If we ever needed more proof that Charlotte is horribly served from a sports journalism standpoint….

NFL players association president DeMaurice Smith comes to Charlotte and UPoR scribe Scott Fowler opts to essentially profile the guy rather than go deep into the issues that will likely result in a labor stoppage next year. (Companion news stories likewise side-step the elephant for basically sidebars on what Gene Upshaw told the UPoR four years ago — talk about self-referential inside baseball! — and the 18-game sked idea.)

The big, big story of course is the NFL owners’ plan to break the union and “win” this round of collective bargaining. The widespread perception among owners is that Upshaw “won” the last round by TKO, a threat to decertify the union and bring anti-trust law down on the heads of the NFL. With that background Jerry Richardson’s constant pleas to fellow owners to stay together and be tough make sense — as do the Big Cat’s very own budget cutting ways with the Panthers. It is fascinating that despite very direct impacts on the local team they purport to cover, local reporters are loathe to mine the connections between the labor dispute, Richardson, and the Panther roster.

In fact, Fowler’s colleague — the usually functional Darin Gantt — went out of his way to doubt John Fox’s own declaration about the impact of financial constraints on the Panthers in the wake of the Chris Harris trade. Now with Richardson’s chief adversary in town and talking tough, what do we get? Yawns and sidebars.

Here’s why I think the official Panther media organs are treading so lightly. The facts do not leave the Big Cat with much to argue over. In an interview with SI.com’s Dave Zirin, the NFLPA’s Smith made his case –right after Zirin dings the Fowler no-nothing stance of let’s just play football:

Zirin: You’ve got a lot of reporters that say, “A pox on both their houses. It’s millionaires versus billionaires.” How do you make the case to say it’s not just rich people squabbling, that there is something bigger at stake?

Smith: The first thing I do is challenge reporters on how much they know. When I was at the Super Bowl and I had a press conference with 120 or 130 reporters who covered football for years. I asked them raise your hand if you knew the National Football League was a non-profit organization? Silence. It is. It’s a 501 C 6 non-profit. How many people know last year the National Football League generated $9 billion in revenue. According to Forbes every team averages $31 million in profit every year. Every team is worth $1 billion. And here’s the kicker, over the last 15 years every team’s value has grown by about 500 percent. So, that’s the owner’s side.

Now for the players, the average salary in the National Football League is $700,000. You will never find a player who’s going to say we’re crying in the poor house. I tell our players the reason you have to be responsible is that the average wage for a man between the ages of 21 and 24 in America is about $25,000. We should never be in a position where we have to give up based on money. That’s insulting. But on our side of the table, the average career for a football player is 3.6 years. It takes you three years and three games in order to get five years of health care coverage when you’re done playing. If you play any less than three years you don’t get any health care coverage when you retire. If you play three years and three games, you still only get five years.

Zirin: What if you play 15 years?

Smith: Five years. If you play 13 years, it’s five years; 12 years, it’s five years. So you take a guy who graduates from college at 21, 22, the average career is 3.6 years, let’s say he plays four years. Players are retiring at the ripe old age of 26, 27. Five years of health care coverage and everything after that, every injury you have is a preexisting condition. Try to find insurance for that. So when they say to me, it’s a battle between billionaires and millionaires, that’s where I start. But we also try to remind people that if we get locked out, we have 30,000 people who work in our stadiums. They’re locked out. The concession workers and they people who are parking cars in the sleet and the rain for forth or fifth job, they’re locked out. The bars and the restaurants that rely on football, they’re locked out. The families of our players that rely on the health care, no health care. I don’t really look at this as a battle between millionaires and billionaires. I look at this as a battle between 32 people who can unilaterally shut down our game, and America who digs it.

Now you’d think the Uptown Paper of Record would be keen to inform Uptown of the looming threat to one of its biggest engines of economic activity, home Panther games. You might even think that there would be an ongoing interest in covering Jerry Richardson as a principal in an adversarial showdown with the the player’s union rather than everybody’s dapper grandpa in a golf cart. I can tell you in heartbeat that the New York tabs would have the Big Cat as the leader of the Gang of 32 in a second were he in Gotham.

Now, of course, the owners attack Smith’s numbers and claim that they are not rolling in dough. OK, fair enough. But what is telling is the reason they claim to be in a more adverse financial situation now. The owners’ top legal man, Bob Batterman, let this slip a few weeks ago:

“In 1994, there was only one team with a privately financed stadium, Miami,” he said. “Now all the owners finance the stadiums themselves and have to eat all those costs. The players association has failed to come to grips with this change.”

In other words, because taxpayers are not subsidizing NFL owners to the extent they once did, the players have to make up the difference with a smaller slice of total revenue. Properly understood then, part of the rationale for the lockout is to dramatically remind states and localities of the economic value of NFL franchises no doubt with an eye toward re-energizing the flow of public dollars to the owners. How many dollars?

The Falcons are already talking up a new $400-500m. open-air stadium in downtown Atlanta. The Georgia Dome will be 20 years old in 2012, when the team would like to start construction.

“This will be something where we try to create a public-private partnership and that partnership requires a substantial investment,” team president Rich McKay explained.

Still yawning, Scott?

The billion-dollar plus stadia in Dallas and New York have scared many owners witless. They envision a football version of MLB with two tiers — wealthy, big market teams with state-of-the-art facilities and smaller markets which essentially have no shot at playoff runs and exist only as regular season cannon fodder. Now ask yourself which one of those two camps does the Big Cat see himself in? Better yet, somebody ask Tom Sorensen to ask Jerry and actually report the answer.