His Imperious Majesty Himself Roger Goodell sat in the negotiations last weekend trying to bring an end to the referee strike to no avail. The Players' Association came out afterwords with this thinly-veiled insult to the owners:

It is lost on us as to how you allow a Commissioner to cavalierly issue suspensions and fines in the name of player health and safety yet permit the wholesale removal of the officials that you trained and entrusted to maintain that very health and safety. It has been reported that the two sides are apart by approximately $60,000 per team. We note that your Commissioner has fined an individual player as much in the name of "safety." Your actions are looking more and more like simple greed. As players, we see this game as more than the "product" you reference at times. You cannot simply switch to a group of cheaper officials and fulfill your legal, moral, and duty obligations to us and our fans. You need to end the lockout and bring back the officials immediately.[37]

While the poorly-paid refs are paid less than $200K per season, the starting salary for the players is roughly half-a-million simoleons during the same amount of time, albeit the HUGE amount of time the players have to spend getting in shape for and gearing up to the exacting demands and flesh, bone, blood and brains is overwhelmingly greater than the refs have to put out. Still, the idea that the refs get the crumbs off the table when it is their decades, in many cases, of experience which prevent the game from becoming the shambles it has devolved to in three short weeks----perhaps it is a premium greedy owners and a pompous Commissioner can overlook.