Looks like the question of who would mourn for MLS just became irrelevant.

Five days before the season opener, MLS and the players’ union have struck a deal on a new, five-year collective bargaining agreement. The players had threatened to strike if a new pact couldn’t be reached this weekend. With approximately 25 players participating, the sides met all day and night Thursday and Friday, and announced the deal this afternoon.

The players’ primary issue was free agency, and although they were not granted full rights to move between clubs in the league, they did agree to a “re-entry draft” for players out of contract at the end of the season.

A supplemental draft for free agent veterans? I wonder which side pulled that one out of its collective ass to settle this. I also wonder if this just means five more years of MLS player movement weirdness, which the league still feels is necessary. MLS commish Don Garber did say in the press conference that only two clubs, Seattle Sounders FC and Toronto FC, operated at a profit last season. Now we’ll get to see if that changes between now and 2015.

This Clint Dempsey goal knocked Italian giants Juventus out of the Europa League and put Fulham in the quarter-finals. Just look at it.

The media pool money kicks in for quarter-finalists in Europe’s NIT, too. Last season, Manchester City made €4.62 million from the media pool for reaching the Europa League quarters, plus the €300,000 in prize money. This goal might have made Fulham something pretty close to that, depending on who else makes the quarters.

Enjoy watching this, U.S. National Team fans, before the copyright cops from UEFA take it down.

(Thanks, Maj.)

The NFL Players Association is certainly acting like it is. Owners have told the NFLPA that they’re losing money. NFLPA chief DeMaurice Smith responded by asking the owners to show him their financial ledgers so the union can have a starting point in their negotiations. Thus far, the owners have said no.

Is there some dark, dirty secret hiding in those ledgers that the owners don’t want anyone to see? Did they buy up a lot of toxic assets? Do they reveal some scandalous ties to sports betting companies and Canadian drug traffickers? Do they not want anyone to find out just how much it costs to keep Al Davis alive? Is Jerry Jones spending millions on “snacks”?

Here’s the thing, folks — the ledgers are a MacGuffin. The only thing these ledgers are obscuring is a simple fact that’s already out in the open, and that’s a clause in the NFL’s contract with the big television networks that states that even if the league doesn’t play a down in 2011, the networks still have to pay the NFL all the TV rights money they agreed to pay.

Let’s ponder that for a moment, shall we?

First off, how powerful is the NFL that it could not only ask for a deal like that, but get it? “If we don’t play, you still have to pay us.” I’m sure there are several other entities capable of getting a deal like that, but certainly not for this much money.

Now let’s examine the men on the receiving end of this windfall. What are NFL owners? They’re wealthy old white guys. Wealthy old white guys did not obtain their wealth by doing things that made them making less money. If their financial advisers are telling them that they could make more money by not playing football in 2011, then that’s what they’re going to do, and nothing the players or the fans say or do will stop that.

What, you think the NFL owes you something because you’re a fan? Please. NFL owners will throw a whole season away because they know you’ll come back. Canceling a World Series didn’t kill baseball. Canceling a whole season didn’t kill the National Hockey League. This is the National Football League we’re talking about here. They could rip you off however they want, and in the end, you’ll still return to the stadiums, turn on the TV on Sunday afternoon, and shell out for the jerseys and trinkets and such. Because you crave pro football, and they have what you want.

Unless there’s an alternative.

If those Twittering upstarts of the United Football League can manage to survive into their 3rd season and expand to eight teams as planned, they could fill the gap that the NFL leaves behind. What’s that? No NFL football this Sunday? We’ll play on Sunday. Come watch our league.

Keep in mind the UFL would only have 8 teams at this point. That means they could schedule one game on Thursday night, two games on Sunday at 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM, and the fourth game on either Sunday Night or Monday night. That allows all those disenfranchised NFL fans to focus on one game at a time. Whether that’s good or bad is up to you. It would certainly be good for Versus and HDNet.

What’s more, if there’s an NFL lockout, any NFL players who are out of contract could probably find work in the UFL. So could any players coming out of college, because there wouldn’t be an NFL draft. Would they get paid as much? Of course not, but if there’s no NFL, does that matter? The rookies would have decent-paying jobs, and they would make the UFL that much more entertaining to watch.

And if the product on the field is good, some fans out there might decide they really don’t miss the NFL all that much. So might one or two of those TV networks who gave millions to the NFL for a season full of nothing.

And if that happens, how do NFL owners react? Do they stay the course and keep making the TV money owed to them? Or do they decide that keeping this upstart league in its place is more important than maximizing short-term gains, thus saving the 2011 NFL season?

Right now, the UFL seems content with its current position a minor league. If, however, there’s no major league 18 months from now, the UFL could very quickly move up from “minor league” to “alternative league,” sign some good quality players and offer a pretty good product to fans who are angry with the NFL work stoppage. That might put some real heat on NFL owners to re-open the shop. Even the USFL wasn’t in nearly as enviable position as this.

Thanks to Bodog for sponsoring Dave’s Football Blog.

I talked with a couple of soccer heads (one who played college soccer) last night and there seems to be a general agreement that a MLS strike would barely cause a ripple, in terms of news coverage or outrage that might give players any leverage … IF NFL players can be replaced, you think soccer players (in America!) can’t be replaced? I wonder how many people who identify themselves as sports fans in this country would even notice or have their viewing choices affected.

I would take this idea even one step further: how many soccer fans in this country would have their viewing choices affected by an MLS strike?

Yes, MLS clubs have tens of thousands of dedicated supporters — especially in Seattle and Philadelphia — who would be royally pissed if league decided to respond to a players’ strike by throwing away the 2010 season. But what about the casual fans and the “eurosnob” types? How much would they care? The Premier League isn’t going away. Neither is the Champions League. La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga will all continue. Lots of American soccer fans watch those leagues instead of MLS. The quality of play is generally higher, and many of the biggest American stars play overseas now.

Many would consider me one of those eurosnobs. I watch a lot of Premier League and Champions League matches. I don’t really care that much about MLS, in part because I don’t live in an MLS city, so I have no rooting interest. There’s a Division II club, Carolina Railhawks FC, that plays near me, and their season (such as it is) is going forward. Is the level of play as good as it is in MLS? I used to think so, but overall, it’s probably not. That’s a moot point, though. The Railhawks are my local club. If I want to see professional club soccer in person, my local club wins out easily over the nearest MLS club — D.C. United, which is 5 hours away by car.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be disappointed if MLS chose to respond to a players’ strike by closing up shop. The USA needs a top-flight soccer league if it wants to remain competitive on the world stage. The primary reason MLS was formed was to develop talent for the U.S. National Team, and it’s been pretty successful at that. Many national team players who ply their trade overseas now got their start in MLS, the same way many Brazilian and Argentinian stars in Europe got their start in domestic leagues.

That said, this gives MLS a reputation for being… well, not so ML, and that reputation doesn’t sit so well with sports fans in North America, where we’re accustomed to seeing the best of the best compete regularly. The best baseball, basketball and hockey players on the planet play on this continent. The best footballers, however, play for European clubs, so if we want to watch the highest level of play, we don’t look toward MLS.

If soccer were woven into the fabric of our culture like it is in South America, it might be different. We might love and support our clubs regardless of how good they are compared to the rest of the world. Alas, that’s not the case. We’ve got our own football game here, plus a few other big sports. Our collective sporting consciousness would barely notice if MLS disappeared. Soccer, after all, is their game, not ours.

Still, let’s hope the players’ decision to strike doesn’t cause the owners to follow up on their thinly veiled threats to take their ball and go home — and make no mistake, it’s the owners who would make the decision to wind up the league and write off all the soccer-specific stadiums they built, not the players. Even if you’re with the players on this and you think the overall structure of MLS needs an enema, the disappearance of MLS — and more importantly, the timing of that disappearance — would be a disaster for the game in this country, in no small part because so many people who are fans of the Association game, or who might become fans if they gave it half a chance, just wouldn’t give a damn.

UPDATE (3/18/2010): A recent quote from Real Salt Lake owner Dave Checketts suggests that MLS would not shut down, but rather hire replacement players if the union votes to strike. Our pal Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion suggests that MLS owners would be looking to break the union with the same strategy NFL owners used in 1987.

What do you say, MLS fans? You up for some hot replacement game action?

As I like to remind you dear readers every so often, football is an evolving thing. The football games people played 50 to 100 years ago bear little resemblance to the games people play today. Small rule changes can have a big impact on our favorite sports.

If the GAA decides to adopt some rules currently being testing in Ireland, however, Gaelic football might soon look very different than the game being played last year.

The first rule change would allow players to take a mark after a clean catch. Clearly, the influence of the infamous International Rules series is at work here, as marking the ball and taking a free kick after the mark were key components of International Rules taken from the Australian game. The experimental mark rule — specified here — is being tested in Gaelic football now, and it has the potential be as game-changing as the forward pass was to American football in 1906, or as the revised offside rule was to soccer in 1990.

The rule tweaking, however, isn’t stopping there. In another nod to International Rules, the open-hand pass was replaced with the fist pass, and one former All-Ireland ref says that change wasn’t enough, and that use of hands in general should be curbed. Said the ref:

“It’s no longer football as we used to know it. We live in an age when value for money has never been as important and when people come to see a football game, they shouldn’t have to watch basketball.”

Why he picked now to hate on basketball seems like a case of bad timing. Maybe he’s just upset that the Celtics are falling apart. Either way, if marks become legal and hand-passing is reduced, Gaelic football will start looking less like Gaelic football and more like… soccer, but with Aussie-style marks and rugby-style goalposts. Kind of like Harrow football, actually, but with less mud. It might also create a dynamic where coaches could emphasize “ground game” and “aerial game” strategies that would make for huge contrasts in styles.

Does Ireland want that? We’ll find out soon enough, I guess. If nothing else, perhaps it’s a sign that I wasn’t the only guy who enjoyed the International Rules series.

(Thanks to Coachie Ballgames for the heads up.)

“These adventures in Europe can help us in terms of us becoming a stronger football club but we have a long way to go, mind, before we match the Inter Milans, the Juves and the Milans.”

If recent results are any indication, so do Inter, Juve and Milan.

That’s how bad this man was at his job in 2009. He opened the calendar year by throwing six interceptions at home in a playoff game, then followed that up with a five-turnover performance, also at home, in his first game in September. Somewhere in between those 11 turnovers, though, the Panthers saw fit to give him a 5-year, $42.5 million contract — a deal which made him the official captain of the Ski-Mask All Stars.

Maybe all that guaranteed money was a thank you of sorts. After all, Delhomme did help this franchise get to a Super Bowl that it almost won, two NFC Championship games and three playoff appearances in 7 seasons, which would make quite a few NFL fan bases pretty happy. Still, Delhomme always seemed to be more lucky than good, and as any gambler will tell you, bad streaks are inevitable. That bad streak finally hit Jake last year, and the Panthers had to consider whether they were willing to take the salary cap hit to let him–

What’s that? NFL owners got rid of the salary cap? Well, that makes it a little easier, doesn’t it?

The question now is which way Panthers GM Marty Hurney will go next. The initial thought is that he’ll stick with Matt Moore for now. Matt Moore is not a great quarterback. Some would argue he’s not even a good quarterback. What cannot be argued, however, is that he is a winning quarterback. Moore is 6-2 as a starter for the Panthers, including a 4-1 stretch at the end of last season that saw him complete 61.6% of his passes, throw 8 touchdowns and only 2 interceptions, and compile a passer rating of 98.5.

That said, Moore doesn’t exactly light Charlotte on fire, and that’s going to lead to a ton of speculation about the Panthers’ off-season strategy. Ron Mexico started that speculation last week when he suggested he might like to play for Carolina - a notion that must have had owner Jerry Richardson rewriting his will to ensure that any Panthers GM who acquired Mexico over his dead body would be relieved of his duties immediately.

Plus, as of today, Mex is still an Eagle, so it seems Philadelphia is entertaining trade offers. Despite what Andy Reid says, though, the question remains which QB the Eagles will trade, and Carolina might be in the best position to make a deal here — not for Mexico, but for Donovan McNabb.

There are several factors at play here. For one, McNabb has worn out his welcome in the Illadelph for just about everyone not named Andy Reid, and while Kevin Kolb and Ron Mexico don’t exactly excite anyone, they would at least be a fresh start.

More importantly, however, the Eagles cut Brian Westbrook last week and are now shockingly thin at the running back position. Carolina is not so thin there. They have a strong 1-2 punch in DeAngelo Williams and Jonathan Stewart, plus a guy named Mike Goodson who has what the pro types call “upside.” Panthers head coach John Fox prefers a running back like Stewart over Williams, who has a bit more power on the line. Stewart shined in Williams’ absence late last season, rushing for 5.7 yards per carry and 4 touchdowns in Carolina’s last five games.

Williams, meanwhile, is dangerous in the open field, which is exactly where Andy Reid liked to put Westbrook when he had the chance. Thus, it stands to reason that the Eagles could offer McNabb to the Panthers in exchange for Williams, and it would be the sort of blockbuster deal that benefits both teams. The Eagles get their new starting running back, and the Panthers get a strong veteran presence in the pocket to run their offense.

Personally, I hope such a deal doesn’t happen, as Williams is one of my favorite Panthers of all time, and I would hate to see his big play ability leave the state. Plus, Williams are Stewart are not only a great tandem at running back (and both better than anyone on the free agent market right now), but they have one of the coolest fan clubs in the NFL. Furthermore, Fox and Hurney are fairly conservative types who have a system that doesn’t put much value in a star QB, and they have to shore up their defense this off-season after Julius Peppers left for Chicago.

Still, business is business, and the bottom line is that a McNabb-for-Williams deal would get more season tickets sold in Charlotte than the prospect of a full season of Matt Moore. The mere notion of McNabb throwing to Steve Smith every week is pretty buzzworthy. What’s more, McNabb would give the Panthers a legitimate passer to fall back on if their running game falters. All Jake ever gave them was a gambler’s chance, and as any poker player will tell you, shouting “One time, baby!” gets old in a hurry.

On behalf of all the folks at FoxSoccer.tv, which is now the only web site that’s legally serving up live video streams of the Premier League and UEFA Champions League, among other competitions, I would just like to say…

Whoops.

Then again, at least FoxSoccer.tv isn’t saying whoops as many times as Nicklas Bendtner did today. How does that man keep his job?

Good things rarely come of me writing about hockey. The last time I tried, it resulted in about 15 seconds of the worst This Week in Tech episode ever recorded. Still, last Sunday’s Olympic hockey final merits a comment in a World Cup year, so here goes…

I was up in Boston last weekend visiting friends and dancing until 3:00 in the morning, because I do that sometimes. Having never been to Boston before, I had a short list of thing I wanted to do while there. Somewhere near the top of that list was visiting an Irish pub to watch some football, since the fan base for the association game is a little bigger in a city like Boston than it is here in North Carolina.

Alas, dancing until 3:00 in the morning two nights in a row required more sleep than I had anticipated, and I found myself sprawled out on an air mattress in Tewksbury on Sunday morning, watching the Carling Cup Final on my phone. Convinced of the cosmic sense this made, I got over this quickly.

After Manchester United hoisted another trophy and Martin O’Neill told his Aston Villa players, “This is why we can’t have nice things!”, some friends called me up and invited me to join them at Quincy Market for the afternoon. Not wanting to hunt for parking for half a day again, I decided to drive to Alewife Station and take the T into the city. We met up and wandered into Faneuil Hall to sample the wares.

The Olympic Hockey Final between the USA and Canada, however, was never far from our view. I kept an eye on it on my phone, and several people who noticed that stopped to ask me what the score was. The chowder bar that was offering free samples — and them’s good eatin’ — also had the game on a TV behind them. None of us could ignore it, so we figured we should settle down somewhere to watch the rest of it.

“Sam’s Cafe at Cheers.” Hey, that works.

In the shadow of classic sitcom bric-a-brac and in the company of some good-natured folks from Montreal, we settled in at the bar and watched the remainder of the game. There was talk of 1980 and “our boys” pulling off miracles, but this game was different. This was two teams full of the best players on the planet, playing for national pride, and playing on a level I’m not sure I had ever seen before. I missed most of the USA v. Canada group stage tilt, but what little I saw of that screamed, “This is top shelf.”

The Gold Medal Game only amplified that feeling. Only twice can I recall being so transfixed on a hockey game, and both those times were Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals — once in 1994, when Mark Messier and the New York Rangers made their famed run, and again in 2006, when the Carolina Hurricanes knocked off a resilient Edmonton Oilers teams to bring the Cup to North Carolina.

This, however, felt even bigger than that. This was Brazil v. Argentina on ice, Spain v. Italy with sticks and pucks, a game between two of the best national teams on the planet who happen to be continental rivals, playing for all the marbles, with all the tension associated with it. When Zack Parise scored that equalizer with 24 seconds left in the 3rd period, you could feel one country deflate and another celebrate. When Sidney Crosby scored the golden goal in overtime, he transformed into Zinedine Zidane on skates and lifted an entire nation with him.

And as that thought occurred to me, so did this one — this is as close as we will ever get to experiencing the emotions of a World Cup Final in our lifetimes, isn’t it? No North American team has reached the semifinals of the FIFA World Cup since the inaugural event in 1930, when the USA won a 3-team group stage to get there, and Americans cared even less than they do now. Given the disparity in talent between North America and the football-fanatical continents of Europe and South America, the possibility of a CONCACAF side getting out of the quarterfinals seems awfully slim.

Perhaps you could make an argument for the Confederations Cup, which Mexico won once on home soil in 1999 and which the USA came close to winning last summer, but the Confederations Cup simply doesn’t carry the same weight a World Cup does, and this Olympic hockey tournament felt much more like the latter. When it was over, just about every sports fan who watched it was already looking forward to what 2014 would bring.

And so was the International Olympic Committee, who desperately needed a successful hockey competition to keep this continent interested. Figure skating has its audience, and its reputation. Speed skating is entertaining, but it only gets traction once every four years. Skiing and snowboarding have been forced to evolve into X-Games-like competitions just to keep people interested. Curling remains a curious niche. Hockey is the most mainstream sport these winter games have, and making Olympic hockey the sport’s de facto World Cup remains crucial to keeping the Winter Olympics relevant here.

When it was over, we congratulated our Canadian friends at the bar, left this place where, as it turned out, nobody knew our names, and headed our separate ways. I took the T back to Alewife, got into my car and drove to the exit, only to find they were charging for parking on a Sunday — $7, cash only. Of course, I only had $3 on me. So the toll booth guy sighs heavily, grabs a tiny envelope, writes down my rental car’s license plate on it and hands it to me. The envelope obnoxiously said something to the effect of, “You owe us $7, or the next time we see your car, we’re towing it.” I probably could have thrown it away, but the gall of that little envelope was just too much to ignore.

So yesterday, I mailed them back their $7. In dimes.

That wasn’t quite as entertaining as USA v. Canada, but it came close.

Let’s just hope everyone watched where they were spitting that day.

(Spotted on 101 Great Goals.)

Aston Villa commissioned a Carling Cup Final song. You read that correctly. It’s a song to celebrate the club’s appearance in the secondary cup competition in England. It is performed here by X-Factor finalist a complete unknown named Niki Evans.

Wow. I’m not sure what makes this quite so epic. Is it the cheap synth horns? Is it the creation of the nonsense word “Championees?” Is it the fact that they would have been better off hiring Prince to write this?

The fact that anyone spent money on this at all speaks volumes about the state of financial management in the Premier League. Seriously, wow.

(Spotted on 101 Great Goals)

I ask because MHz is now available through the Roku Digital Video Player, and according to the gang at AFANA, MHz still shows live AFL games. Thus, Major League Baseball would no longer be the only sport you could watch on the Roku.

Of course, this probably won’t get any of us hardcore football lovers to cut our cables and dump our dishes anytime soon, something I’ve lamented here before. We need the boys at Roku and Boxee and their competitors to give us sports fans some more complete offerings. If we could get, say, ESPN360 ESPN3 on a set-top box like this, it would become much more intriguing. A channel for Fox Soccer would also be something of a coup — and not entirely impossible, given that Fox seems to have the rights to everything except the World Cup, the Confederations Cup, La Liga, the Bundesliga and the Copa Libertadores.

How much would you pay for ESPN and Fox Soccer channels on a Roku? That’s a question someone ought to start asking.

You have to say this much about Akon’s 2010 World Cup anthem, “O Africa” — it beats the living crap out of “World In Motion” on many levels, even if it does abuse the auto-tune a bit.

Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres make cameo appearances here, kicking paint-filled footballs against a wall that explode into a mural of other famous footballers making O-faces. It’s a decent enough visual — that is, until we see this:

Gee, that image seems familiar. Where have I seen that before? I can’t quite remembe–

Oh, yeah. That. Good thing the directors of that video didn’t ask Drogba to yell about any “fooking disgraces” in this.

(Video spotted on 101 Great Goals.)

Matthew Stafford is the starting quarterback for the Detroit Lions. The Detroit Lions are terrible. Yet even a QB for a terrible team gets to be a scratch-and-sniff plaything for a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. In public. And the whole episode gets recorded for posterity. Must be nice.

Of course, Stafford probably deserved to have a moment like this happen to him just by virtue of being drafted by the Lions. He might never experience a win this epic again.

(H/T: The High Definite via @unsilent)

If Super Bowl commercials had not jumped the shark before, they certainly did this year. Even the “good” ads were severely lacking in entertainment value, and the misogynistic streak that ran through this year’s ads was unnecessary and self-defeating.  106.5 million Americans watched this game; at least some of them were bound to be women. Why air an ad that makes your business seem like a comic book store?

What’s more, as the video above shows, this year’s ads used a hell of a lot of gag violence to try and keep people’s interest. A few of those spots were entertaining — the dog collar ad was good for a laugh, and watching Betty White and Abe Vigoda get tackled was funny — but the more you look at this montage of slaps and pratfalls, the more it seems today’s mad men have fewer ideas than Hollywood.

My favorite spot? EA’s ad for Dante’s Inferno, simply because you don’t expect to hear Bill Withers in a video game ad. And I like that song. Well done, EA.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing for the first video.)

We cannot leave this city. Not now.

That’s essentially what NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue told New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Lower 9th Ward and left us with painful images of a shattered Superdome full of desperate people. Benson spent several years prior to Katrina demanding that the city and the state of Louisiana build him a new stadium on their dime. He threatened to move the Saints to another town that would buy him a shiny new stadium.

Lest we forget, even after Hurricane Katrina, Benson fought with the fans, assaulted a cameraman, and flat-out lied to the world about the condition of his facilities in Louisiana. He was itching to ditch Bourbon Street for a richer, sunnier city. Even San Antonio would have been just fine for Benson.

Paul Tagliabue said no. He saw what Katrina did to New Orleans, and he all but ordered the team to stay. He knew the message it would send. If the NFL abandoned New Orleans, then America had abandoned New Orleans. Someone had to be there to stand up for this city and its people. Who better to do that than the man in charge of America’s biggest sporting obsession?

Last night was Paul Tagliabue’s gift to the people of New Orleans and the survivors of Katrina. Decades of heartbreak, frustration and empty promise finally faded into the background. Sean Payton rolled the dice and won. Drew Brees played the game of his life — a game that the leadership in Miami or San Diego didn’t think he could still deliver four years ago. And in one fell swoop, Tracy Porter and his terrible haircuit turned the Super Bowl on its head.

If Paul Tagliabue had not stood up for New Orleans, would we have all lived through this Twitter-smashing moment? Would we be celebrating with a city that was nearly left to die four and half years ago and is still rebuilding today?

In the last four years, the Saints have come to embody the spirit of New Orleans. That spirit might not be there today if it weren’t for the NFL encouraging us to “Be a Saint.” That is Paul Tagliabue’s legacy. His leadership made last night’s celebration possible. With so much talk of the NFL disappearing in 2011, perhaps Tagliabue’s successor would do well to remember the importance of that kind of leadership.

Of course, just as soon as I make some exceedingly inane remark about shiny trophies, we get this monstrosity from the Russian Football Federation. This trophy, which goes to the club who has the best combined finish in the Russian Premier League and its equivalent youth competition, is made of almost 44,000 diamonds and 2.5 kilograms of gold. Yet somehow, it cost only $1 million to make, prompting Kobe Bryant to feel a sudden pang of buyer’s remorse.

And the bald dude in the reflection? He judges. Quietly.

This information comes to us from Yahoo’s brand-spanking new soccer blog Dirty Tackle, a gig that Brooks Peck got because A.) he’s very entertaining, and B.) I’ve been phoning it in for the last 18 months and still don’t have a plan for the future. But pretty much A.

Since I’m still phoning it in, though, here’s some other football-related stuff you should be reading:

• Every possible storyline for Super Bowl XLIV, and then some. [NFL Fanhouse]
• The annual Madden sim has the Saints winning by 10. No word yet on what Tecmo Super Bowl predicts. [Shutdown Corner]
• The Colts’ biggest fan? Jared. Way to go, Indianapolis. [The Sporting Blog, which, by the way, is all over this Super Bowl like white on Zenit St. Petersburg rice.]
• Memo to bakeries: don’t give the icing gun to people who know nothing about football. [Cake Wrecks]
• Anthony Bourdain takes on Miami cuisine. Sort of. [Kissing Suzy Kolber]
• Jason Whitlock thinks NFL owners are foolish for even considering a lockout. He missed the part where the TV networks have to pay the owners in 2011 whether there’s a season or not, and wealthy men don’t stay wealthy by doing things that make them less money. [Fox Sports]
• Online betting in the USA is still technically illegal. And really sketchy. [Shutdown Corner]
• Drew Brees points out how the NFL is attempting to use the courts to become a single entity, rather than 32 separate teams. Kind of like Major League Soccer, come to think of it. [Washington Post]
• A complete list of soccer podcasts. And there’s a whole hell of a lot of ‘em, too. [EPL Talk]
• Royal Bank of Scotland has apparently had it up to here with Tom Hicks and George Gillett. [The Independent]
• The head of the Confederation of African Football banned Togo from the African Cup of Nations, just weeks after Angolan separatists sprayed machine gun fire at the Togolese team bus, killing 3 people. Here’s why he should resign after such an appalling decision. [Pitch Invasion]
• That whole thing John Terry getting his teammate’s girlfriend pregnant? He was just following John Harkes’ lead. I suspect it’s far less likely that England’s World Cup gets ruined over this. [Dirty Tackle]
• Brian Phillips is working on something awesome. Can’t wait to see it. [The Run of Play]
• Oh, by the way, the NAB Cup begins in a week. Are you ready for some footy? [AFL.com.au]

You might have seen my name pop up on EPL Talk recently — specifically for this piece about the Green & Gold protests at Manchester United. I’ll be contributing a bit more to EPL Talk and its sister site, Champions League Talk, over the next few months. My first piece for Champions League Talk takes a look at why the Champions League Final has become a bigger game than the Super Bowl — although the gap between their average audience figures (109M to 106M) is actually pretty small.

Check out those shiny trophies, though. Who wouldn’t want to leave their fingerprints all over either of those?

One day, we’ll have our grand underdog story again in a major football final. Just not right now. The stars have all aligned once again to give us another all-Goliath final.

It happened last May in Rome, when Spanish champions Barcelona met English champions Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League Final.

It happened in Melbourne last September, when the St. Kilda Saints and Geelong Cats, quite clearly the two best clubs in the AFL all season, gave us an epic Grand Final.

And it will happen again in Miami, when Indianapolis Colts, clearly the best team in the AFC, meet the New Orleans Saints, clearly the best team in the NFC, in Super Bowl XLIV.

Don’t think for a moment that these aren’t the two best teams in the NFL, either. There were no worthy challengers in the AFC, and whatever argument the Minnesota Vikings had vanished in a haze of fumbles and turnovers. Back in November, when these teams were both 8-0 and we absurdly spoke of runs at history, there was plenty of talk that Colts v. Saints would be the best possible matchup, the game we wanted to see.

And you know what?  We do want this. For all our big talk about Hoosiers and Joe Namath guarantees and Bloody Hell! Wimbledon beat Liverpool!, there’s something just as appealing in seeing the two best teams battle it out to determine who will be champion. Yes, we as fans have our allegiances to teams that ultimately fell by the wayside on this path, but we’re also fans of these football games, and what could be more compelling to us as fans than #1 v. #2 for all the marbles?

We will still dream of the improbable and revel in the glories of past upsets, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll tell you we want to see two Goliaths battle it out, too. The spectacle is just as grand, and ultimately, it makes us appreciate the underdog stories just that much more. Besides, if upsets happened all the time, wouldn’t they start to smell a little funny?

We’ve already seen Usain Bolt have a mini-kickabout at the Bernabeu, but how is he when he has the option to use his hands? The boys from Kerry County found out recently, as they taught the world’s fastest man a few of the finer points of Gaelic Football. Given Bolt’s height and speed, I’m surprised they didn’t offer him citizenship on the spot.

Then again, Bolt probably would have heard how much GAA players actually make and politely declined.

If you’re new to this blog and unfamiliar with Gaelic Football, click here for some basic info. We don’t discuss Gaelic Football that often here, but it’s even more of a national obsession in Ireland than the NFL is here in America.

(Thanks, Coachie Ballgames.)

Let’s be fair. This is not the worst thing Prince has ever written. If you dig around the Crystal Ball collection or The Rainbow Children for a while, you’ll find a few things more unbearable than this. Plus, the man did give us the best Super Bowl halftime show ever.

That said, is this a “fight song”? Is this supposed to rally the troops? Would this make a Vikings fanatic like, say, Drew Magary want to run through a brick wall? I’d say no. Fight songs have some energy to them. This is more like an alma mater, complete with alma mater-ish lyrical oddities.

the eyes say ready 4 battle
no need 4 sword in hand
we r all amped up like a rock n roll band
ready 2 celebrate every score
ready 2 fight the elegant war
ready 2 hear the crowd roar
that’s what we came 4 and so much more
in the name of the purple and gold

It’s a bit more modern that “Gloriana, Frangipana, e’er to her be true,” but the vibe is pretty much the same. I get more pumped up hearing Brett Favre sing “Pants on the Ground.”

Prince seems better suited toward writing party songs, love songs and the occasional socio-political commentary — no fronting on “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night,” please — than a fight song for a football team. Let’s just hope he doesn’t try to put this up against what U2 & Green Day did in New Orleans a few years ago. Bono’s a total dick about copyright, but at least he picked a song that got the crowd completely psyched:

(Hat tip to Joe Ovies for the heads-up. Video from The Huffington Post.)

If Major League Soccer follows through on its threat to lock out the players union, does that mean Landon Donovan gets recalled from Everton?

I haven’t seen anyone else ask, and I figure I should, because if it’s true, it would suck on several levels. Donovan played awfully well in his first Premier League match, getting an assist on a well-placed corner kick, smoking Arsenal left back Armand Traore on the wing, and getting the English press to take notice. He showed signs of challenging Clint Dempsey’s position as best non-goalkeeping American footballer in England.

If he has to sit in England because of a labor dispute in America, that does nothing to help the U.S. Men’s National Team in a World Cup year — and really, wasn’t that the primary reason MLS was launched in the first place?

My interest in the NFL playoffs seems to have hit an all-time low.

I’m still paying attention, of course, but aside from being utterly transfixed by that shootout in Arizona, I haven’t actually been watching all that much. Saturday’s Wild Card playoffs were mostly background noise in my living room, while the Ravens’ win over the Patriots on Sunday seemed like a good time to go run errands.

And why not? I’m a Steelers fan. The Ravens and the Pats are the last two teams I want to see in a playoff game. If my team were playing one of them, that would be a different matter, but the Steelers’ season is over. I’m pretty sure most Washington Redskins fans weren’t so interested in watching that Cowboys-Eagles game on Saturday night, either. (Assuming Daniel Snyder hasn’t browbeaten their love of football out of them all together, of course.)

Football has always been tribal like this. This is our club, and these are our colors, and we will fight to beat your club and your colors. We love the Packers, screw the Vikings. We support Arsenal and want to kick Tottenham arse. Carlton rules, Collingwood drools. It’s a battle without a war, games in the place of guns, a fulfillment of primal urges that doesn’t leave massive scars upon civilization. This is why we express so much shock whenever real guns come into play, either by choice or by circumstance. We don’t want actual war to intrude on our tribal skirmishes.

It’s also why I was puzzled at some of the comments I read on blogs discussing the whole USL-NASL brouhaha.

It seems there’s at least a small contingent of people out there who think that there should be no other soccer league in America except Major League Soccer. Here are a few samples taken from MLS Talk and The Kartik Report:

“MLS is still trying to build itself into one of the top leagues in the world. We are getting there, but aren’t there yet. The NASL by invoking nostalgia for a failed league that bought big foreign players but left behind tons of debt threatens that. USL threatens that by signing MLS players to contracts that include free loaner cars and paid rent/apartments.

“MLS is the league we should all be following and investing our time and effort into. The investors that put money into USL or NASL are hurting MLS. Can you imagine if we could bring that money into MLS as well? It could be such a fantastic league.”

“MLS is our league and only by supporting the established brand does soccer get stronger. USL has always been an annoying little neighbor with fans who say “look at us, look at us.” but finally instead of continuing to dress up an ugly step sister, we are rejecting her entirely and sending away for good.

“I also call on CONCACAF to suspend all current and former USL clubs from the Champions League. We do not need a hard earned MLS spot being taken away again by an annoying Puerto Rico Islanders team that played 180 minutes of anti-football to defeat a superior TFC side.”

“Neither league ought to be in business and it would be good if those who have supported USL for years focused on MLS this year, with viewership and attending games. Together with one league we can move forward.”

Now, on some level, I suppose I can see this tribalism extending to leagues. It happens with college conferences in America — ACC v. Big East, Big Ten v. Pac-10, etc.

That said, I cram to understand why soccer fans in America are supporting leagues over clubs, or why these MLS fans feel so threatened by the existence of another league. Is the Premier League threatened by the existence of the Coca-Cola Championship? Hell, is the NFL threatened by the existence of the UFL? There are multiple football, baseball, basketball and hockey leagues all over this country. But no, MLS should be the be-all and end-all of soccer in America.

These people annoy me, because they’re basically saying that my local club, the Carolina Railhawks, doesn’t deserve to exist, and neither do any of the other pro soccer clubs in North America — unless they pony up $40 million and build a stadium to join MLS. They’re basically saying, “I support this specific corporate structure over yours,” oblivious to the fact that there’s plenty of room for both.

If the NFL suddenly went bankrupt tomorrow — I know, I know, work with me here — do you think its member clubs would just give up and go out of business? Of course not. The clubs themselves would reform and figure out a way to keep going, and their fans would continue to support those clubs. They wouldn’t say, “Oh, no, we support the NFL, and if you’re not in the NFL, you don’t deserve to exist.” Well, what happens if the NFL doesn’t exist anymore? Does pro football just die? Of course not. It remakes itself and moves forward, just as it always has.

I don’t care what league my team plays in. I’m going to support my team. The league itself is merely the structure that facilitates the tribes, not the tribe itself. That’s why I care about what’s happening in the lower divisions of American soccer, because that’s what impacts my club, and I want my club to succeed. The league in which they play is ultimately irrelevant. Why try to force people to be fans of a race in which they have no horse?

It’s also I’m not paying much attention the NFL playoffs this year. Maybe if I had an urge to gamble on games, I’d care more, and I’ll still watch the Super Bowl, but as it stands, my tribe’s season is over. I’m waiting till next year. So it goes.

After opting not to sanction either the USL or the breakaway NASL for 2010, the U.S. Soccer Federation quietly grabbed everyone by the ear, yanked them into a smoke-free back room, knocked their heads together and said, “Okay, this is how it’s going to be this year.” The end result is a strange stopgap hybrid league with six USL clubs in one conference and six NASL clubs in the other.

And no more lawsuits. That was kind of a big deal.

Kenn Tomasch liveblogged the USSF conference call on the matter, which was dominated by USSF boss Sunil Gulati, and as expected, Gulati sounded like he was the only one satisfied with the arrangement. Tomasch wrote that acting NASL commissioner Jeff Cooper didn’t sound all that sincere when he said the temporary league was “A fair resolution for USSF, for the teams, the players and most of all for the fans.”

Here’s how it breaks down:

USL Conference: Austin Aztex, Minnesota Thunder, Portland Timbers, Puerto Rico Islanders, Rochester Rhinos, Tampa Bay Rowdies
NASL Conference: Carolina Railhawks, Crystal Palace Baltimore, Miami FC, Montreal Impact, A.C. St. Louis, Vancouver Whitecaps

Presumably, the league will run a 32-game schedule, with 20 in-conference ties and 12 inter-conference ties, and the conference champions will compete in the finals. Schedules and TV deals are expected to be announced before the end of the month.

It’s worth noting here that the dividing line here is not geographical, but political. It’s fairly clear which clubs took which side — save for Rochester and Tampa Bay, two of the clubs USL sued for breach of contract when they bolted to the NASL. Crystal Palace was also named in that lawsuit, but for whatever reason, they swapped places with Minnesota in this arrangement. The Atlanta Silverbacks and FC New York are also missing from this league, though the press conference revealed that neither club would be ready until 2011 — something nobody was really certain about until now.

The end result is a clear fork in the road for 2nd-division soccer in North America. The NASL is going one way, the USL is going another way, and once this hokey hybrid year is complete, they won’t cross paths again, except maybe in the U.S. Open Cup. The NASL will continue to push for full sanctioning in 2011, as Railhawks majority owner Selby Wellman said in this spin-happy interview with Triangle Offense’s David Fellerath:

“This is nothing more than a 2010 transition. After two and a half years of work, we are going to launch North American Soccer League for 2011. And during this transition year we will launch our league. It’s a lot of work to launch a league and that’ll be our focus at the league level, to launch a league this year. The transition is nothing more than a way to compete on the field. There are nine NASL teams and three USL teams. Three of the NASL teams (Rochester, Minnesota and Tampa Bay) will play in the USL Conference, but they are members of the NASL body and they will be playing in the NASL in 2011.”

Wellman makes it clear there won’t be much to stop this league from getting sanctioned next year, especially if the league owners continue working closely with the USSF on the matter.

“What (Gulati and the USSF) discovered in this process is that the standards for Division 2 need to be tightened up a little bit. There’s a piece of work that’s going to take place at the federation level very quickly to tighten up those standards in terms of league needs to be in order to be sanctioned a Division 2 league. The day after they revise those standards-we will apply the following day. We already have enough information to know that we will pretty much qualify already…

“I would expect to see stadium standards. For example, one of the major problems we had in the past with USL was stadiums: playing high-school football stadiums on not-properly sized soccer fields with football lines. That’s not proper. We need to make that a standard: You’ve got to be on a soccer field in a soccer stadium.”

If nothing else, that’s going to raise the bar of entry to the NASL. However, it might not do much to allay USSF fears that the NASL will attempt to compete with MLS in the long run. After all, it costs $40 million just to join MLS. That money could be put toward building a stadium — Saputo Stadium in Montreal seats more than 13,000 and cost $14 million to build — and paying quality players more than MLS could, and the U.S. Open Cup is still a gateway to the CONCACAF Champions League. On the flip side, though, that sort of thinking might encourage the kind of reckless spending that eventually killed the original NASL in the early 1980s. I doubt the current league owners wish to see that history repeat itself.

Meanwhile, what becomes of USL is still anybody’s guess. The USL Second Division appears to be operating this year with only six clubs: Charleston, Charlotte, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Real Maryland and Richmond. Do Austin, Puerto Rico and FC New York join them in 2011 to form one single pro league? And can they manage to obtain Division II sanctioning when several of these clubs probably won’t meet updated stadium guidelines?

There are tons of questions left to be answered about the future of American soccer below MLS. That said, this is the setup we have for one year, so we might as well make the most of it. I can’t wait to see how Fox Soccer Channel ends up advertising this. “The USSF Second Division! Only on FSC!” Doesn’t sound so hot, does it? Here’s hoping they find a sponsor for this mess. I hear Coca-Cola may have a few extra bucks to spend these days.

There it is. Avatar and its 3D blue-skinned hot chicks are making too much damn money at the box office, and now big media wants us to spend all this cash to duplicate that 3D experience at home so that we can all remain mesmerized by the pretty computer graphics and not think about just how shallow and artless the actual story is.

So now everyone is jumping on the 3D bandwagon — including ESPN, which has big plans to make you wear stupid glasses on your living room sofa just so you can see that Cristiano Ronaldo free kick coming right at your head. It’s dipping! Don’t flinch!

Please. 3DTV might the biggest waste of time and money this side of JaMarcus Russell. Most of us (except me) just spent our hard-earned cash to get nice flat panel HD screens or in our homes. We’re just now getting accustomed to 720p football, and we’re not the least bit bored with it. It’s awesome. And that’s not enough anymore? We’re now being asked to throw out perfectly good HDTVs that most people are still paying off and spend another $2K to $3K so that the action “pops out” at us? The cost of entry for HD was high enough, and it provided actual value. 3D doesn’t do that.

Number two, has anyone come up with a 3DTV solution that doesn’t involve wearing some sort of silly glasses? If you turn your head wrong, the 3D effect disappears. So if we get up and shout at the TV like your average football fan, or turn our heads back to our laptops to chat with friends about the game, it gets weird. Unless you’re a steward at Old Trafford, you can’t force football fans to sit still and passively watch football.

And yet everyone is jumping on this 3DTV bandwagon, because Hollywood demands that James Cameron’s gigantic blue cock ego must be stroked. They’re all missing the point. 3D is a gimmick meant to be consumed in small doses in IMAX theaters and dodecaplexes. People will pay for it there because it only costs $10 to $15 a pop for a night of entertainment. Ask those same people to blow $2,500 to kinda-sorta bring that gimmick home — especially when so many people just spent close to that on a new home theater — and they’ll laugh you out of the room.

IMAX 3D is something that can’t be duplicated by a home theater. That’s the point. It’s supposed to get you out of the house to experience something more engrossing than even the 10-foot HD image your friend’s projector throws at his wall. I enjoy a good IMAX 3D experience. In fact, if my local IMAX theater announced it was going to show England v. USA live in giant-screen 3D for $50 a head, I’d buy a ticket. That doesn’t mean I want to see Wayne Rooney’s ugly mug jumping out of my TV set — and even if I did, it still wouldn’t duplicate the experience I could get in an IMAX theater. After all, if it’s nightmare fuel you want, it might as well be larger than life.

Maybe if ESPN set up a network to show big games in IMAX theaters, it would find an audience. It won’t find that audience for a 3D sports network at home. I’m sticking with HDTV, thanks. 3DTV has FAIL written all over it.

You know what would be even more out of character than Landon Donovan sneaking across the border to play the Mexican lottery? Landon Donovan sneaking into Anfield to talk smack to Fernando Torres. “Two-nil, bitch! Ha! And you’re next, Gerrard!”

(Spotted on Soccer By Ives.)

Let’s just hope they’ll open the channel up, rather than continue to charge $15/month. Basic economics suggests this will happen. If Fox can get FS+ into 20 million homes and charge the carriers a mere $0.05 per subscriber, the channel will already bring in more cash than Setanta Sports and its mere 65,000 subscribers.

Damn. Look at that goal. Look at it. Then look at it again. Damn.

A few days ago, Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport called Clint Dempsey the best left winger in the Premier League. If he’s capable of strikes like that, though, Bob Bradley needs to get him off the wing and move him up front. The U.S. national team can find a few decent midfielders to play out wide. It won’t find a striker anywhere who can do that.

Granted, we still haven’t heard from Marcus Tracy yet, but he’s got some work to do if he wants to top that.

(Spotted on 101 Great Goals.)

Every change creates ripple effects, which makes it all the more difficult to see the big picture until enough time has passed and we can look at the bigger picture. If John Bassett hadn’t contracted lung cancer, would he have been able to prevent Donald Trump from leading the USFL over a cliff? Maybe, but we couldn’t see that while it was happening.

That’s why some soccer fans in America are having such a negative reaction to the news that Fox Sports International is about to buy out Setanta Sports USA. They only see the immediate change in the world in front of them. If Setanta goes away, it would mean on the surface that there would be less Premier League matches to watch each weekend.

Nothing, however, operates in a vacuum, and most of these fans are ignoring the $4.3 billion elephant in the room.

The problem with Setanta Sports has always been cost as a barrier to entry. You have to be a truly dedicated football fan — or a paid blogger who’s creative with tax write-offs — to shell out an extra $15 a month to watch that much more football. This is why Setanta has only been able to attract about 65,000 subscribers in the USA, giving it a monthly income of $975,000.

By comparison, Fox Soccer Channel is in 32 million homes and pulls about $0.06 per subscriber from cable and satellite providers. That’s $1.92 million a month, almost double what Setanta takes in monthly, and because it’s part of a massive media conglomerate, FSC is always going to have the upper hand.

They don’t get any more massive, however, than ESPN, which pulls a whopping $3.65 per subscriber from cable and satellite providers. Multiply that by 98 million homes, and you’re talking $357.7 million a month.

So it stands to reason that if company A 1.) brings in 366 times more cash than company B, and 2.) wants something you have, it might be willing and able to pay just a little bit more cash for it.

That something, of course, is the TV rights to the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League in the USA. Fox has these things for the next three years. ESPN, meanwhile, has the FIFA World Cup, and it doesn’t want all those world-class players to fade from memory after the World Cup is over.

Those world-class players don’t play here. The world’s best baseball, basketball and hockey players play in the USA, sure, but the world’s best footballers don’t play in MLS. Hell, most U.S. national team members play in Europe these days. Even Landon Donovan is in Merseyside right now, and Stuart Holden seems headed for the UK himself. Given the current state of MLS labor negotiations, we don’t even know for sure if our domestic league season will start on time.

Plus, the Premier League fits ESPN’s programming schedule better than anything American club soccer has to offer, and the quality of play is generally higher. The WWL can pull much better ratings with baseball and basketball in prime time while filling its weekend morning and weekday afternoon schedules with soccer. EURO 2008 was cheap mid-day programming for ESPN, but the Nielsen ratings proved there was an appetite for top-shelf soccer in this country.

So why didn’t ESPN just acquire the TV rights to the Premier League and Champions League itself, rather than ceding them to Fox? For the same reason ESPN let Setanta UK fail before swooping in themselves — to save money. Let Fox shell out the big bucks to get those TV rights, or to try and mesh what’s left of  Setanta’s corporate culture with its own. Sub-licensing Premier League matches is much cheaper for ESPN, who only has to pay for a studio team in Bristol and make way for the league’s own satellite feed.

As for the Champions League, Fox’s buyout of Setanta allows them to keep this year’s knockout stage exclusively on its own networks. UEFA set up the schedule for the knockout stage so that only two matches would be happening simultaneously on any given day. That means one match on FSC and one on Fox Sports Net. What happens next season remains uncertain, but I think Fox wants to keep this competition to itself.

And what about the FA Cup or the other leagues in Scotland, France and Russia? Fox could easily sub-license those to ESPN as well, and the WWL could shuttle them over to ESPN360, which already has La Liga, Serie A and the Football League, among other things.

So do not fret over the Setanta buyout, fellow soccer fans. You won’t be getting fewer games as a result of this deal. You’ll just watch them on different channels.

Now, if you’re a rugby union fan, you’ll probably have to shift your cash to Rugby Zone or some other online feed — unless those matches wind up on ESPN360, too, which is entirely possible. That’s where the Australian Football League ended up last year. If you’re Irish and want to watch the GAA… well, honestly, I don’t know what to tell you at this point. This deal was always about those filthy garrison games. You might be out of luck.

The rest of us, though, will be saving $180 a year for the same amount of football, which is awesome. I’d use my savings to get season tickets for my local club, if only Sunil Gulati would stop trying to stamp it out of existence. He’s looking more like Agent Smith to me every day.

And the best part about it? I didn’t buy it. It was a Christmas gift.

Sure, I did have to buy all my HDMI cables and throw $100 at DirecTV to get my set-top box upgraded, and my satellite bill will jump as well, but the TV itself? Didn’t cost me a dime.

There’s a lesson in this for Chris Johnson. Going into the final week of the NFL regular season today, the Tennessee Titans running back needs 128 yards to reach 2,000 rushing yards in a single season. Johnson, however, may or may not be hedging on the gifts he buys his linemen this year. Last year, he bought his linemen 55″ flat-screen HDTVs for helping him gain 1,200 yards. This year, he reportedly said he would buy them all cars — except then he said he wouldn’t.

“I never promised any cars. I said the offensive linemen wanted cars if I got 2,000 yards. I never promised anything like that. I’ll have to think of something nice.”

You can imagine why he’d be hesitant. Even if he only spends $25K on each of his five starting linemen, that’s a $125K outlay — no small chunk of change, even for the future first pick in every fantasy draft next season.

This is proof, however, that Johnson has yet to learn the first rule of being rich: Don’t spend your own money to get stuff.

This is how rich people stay rich. They get other people to buy stuff for them. You think those Hilton and Kardashian girls spend their own money on those expensive clothes? Hell, no. They convince designers that they have influence in the marketplace, and those designers fall all over themselves to give them free stuff.

Take a look at Malcolm Glazer. When it came time for him to buy Manchester United, he didn’t spend a dime of his own cash. He financed the whole deal, and he’s letting the fans pay for it. Sure, the fans aren’t happy about it, but did that keep them away from Old Trafford today for a 3rd-round FA Cup tie? Of course not. Glazer knows the fans aren’t going to stop supporting a club that’s in contention for major and minor trophies every year. Why not let those fans buy the club for him?

(Of course, the fans won’t be there for a 4th-round FA Cup tie, but there you go.)

Johnson is on the verge of becoming only the sixth running back in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards in a single season. That’s easily worth at least a million in endorsement cash. That is the money that would pay for those Escalades for his linemen, and there would be plenty left over to help him through the seemingly inevitable 2011 work stoppage. All he has to do is show up for a few commercials, and voila! The linemen get theirs, Johnson keeps his paychecks, and everyone’s happy.

That’s how you do it in the 21st century, folks. You build your reputation, and other people will pay for it. 2,000 yards is all the reputation Johnson needs to get that sweet, sweet endorsement cash — and if he can’t turn 2,000 yards into seven figures, he needs a new agent. The economy might be bad, but it’s not that bad.