The kind that said 6'4 275 pound starting defensive end makes up with his probably chronically damaged imagination?

"I would love for a regular student to have a student-athlete's schedule during the season for just one quarter or one semester and show me how you balance that. Show me how you would schedule your classes when you can't schedule classes from 2-to-6 o'clock on any given day.

It isn't homogenous in that the interests of the players, while aligned on some fronts, are more disparate on others. A marginal player who thinks he has a year or two left of good playing time might be concerned about concussions, but he's not going to care enough to not vote for labor peace as compared to a strike.

Huh, that's a good point about the quarterbacks that I hadn't really thought about. I wonder if they could be enticed by the prospect of what they might be able to be paid if there were no salary cap and the highest bidder could pay for them? I have to imagine that the market value of Aaron Rodgers in an uncapped…

Well, maybe. I might buy that if that was 2007, but 30 years is a long time.

Which, yes, I think contributes.

Sure, but (this is where I reveal my own preferences), if the NFLPA is weak because of structural issues that are no one's fault, they just exist because of the nature of the game, then I don't really care if the NFLPA ever gets any stronger.

But it isn't weak just because it is weak. It is weak because the resolve of the players to use the one tool at their disposal, striking, was weak. Expectations can be set however they want to be, ultimately if the players have to hold out for X number of games to get everything they want, then whether the union…

I think Marvin Miller would have had a much harder time in the modern NFL, because I suspect that the interests of the players are much less homogeneous than they were during his era.

I mean, yes, I think all of those things are probably true, though I'd love to see evidence that this is what has driven a weaker union. Things like, voting records stratified by players' base salary, for example, to see if the notion that players who are marginal, and thus have lower base salaries, tend to be more…

They get a larger piece of the revenue pie, but I think on a dollars of revenue gained per player basis, the NBA soundly outperforms the NFL, due to the fact that there are 5 times as many NFL players on a given team.

I don't necessarily disagree, though all that proves is that the NFLPA is weaker than other sports unions. The question in my original comment acknowledged that, and asked "Why?"

I don't think it's bad satire. I think it's subtle.

Do we really hark all the way back to 1987 in order to explain why, almost 30 years later, the NFLPA is so much weaker than other professional unions?

We also find this subtle.

Well, highly unsubtle satire anyways.

In the midst of all this satire and snark, I'd really like someone to provide some meatier discussion of why the NFLPA clearly has less power than the MLBPA and the NBPA.

I'm not sure that a stronger union would necessarily help Lynch here. Lynch may be a highly skilled professional, but it's probably worth remember that his profession is as an entertainer, who just happens to entertain with his athletic prowess. The media doing the normal media thing and asking the same inane and…

Which just goes to show that even people who get satire can still have a bad sense of humor.