Fuck the players ... again

From Lawyers, Guns and Money:

During the upcoming NFL labor negotiations, I’m either going to have to avoid reading much about it or be careful to watch my blood pressure.   The journalists who cover all sports (with a few honorable exceptions) seem to seem their role during labor negotiations as pretending that the interests of the owners and the interests of the fans are one and the same no matter how absurd or self-serving the arguments the owners put forward, but as Pierce says given the career and life expectancies of NFL players the inevitable sucking up to NFL owners is especially grotesque.
I’ve written this before, but as I public service I would like to note the following, which seems to escape both a majority of fans and a majority of sports reporters.

Distribution of money that comes from reductions or artificial limitations on player salaries:

• Teachers, cancer researchers, Haitian orphans, and other comparative groups often cited as more deserving of money paid to athletes in order to justify owners screwing players:   0%
• Extremely wealthy, usually lavishly taxpayer-subsidized owners: 100%

…And, as NonyNony reminds us in comments, “Amount that ticket prices would be reduced by if players were payed less: 0%.”

And the crazed hatred of anything Union-related just keeps on growing ... mostly among those who would benefit most. Welcome to the wage-slavery galley boys, take an oar and sit right down.

And in related football news:

Word comes that Reggie Bush will forfeit the 2005 Heisman Trophy because the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) has ruled him ineligible for accepting money from an agent while still playing football in college.
I have seen many disgustingly hypocritical organizations in my life, but the NCAA ranks at the top. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the NCAA is a cartel, which licenses universities to establish franchises that participate in its branded market niche, university atheletics. It's a scam unique to the United States, other countries having had the good fortune of avoiding this particular institutional setup.

The NCAA protects its niche in the sports entertainment market by -- get this -- preventing the players from getting any share of the millions and millions of dollars that flow through the system. And by trumpeting the moral superiority of this system, in which student-athletes play for the love of the game, rather than for the filthy lucre of the professionals. That this system provides a healthy living for thousands of sportswriters, and huge salaries for the coaches at the top, doesn't stain them, of course, because they are concerned with the "growth" of their athletes.
Probably the choicest bit of hypocrisy comes in keeping players from being "exploited" by agents who would -- gasp -- pay them in advance of their signing professional contracts. That's right, the NCAA tries to "protect" athletes by keeping them from being paid! And what harm is produced by these agents? They break NCAA rules, of course. The role of sports media is to imbue these rules, which are no more than tricks of the trade by which the the NCAA scam artists keep the money to themselves, with some sort of vague moral worth. "OMG, he broke the rules! The rules, the rules!"
I have an analogy which makes the hypocrisy clear. Imagine that college theater produced millions and millions of dollars in revenue. Imagine that the NCDA (National Collegiate Drama Association) established "rules" by which the money goes to the directors and lighting designers, and whoever else can leech off the labor of the student actors, but none goes to the actors themselves. Further imagine that the NCDA "protects" those student actors by making rules against Hollywood or Broadway agents who might want to give the best actors money while in school, in hopes of securing their patronage when they sign their professional contracts.
But that's ridiculous, right? The NCDA would be laughed out of existence, though perhaps a wry chuckle might come their way, acknowledging their chutzpah in trying to imbue their "rules" with some sort of moral worth, when it's clearly just a scam. So where, tell me, are the howls of laughter when the NCAA pulls its scam?