Tony Romo’s NFFC Delayed: NFL Strikes It Down Again

I love Inside The Star. I love everything about it and the chance its given me to lend my thoughts about the Dallas Cowboys, the National Football League, and the occasional tangent.

We preach the notion that Inside The Star is the “voices of a nation” for a reason. We strive to deliver content that will resonate 100% with the fans – you are our target audience.

This platform allows us to speak our thoughts with full honesty, and that’s what I’m doing right now.

~~~

Tony Romo’s National Fantasy Football Convention (NFFC) has officially been postponed. No, this isn’t a headline from a year ago. This is news as of Tuesday, June 14th, 2016.

The articles you’ll read and the tweets you’ll see will tell you that it just couldn’t work. They’ll say that sponsors dropped out, players dropped out, or some hybrid of everything here.

The truth of the matter is that the NFL put their foot down for the second year in a row and won’t allow this to happen. Why? They want a piece of that pie.

The National Football League is one of the most successful businesses on this planet, and to be honest part of the reason is because of this mentality. They carve every penny out of every single one of their properties, this time at the expense of the fans (again).

If you’re unaware, I’ve alluded to this already, this happened last year. The NFFC was set to go down in Las Vegas, but the NFL had a problem with casinos being involved. As silly as that is I think we can all semi understand that, and that’s why the NFFC moved to Pasadena, California for 2016. No problem, right?

Wrong.

The NFL is still not running this show. That’s the problem. So what do they do? They nip it in the bud.

It’s Not Just Business, It’s Personal

So many people have sacrificed to make this happen: the coordinators of the NFFC, the players involved, and most personally to us… the fans who have spent non-refundable money on travel, lodging, and tickets.

I can say personally because it is personal. I’ve been talking about it on Twitter, Periscope, and the #RJOShow how Bobby Belt (Host of Cowboys Cast) and I were going to be there. Our objective? To deliver the highest quality content for you to enjoy from afar.

If you’ll allow me, I’ll get even more personal for a second. I’d already planned in my head how the first article I wrote from Pasadena was going to go. It was going to be titled I Hopped Off The Plane At LAX For The NFFC in tribute to the ballad Party In The USA by Miley Cyrus.

I was going to include a funny song written to the theme of hers with words that matched our situation. The best part was that I was going to at one point take a shot at DeMarco Murray, reference him being a Titan now, and drop it right before she says “This is definitely not a Nashville party” so that it all made sense. That joke will never happen now!

And it’s not going to happen because the NFL is once again putting potential (and modest) profits over their fans.

The NFL: A Business Above All Else

As a young boy watching football, I absolutely loved the game. Everything about it. I mean everything. Down to the most minute detail of the jerseys. I assumed that everything the league did was done in fairness. The most important thing is the fans, right? That’s what matters most!

When we grow up, the naiveties of life reveal themselves to us, but they do it softly. In due time. The NFL does it with a punch to your gut.

They are intentionally standing in the way of hundreds – if not thousands – of fans interacting with their favorite players in ways that have never been done before. The experience that they are halting is not achievable in any other way. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they are crushing dreams.

Why? Because the money you’re paying for that once in a lifetime deal isn’t going into their piggy banks. Not one dime. The sad truth is that even if it was just one dime, they’d still do this. Money is that important to them.

Let’s assume that an average ticket to an NFL game is $300. This seems fair for the average considering there are box seats, blah blah blah. Let’s also assume that each stadium can hold 70,000 people. This all feels fairly conservative, but hey let’s keep math simple.

There are 256 games in an NFL regular season. Right there that’s $5,376,000,000. Just on tickets for the regular season games. The most expensive ticket to the NFFC was $745. Say they sold 10,000 of them. That’s a gross exaggeration, but hey. Let’s roll. The NFFC would have then made $7,450,000.

Say the NFFC donated 100% their profits to the NFL. That would be 14% of what the NFL makes during the regular season. That’s not counting playoffs, not counting sponsors, not counting TV deals, not counting jersey sales.

So the NFL wants to rip off the fans over what could, in an intense exaggeration, be at maximum 5-10% of their annual income. That’s it!

Word trickled out that Commissioner Roger Goodell made $34.1M in 2014. Money talks.

It’s a sad reality that the NFL is such a greedy monster. It really is.

We Love Football: No Matter What

While we’re all disappointed that they are putting such a small amount of dollars ahead of the satisfaction of fans, let’s remember why we love this game for a second.

We love football. We love the action. We love the drama. We love the debate. We love the touchdowns. We love the broken tackles. We love that feeling when we wake up on Sunday and our team’s got a big game going. We love when we get the win we needed most.

We love football. No matter what. While some corporate entities are choosing to take advantage of that fact, I propose that in spite of that we celebrate this game.

Ultimately the NFL can’t stand in the way of that, right? They can’t stop us from loving football. That’s ours.

That’s how we triumph.

We love football.

For now. And for always.

As the late Steve Sabol once said, “Life is great. Football is better.”