The NFL's players — and owners — are threatening its business model

By all accounts, National Football League players have the worst collective bargaining agreement in sports.

The rookie deals are bad, only a paltry portion of any contract is guaranteed, and the players are subject to being cut at any time to help their team meet a merciless salary cap. The NFL's owners, as a whole, have acted more arrogantly and greedily than the collective ownership of any other sport.

However, if they want to save their sport's position as the unquestioned champion of American sports, they need to act quickly to quell player behavior that threatens the long-term financial health of the league.

In order to accomplish this, NFL owners should take two painful steps: 1) figure out a way to address or stop the spreading national anthem protests that are alienating the NFL's fan base; and 2) fairly compensate their players.

It's easy to point fingers at the players and national anthem protests as the villains in this story, but doing so ignores the very real role the NFL's ownership has played in creating this sorry state of affairs.

TV is king

Billions of barrels of ink (both digital and real) have been spilled over the national anthem protest issue, most of which has focused on whether the protest is justified or not. Americans on both sides of the issue will continue to disagree about that for years to come.

But what no one can disagree about is that the protests are damaging the league's image and television ratings. For now, networks seem willing to continue to pay for NFL programming regardless of actual viewership, but you can bet that is a trend that will not continue.

The NFL has seen its share of scandals over the years: the concussion controversy, the shamefully light suspensions for repeated criminal behavior on the part of players, and even scandals that have implicated the integrity of the on-field product like Deflategate.

Through it all, one inexorable truth protected the NFL from consequences of these scandals: Americans kept turning on their television sets to watch games in record numbers. Time after time, the NFL and its players generated outrage and negative commentary, but never enough to actually stop people from watching.

There are signs, however, that the fire Colin Kaepernick started may have finally encouraged people to turn off their television sets when the NFL goes live on TV. As the Daily Wire notes, the NFL's ratings were down significantly for its marquee season-opening match between the defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, a 2016 playoff team.

League-wide ratings were down 8 percent in 2016, and early indications are that the slide is poised to continue: A significant number of NFL fans have responded to recent polls by threatening to turn off the NFL for good if the anthem protests continue.

What the NFL needs to do

The protests have put the NFL ownership in a serious pickle. While they are tremendously unpopular with the NFL's paying fan base, they appear to be growing in popularity with the NFL's players, and NFL owners surely realize that any ham-handed attempt to shut the protests down will lead to open revolt.

The NFL needs to come up with a creative solution that will allow the players to feel that their voice is heard without the fans feeling that their entire country is being disrespected by the players they came to watch.

Some have suggested that the NFL should just quietly stop playing the national anthem before games, but such a response would likely make the problem worse. Players would notice and complain to the media, fans would notice, and the problem would get worse.

The only workable solution that is immediately apparent would be for NFL ownership to somehow convince players to reshape their protest so that it does not involve the national anthem itself. The NFL-watching public probably does not mind that the players are protesting per se. What sticks in the craw of the average NFL fan is that the protest is perceived as being disrespectful of the country as a whole.

Almost everyone would acknowledge that there is always room for improvement in every country, including America. However, even a marginally patriotic person will get riled up when they see someone spitting on an American flag or openly disrespecting the country's national anthem.

Why the NFL owners can't convince players to modify their protests

The problem right now is that the NFL ownership has no credibility with its players, due to long-simmering tensions between ownership and the players over the way players are treated and compensated.

The NFL's salary cap this year is set at $167 million, which is less than Major League Baseball's 2017 luxury tax threshold of $189 million, even though NFL teams carry a 53-man roster and MLB teams carry only 25, and even though the NFL made about 50 percent more revenue than MLB in 2016.

One could fairly argue that, from a pure labor perspective, the NFL is exploiting its players, relative to other sports leagues. There is also a growing body of evidence that the physical toll an NFL career exacts on the human body is different in kind (not merely degree) from that exacted by a career in other sports.

There's some degree of class envy that causes some people to just not care about the fate of anyone who makes over $1 million a year playing sports. The capitalist perspective should probably be that the top 100 or 200 people in any human endeavor will probably get rich performing that endeavor if they work hard and manage their careers properly, but capitalist sentiment (and consistency) doesn't often reach fans of the business of sports.

Nonetheless, the facts speak for themselves: NFL players contribute more, to a business that makes more, and in return they receive far less and are treated worse than their contemporary athletes in other sports.

The current NFL collective bargaining agreement runs through 2020, and the players' bitterness over this reality is already spilling over into public. NFLPA president Eric Winston is already on record predicting that a lockout is a virtual certainty, and that the players don't care if the league dies as a result of that lockout. This is not a dynamic you expect to see from two groups that are prepared to talk to each other.

The NFL's challenge then is to first establish credibility with its players, and then to find a way to encourage the NFLPA to channel the players' protests away from the national anthem. It's not likely to be a quick or easy process, but it's necessary for the survival of the game itself.