rosters. Teams would slide into irrelevancy like they have in other sports, leading to a disinterested fan base in more than half of the league's cities that would cripple overall revenue and lessen the quality of the product.
Believe it or not, even the players should want the current system to continue. They have 32 teams that can afford their services, not six or seven. Their value goes up with more bidders able to offer contracts during free agency. They all have a chance to win a championship when the season begins. They've already taught themselves this lesson. Learning it again would be more painful than either side wants it to be.