The NFL Lockout—in Orange County?

Let’s be up front about it: The National Football League lockout has very little impact on those of us planted in Orange County.

We can’t even look to Los Angeles for vicarious pro football thrills. The best we can do, if we want to stay regional, is follow the perpetually disappointing San Diego Chargers into yet another year of promising draft picks and savvy trades, followed by Mission: Impossible-style self-destruct sequences.

If we’re willing to travel north, there’s always San Francisco, of course. But that’s no good for me; I started hating the 49ers back when they were manhandling the Los Angeles Rams in the late '80s.

The Raiders, you say? Sure, but the Raiders aren’t going to win anything until Al Davis stops using horror movie-style organ implants to prolong his life. I know the players love Al, but how the fans do is beyond me.

If I sound bitter, I am. Really, I’m jealous of legitimate football fans everywhere—especially Raiders fans—because they have loyalties that I can no longer pretend to. Every year I narrowly avoid being roped into a Fantasy Football league because I fear it will be the final infidelity in the football affair I began as a teenager.

It’s not that I don’t love individual players—I do—but I love teams more. The camaraderie. The key block. The punishing defensive tackle that energizes an offense just taking the field.

Look, I know the common refrain is that the players are just in it for money. They’re too greedy, etc. And that’s certainly what the PR firms representing the NFL would have you believe.

It’s true, of course, that the game has changed since free-agency helped inflate star players’ salaries, but that’s only part of the story. Football is literally destroying its players.

More and more evidence is mounting that professional football players are subject to neurological impairment far more often than the national average. Football players between the ages of 30 and 49 are 19 times more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, according to the NFL’s own 2009 report.

Add to that the fact that the average salary of a pro player is about $790,000 a year and that the average career is just under four years, and it’s hard to see the dispute between the owners and the players union in a way that favors the owners. Living like kings for life, most players are not.

Obviously, the players union is not blameless: it is largely responsible for underfunding the players' retirement and health care needs. But given the damage the game does to its players, the owners’ asking for two more regular season games sort of looks like Caesar giving a big thumbs down to the gladiators.

So, even though we don’t have a team in the greater Los Angeles/Orange County area, I will be rooting for the players in the current dispute.

The owners have been dominating the game these past decades. It would be nice to see a union win for a change.