Posted by Teddy Panos, Sun Staff

Looks like the NFL’s owners, having just signed a new collective bargaining agreement and averting a potentially cap-less year, are hell bent on destroying the money making machine they’ve created.

The issues are very much the same as the last time this came up, so I won’t bore you with a recap of my take back then. (Feel free to read the posting here) I’ll simply repeat that this is really a battle the big market owners need to hash out with their small market brethren. Perhaps it gets solved with increased revenue sharing, or maybe even raising the salary cap minimum so that cheap teams like the Bengals don’t continuously spend under the cap while raking in Bob Kraft’s and Jerry Jones’ millions.

I understand what Kraft, Jones, Dan Snyder et al are saying: why should they prop up teams like the Bengals and Cardinals and reward them for not running their business the proper way. Of course, what they should also take into account is the fact they run their teams the right way has made their franchises much more valuable than the league’s lesser valued squads and opened up other avenues of revenue not available to lousy teams or small market teams that really do try, like the Buffalo Bills.

How much money do you think Kraft is going to make off of that Patriots Place shopping and entertainment complex? You don’t think Jerry Jones is going to make a killing off of his new stadium and all the ancillary venues he puts around it? You think that same revenue avenue is available to Ralph Wilson in upstate New York or the Brown family in Cincinnati? Who the hell wants to go to “Bengals Place” and celebrate that crappy franchise?

So once again, my advice to the NFL’s billionaire’s club (imagine that, me thinking I’m smart enough to give these financial titans business advice…how’s that for arrogance…LOL) is get your financial house in order amongst yourselves. Make nice with the small market guys by sharing a little more dough. Let the players keep their 60% revenue share. Tweak some minor things like creating a rookie pay scale, as long as that money saved goes to the vets. And think of instituting a salary floor to force the cheapskates into spending more of their money.

Because once you let that genie out of the bottle by potentially going without a salary cap, it’s going to be mighty difficult to get her back in the bottle.

That's the view from here...how do you see it?