NFL Lays Off Staff

While as a commuter I have been somewhat enjoying the slowing world demand for oil - particularly in the distilled form known as gasoline - I have spent considerable time worrying myself about economic prospects.

For this, I direct your attention to your local paper. One look at the Sunday newspaper - usually chock full of, at the very least, entry level or low skilled jobs - will tell you that there's not a whole lot of there, there. The jobs that are advertised are highly selective and/or quite specific: Teacher of Special Education with a teaching certificate in Chinese; Vice President of Petroleum extraction - 15 years in crude oil production... I don't usually review the Sunday paper for jobs, but I have to say it does provide a reasonable barometer for such as exercise as local demand for labor.

The National Football League on the other hand would seem to be about as solid an investment as they come. Not so much - it would seem you could add Forbes' wealthiest sport to the Forbes Layoff Tracker. The league is reducing - "RIFFING" to us HR folks - 150 staff of their 1100 staff or about 14% and reducing the cost of this years playoff tickets - likely anticipating those sales to slump.

Revenues for the on field product are good - most of the games are sold out - but the league correctly identifies that those tickets were bought well in advance of the melt down. Oh, and there is that small matter of a reliance on corporate box revenue - if the corporations aren't there, hard to sell seats to them. My guess is that the League is VERY concerned with companies not re-upping their boxes. Revenues stand at approximately $6.5 Billion, but they're handling this in a planful way...refreshing really, given the debacle going on in Washington over the auto makers.

Back in October, the NBA announced staff reductions of 9% - it is curious to me how the NBA had the insight to a "wobbly economy" over a year ago, yet those in the know at the government ranks seem to be taken aback by this enough that by the time they realized anything was wrong the only thing to discuss was the value of a banking bailout.

It does kind of make me wonder if that bailout had never happened, if we ever would have heard about General Motors problems - what with Ford pulling out of a request for money last night...but that's for another entry. It REALLY makes me wonder if the sots throwing barbs at the auto executives are doing so to divert attention to their own inactivity and willful negligence on the economic front.

Just as interesting to me is that the NFL cuts are at NFL Films and at their internet production facilities. Major League Baseball has also cut 4.5% of its staff at their internet arms. This will certainly reduce some of the more interesting aspects of their web delivery, but in the end the game on the field is the product so it will be interesting to see how - if at all - web delivery of the games is curtailed.

And last while the other leagues are paring staff, the National Hockey League has said they're not even "planning of thinking about" laying off staff. The NHL, mind you, is widely considered to be the least mindful, and least well managed of the four major sports.

What is worthy of note is that as the leagues are pairing back the one thing that has taken us away more often than not from tragedy and hard times has been sport, but at this juncture, even sport is not immune. But sport, it would seem, is a far more prudent and wise activity than "real business" particularly since they seemed to know what was going on better than a year before Detroit did.