Line of Scrimmage: Five Things the NFL Must Fix

The National Football League will enter the 2008 season just as it entered the 2007 season, and the 2006 season - as the most financially successful sports league in the world.

The NFL currently dominates the U.S. sports landscape in a way that would have seemed unthinkable two decades ago, when baseball held onto its standing as America's national pastime and the NBA was in the midst of the halcyon era of Jordan, Bird, and Magic.

While baseball and basketball have both faced crises great and small in the years since, the NFL has continued its ascent thanks to a combination of an ever-improving product built around an equitable financial structure for teams, a canny marketing effort, and a shift in the U.S. cultural climate, amongst other elements.

That said, the league circa 2008 is far from perfect.

Labor strife looms in the not-too-distant future. The outsized nature of rookie contracts has created a financial burden for teams and has negatively impacted veteran salaries. More retired players seem to step forward every day, complaining that the league for which they risked great physical peril has now abandoned them.

The NFL, its teams, and its player's union have all begun taking steps to resolve these issues and several others, but just as in any bureaucracy, progress is slow. There are conflicting agendas among the NFL's powerbrokers that are sure to stand in the way of change, and that's a dangerous situation for a league that might not know quite how good it has it.

If the NFL spins its wheels and deems itself untouchable atop the hierarchy of American sports, an MLB-styled fall from grace is a possibility. The league must find ways to improve itself and remain ahead of the curve in order to maintain its position, and must also take preventative steps in anticipation of the obstacles that linger just down the road.

Thus, we give you the top five issues we believe the league must confront.

For the purposes of this piece, we're going to ignore the very real problems of the contentious collective bargaining issue and the much-needed cap on contracts for first-round draft picks, which we believe are tied to one another. It should go without saying that an effort toward labor peace and an agreement on compensation must perpetually be at the top of the NFL agenda, just as it should be in all major sports leagues.

Continued at My Sportsbook...