Wouldn't it be ironic if Obama saved NFL?

AMERICA AT LARGE:With neither the players union nor the owners willing to concede, the 2011 season is in danger

THE CLOCK has been so incessantly ticking on the doomsday machine in the four weeks since Super Bowl XLV that Americans who couldn’t tell you what month Easter Sunday falls on this year know with absolute certainty the world of the most successful sporting enterprise known to man will cease to exist at midnight tonight with the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the National Football League and its players.

Barring an 11th-hour reprieve – and given the fact both sides have been inexorably careering toward this moment for years, there is little reason to expect a last-minute bolt from the blue – the collapse of the CBA will allow the NFL owners to impose a lockout on its players, as represented by the NFL Players Association, setting in motion a long, protracted battle in which neither side will get much sympathy from America’s sports fans.

The performances of both the owners and the NFLPA’s sabre-rattling director DeMaurice Smith over the next few months will be evaluated in a large measure not by what concessions they might extract at the bargaining table, but how little face they manage to lose in the process, because history does not augur well for the NFLPA’s ability to sustain the old Joe Hill spirit over the long haul.

The most immediate effects will be evident in some preliminary jousting already underway: The Players Association scored a point a couple of days ago when it found a sympathetic ear in Washington, where a federal judge agreed with the union’s claim that the owners’ designation of a $4 billion down payment on future TV revenues as sort of a de facto strike fund for rich guys in fact constituted an unfair labour practice.

Both sides understand that ruling could be decidedly temporary; at the next appellate level the issue could wind up in the chambers of a Bush-era appointee. The NFLPA, in the meantime, is expected to formally request federal “decertification” sometime before this evening’s witching hour.

If the NFLPA can effectively cease to be a union, it could place the 32 NFL owners in a sticky position with respect to the antitrust exemption they currently enjoy and conceivably also make them answerable to charges (including lawsuits) on the part of individual players.

But if all of this seems preliminary jousting this morning, its disruption of the biological time-clock that constitutes an NFL year will have an almost immediate effect – this week, this month, this summer, and this spring – long before NFL teams would be putting on actual uniforms.

In the absence of a lockout, for example, nearly 500 veteran players would become either restricted or unrestricted free agents tomorrow.

Not only have those players been rendered essentially powerless, but another 74 veterans who were due an additional $140 million in performance bonuses, just for being on NFL rosters.

There will be no free-agent signings, no bonus payments, as long as the owners can hold the line.

In recent years the NFL has managed to turn April’s collegiate draft into a full-scale media event that draws audiences to rival the Academy Award telecasts. Much of the shine will go off next month’s event, since (a) the teams won’t be able to sign or even negotiate with the players they draft, and (b) the entire exercise will have the trappings of a gigantic crapshoot, since no team can hope to draft intelligently when they have no idea what the veteran composition of its roster might be.

A month of no free agent signings and another of no draft will then be followed by a month of no “voluntary” off-season conditioning programs, yet another month of no mini-camp, and eventually, come August, of no pre-season games. (Rest assured that NFL coaches, at this point, will be absolutely tearing their hair out.)

While both sides claim they are prepared for the eventuality, the one thing you can probably take to the bank is that the entire 2011 schedule might be wiped out. Once players start missing game checks and owners start missing sold-out Sundays and the TV folks start monitoring the ratings of whatever trash-sports they have lined up as alternative programming there could be defections all around come September.

Meanwhile, both sides have more or less hurtled unimpeded to where they now find themselves as if they genuinely anticipated some sort of divine intervention. That isn’t going to happen now, but by the time the stakes get really high late in the summer, don’t be surprised to see another higher power exert itself.

It wouldn’t make sense for anybody to have the White House try to head off the impasse with an offer or mediation, but further down the line, when it has become abundantly clear not just to the warring parties but to the sporting public as a group, it would provide an opportunity for President Obama to flex some muscle on an issue he is, perhaps uniquely among his predecessors, equipped to deal with.

And, unlike the thornier battles that have characterised his first two years in office, this would be a battle that absolutely transcended partisan politics. Barack Obama is not only a dyed-in-the-wool professional football fan, but one who understands the vicissitudes of the game, and the particular niche it has come to occupy in the fabric of the American experience.

Given the rancour that has attended his rough ride in Washington, wouldn’t it be ironic if the legacy of Obama’s first administration turned out to be that of the man who saved the NFL from itself?