Will Fans Continue To Blame Owners And Players After NFL Lockout Ends?

Mike Silver of Yahoo! Sports pretty much nailed it when talking about what the reaction will be from the fans when the NFL lockout finally ends:

As the owners and players prepare to reconvene this week in New York City following the Fourth of July holiday, a deal is very much there for the making. And if NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith and their respective table mates can pull it off in the next few weeks, they’ll all be heroes, and this Lost Offseason will be forgiven and forgotten before you can say fantasy draft.

Yes...for the vast majority of the fans this will be the case. Most fans will be so thrilled that football is back (!) that they won’t bother going back and remembering all those things they said about the greedy owners and players.

We’ve been advocating the importance of keeping the big picture in mind during these negotiations. When the NFL lockout started last March, there wasn’t -- and still isn’t to this day -- any real harm in the NFL lockout. Sure, offseasons were missed and fans were upset but the revenue wasn’t being drastically affected.

The owners and players will see their pockets decrease significantly if they start losing preseason games. As of now, there’s still time to do a deal so that no preseason games are missed.

And if that’s what they do, the fans will forget that, at one point over the summer, they promised not to watch football anymore thanks to the lockout.