This has been quite a week in the business of sports. Club owners in baseball and basketball have settled their labor disputes with the unions representing their players through the arduous process of collective bargaining. While the parties in baseball were expected to reach an agreement, their history of failed...

Every time there is a new scandal involving college athletics hope arises among observers that the latest incident will result in a wholesale rethinking of the entire "amateur" enterprise. When Woody Hayes punched a kid playing for Clemson and Bobby Knight choked one of his "student-athletes," the media seemed interested...

The death of Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis has produced an abundance of contradictory remembrances of the man who was proud to be considered a maverick. Davis confronted the National Football League cartel in federal court when his fellow owners would not allow him to relocate his franchise to the...

Although the college football season is in full swing, most of the attention of the media and the public has been on the frenetic pace of schools moving from one conference to another in search of gold. Like those who rushed to the west to pan for nuggets, the universities...

The recent headlines about the perversions in college football have appalled observers, but no one could really have been surprised. The University of Miami fiasco is only the latest in a series of contretemps that spread back over a century. While enforced amateurism is really a post-World War...

The NFL owners and the NFL Players Association have finally decided to play "Let's Make a Deal!" That is not surprising, considering the amount of money that would have been squandered had the parties not reached an agreement. I had told my friends not to worry about the NFL...

Now that the NBA has joined the NFL in lockout mode, it is time to think about what we are going to do with all our new free time. For some, there will be wailings, dismay and disgust. How can all these guys take away our gusto? What right do...

Word has leaked out of early collective bargaining negotiations between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association that, in addition to the usual set of issues involving revenue sharing, luxury taxes and player benefits, the parties are discussing a fundamental change in the structure of the leagues....

While the fans in Dallas (and Cleveland) are understandably elated at the outcome of the NBA finals, I feel some sadness. One of our greatest modern basketball players, Lebron James, obviously overcome by the series loss of his nouveau Heat, has exposed the raw underbelly of professional sports by...

Now that the finals of the NBA playoffs are set -- Miami against Dallas -- we can focus for a few weeks on high-quality professional basketball and try to ignore the high-quality labor relations work going on in corporate offices in New York City. The "Heat" of Miami --...

A majority of the three-judge panel hearing the NFL's appeal from the district court's decision enjoining its lockout of its employees seems determined to give the league the victory it seeks. Most of the media has simply played the interim decision as a continuation of the stay of the...

This week Commissioner Bud Selig announced that he would exercise his reserved power to save a baseball club from its owner. The Los Angeles, nee Brooklyn, Dodgers have been part of organized baseball for over 120 years. The club has persevered through thick and thin (mostly thin), although its legions...

This has not been a particularly good time for sports. We have not seen an overabundance of positive role-modeling. Barry Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice and possibly may serve jail time, although that appears unlikely. Kobe Bryant was fined $100,000 by the NBA for hurling an anti-gay slur...

For reasons I do not totally understand, after four days of wall-to-wall college basketball my NCAA brackets place me in the 96th percentile. While this is not quite in President Obama's league -- he is at 99.9th percentile -- it is a "personal best" -- at least so far....

In an effort to take a break from the lingering winter and the dismal news coming out of the NFL-NFLPA negotiations, my wife and I took our first annual Spring Training trip. Just in case you have never taken in the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues, let me highly recommend them....

Those of you who regularly read this column know that I have been cautioning for months that it was too early to start to fret about the NFL negotiations with its Players Association. It is no longer too early. Let the "fretting" begin.

This week the collective bargaining agreement between...

It is almost time to fix blame for what some see as the impending disaster in collective bargaining between the NFL and the NFL Players Association. This week's negotiation sessions produced no results. The sport has operated brilliantly without a work stoppage for almost a quarter century. Even though the...

The story of Gil Meche, erstwhile right-handed pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, is certainly one for the books. Early in 2007, Meche signed a five-year, $55 million dollar guaranteed contract as a free agent with the Royals after a particularly noteworthy 2006 campaign with Seattle. Many folks thought the...

We have wasted too much ink (or electrons in the case of the Internet) on the issue of whether we should abolish the current college football bowl system and adopt an NCAA playoff as we have in every other college sport. The arguments have all been raised and re-raised...

Thirty-five years ago today, a labor arbitrator changed professional team sports forever. We have become so accustomed to multi-million dollar contracts for players in our favorite sports that we forget that it was not always so. At one time in the not-so-distant past, club owners controlled their reserved players...