Send in the clowns - Ingles

They held the NFL draft in New York City this week, the whole sport trying to run behind or hide behind the old players reading off the picks. Afterward we heard about how great the television ratings were. They were tremendous for the Royal Wedding, too. But when the wedding was over, Prince William and his bride didn't go back to Buckingham Palace and find the doors padlocked.

They booed Commissioner Roger Goodell at the draft, because that was a way of booing the whole sport. To do more damage to the NFL brand than this lockout and un-lockout and re-lockout have done you'd have to be Donald Trump giving a speech in Vegas, now that Donald apparently thinks that being a candidate for President is the same as an f-bomb Comedy Central roast.

The boos weren't about the real courts where the NFL finds itself these days, just the court of public opinion.

And as long as there is a game between the Packers and Saints on Thursday night, Sept. 8, as long as the doors are back open on the night the NFL is supposed to officially open back up for business, they don't care. Neither side.

Oh, nobody wants to have a league this rich and this popular look like clown school in front of the world. Nobody would want that. But the owners care a lot more about Sept. 8, and how much more money they get to keep, than they do about getting banged around by fans at Radio City.

The NFL once looked like the league that runs the best. Now it looks like the opposite of that. It starts with the same lack of trust between owners and players that there used to be in baseball. Baseball has its own problems, you bet, from the Dodgers to the Mets to attendance that has taken a dip over the past few years. It still runs so much better than pro football, and in pro basketball right now there is nothing to discuss.

In February, we got that wonderful old-school Super Bowl between the Packers and the Steelers. Now, less than three months later, the only game that matters in the NFL, at least in the current ridiculous state of the NFL, is this one:

Minnesota vs. St. Louis.

Not the Vikings against the Rams. No, the Minnesota judges against the St. Louis judges. That was the whole ballgame this week, for now, anyway. Because making lasting judgments about this fight between football owners and players makes about as much sense as deciding who is going to win an NBA playoff game after watching the first two minutes.

So the real action, despite those big TV ratings, in the NFL this week wasn't all the quarterbacks drafted, starting with Cam (Where's Mine?) Newton, a No. 1 pick who sometimes makes Tim Tebow look like a more accurate thrower in comparison. The real action started with a judge in Minnesota lifting the 45-day NFL lockout last Monday and then the owners running to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis to get a stay on that.

I never like to talk about gambling in this column, but I have to tell you, I took St. Louis and gave the judge-and-a-half.

In between, of course, there was an embarrassment to the league as big as the money both sides are fighting about: The pictures of NFL players, some of them NFL stars, being told to leave their own practice facilities.

The league lost one to Susan Richard Nelson, District Judge for the United States District Court in Minnesota, appointed to that position by President Obama himself.

Then the league won one in St. Louis by a 2-to-1 vote, two judges appointed by George W. Bush supporting the temporary stay and one judge Kermit Bye (he didn't invent the bye week in professional football, though the way things are going anything is possible) appointed by Bill Clinton, being the lone dissenter.

Bye wrote that he didn't consider the NFL to be in a state of emergency, and immediately sounded like the smartest guy in the room and maybe the whole sport because Alabama is an actual state of emergency, and the NFL is just a state of clowns these days, which is a little bit insulting to the circus, but there you have it.

The state of emergency, NFL version, will come in the summer if the doors to training camps are closed the way the doors to the training facilities were closed this week. For now, Goodell and the owners, especially the ones who have accumulated more debt than they dreamed possible when the economy was still flush, will let you keep hitting them with pies to the face as they try desperately to get out of court and back to the negotiating table.

Boo all you want about the doors being closed right now. You don't matter. All that matters is the doors being opened the night of Sept. 8. The day the start of the season is in actual jeopardy is the day they all get out of District Courts and Appeals Courts and make a deal. (source Mike Luipica – New York Daily News)