Tuesday, after hearing that the league's lockout had been lifted by a federal court in Minneapolis, some NFL players showed up for work.
They were politely turned away.
Imagine the inevitable escalation. Next time the players show up, they will be targeted by poison-tipped arrows and Kenny G CDs. The time after that, they will be scalded by vats of boiling oil and invited to listen to Zygi Wilf recite the Gettysburg Address. Where will man's inhumanity to man end?
Actually, in the court of public opinion, this battle should already be over. The NFL players -- a loose-knit and sometimes dysfunctional group of young men with short-term careers, frequent head trauma and a history of losing that would make the Timberwolves blush -- have whipped the owners the way viral infections whip Joe Mauer.
We all know that the players who reported to work on Tuesday did so for strategic and symbolic reasons. If NFL teams allowed them to meet with coaches or work out, that would provide evidence that the lockout had ended. If NFL teams turned away players, then the owners would look even more petty and imbecilic than usual.
Because we knew this, it is logical to assume that owners knew this. And yet they allowed themselves to be hustled, proving that billionaire owners of sports teams are rarely as savvy as their portfolios would lead you to believe.
Taking the players' side in this dispute is rough. It puts me on the same side as Drew Rosenhaus' smirk, Brandon Marshall's rap sheet, Jay Cutler's sneer and DeMaurice Smith's hat, which I hope came with a really good bowl of soup.
There's not much of a choice, though. You can either side with the players, who are willing to work, and work under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement that made the owners lots of money, or you can side with the owners, who have shut down a game at the height of its popularity so they can afford plutonium countertops on their ninth yachts.
