With a possible lockout looming, it occurred to me the NFL is structured in a way that almost guarantees conflict between what's best for the fans and the sport on one hand, and for the owners on the other. For starters, if you need your team to make a profit, i.e., do significantly better than break-even, you're not rich enough to own an NFL team which is of massive cultural and economic importance to the city in which it's located. The only goal should be winning a Super Bowl, and every team should be able and willing to take whatever short term pain necessary toward that end.

Second, it's ridiculous that attendance, sky boxes and jersey sales matter. They're just a rough proxy for on field success and should be shared just like TV revenue. The NFL should make investments in stadiums with that money to ensure the total pool is large, and take a cut for operations and an incentive to run a tight league. Third, teams should earn money by making the playoffs and advancing. If you win the Super Bowl, you get a $400 million bonus or whatever the appropriate share of the total pie is. You'd get say $200 million for making it there and losing, $100 for making the title game, $50 million for making the playoffs, $25 million for having a winning record, etc. Of course, these numbers are just guesses, it might be twice that once the money was divvied up. And if you're the Panthers, you should get only some minimal revenue this year.

This will never happen because the owners won't want to gamble at those stakes, but to me that's just a problem with the owners who aren't rich enough to run the league properly. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates would have no problem affording a $150 million a year entry fee for the big prize. Other lesser billionaires could co-own teams (Already teams like the Giants with the Maras and Tisch's do it) to pool risk. You'd keep the salary cap so that a Super Bowl winner couldn't simply buy every top player in the league, but align the owners incentives with that of the fans.

There's nothing more odious in sports than an owner compromising the quality of his team for the sake of his bottom line except an owner moving a team (which belongs to the city more than it does to him) for the sake of seeking a new stadium deal. This would eliminate all of that. The NFL would have every incentive to make venues as nice as possible to grow the pool, and owners would have every incentive to innovate on the field. I don't care how much money Jerry Jones makes or loses, and I doubt many of you do, either. If I'm a Cowboys fan, I want him to win, even if that means putting aside his ego and hiring competent personnel evaluators and coaches. With all that money on the line, even meddling owners would have to think twice.