It's Good That The NFL Is Punishing Washington And Dallas For Breaking No Rules

I'm glad, gosh darn it, that NFL owners voted 29-0 to enforce salary cap penalties against the Redskins and Cowboys for spending a lot of money in the uncapped 2010 season. It's a good thing that the league is coming down hard, $36 million for DC and $10 million for Dallas, on two of the most powerful and high-spending owners in the league for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

It's all in the name of competitive balance, you see. Just because there was no salary cap in 2010 doesn't mean owners should have been allowed to spend whatever they wanted, even though that's exactly what "no salary cap" means. It's not fair to those other teams that agreed to the league's secret memos that spending should be kept low, to prevent a free market that would give players fair value.

After all, the league warned Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones at least six times that there would be penalties for spending what they were allowed to. This is collusion, and collusion doesn't work if two maverick owners go off on their own not colluding with everyone else.

It's nice to see the other owners finally finding common ground with the NFLPA here. The union already signed off on the Skins' and Cowboys' punishments, because the NFL threatened them with lower salary caps across the board without the $46 million at play here. Sure, maybe that salary cap threat was a disgusting form of coercion, but shouldn't the league be able to do whatever it wants, all the time?

This could not be going better. So that's why I'm happy the owners have followed through, and that this now heads to arbitration. I'm thrilled at the prospect of the NFL getting its ass handed to it by an arbiter, and I hope with all my heart that the Redskins and Cowboys withdraw from the arbitration process—oh, joyous day if that happens—and sue the shit out of the NFL.