The NFL Wins, Because The NFL Always Wins

There's no way that any sensible, thinking person who's not an NFL owner can honestly feel that the league acted justly in penalizing the Cowboys and the Redskins for spending their money and structuring their contracts the way they did during the uncapped 2010 season. But it doesn't matter, because the NFL plays by its own rules and no one else's, and that's the lesson for today.

That's ESPN.com's Dan Graziano, summing up in two sentences what I spent a few thousand words bunching my panties over. Now the Redskins' and Cowboys' totally legitimate grievance with the NFL's unilateral salary cap penalties have been dismissed without even getting past the NFL's arbitration process. The arbitrator ruled that it wasn't, in fact, unilateral because both a supermajority of other owners and the NFLPA signed off on it, even though the league strong-armed and blackmailed everyone into going along. DC and Dallas have said they won't press their cases any further, and if Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones accept that they can't win a small battle against the tramping NFL machine, what chance do the rest of us stand?