NFL Lays Off Staff

Plans to Reduce 150 Positions or About 14% of Staff

While as a commuter I have been somewhat enjoying the slowing world demand for oil - particularly in the distilled form known as gasoline - I have spent considerable time worrying myself about economic prospects.

For this, I direct your attention to your local paper. One look at the Sunday newspaper - usually chock full of, at the very least, entry level or low skilled jobs - will tell you that there's not a whole lot of there, there. The jobs that are advertised are highly selective and/or quite specific: Teacher of Special Education with a teaching certificate in Chinese; Vice President of Petroleum extraction - 15 years in crude oil production... I don't usually review the Sunday paper for jobs, but I have to say it does provide a reasonable barometer for such as exercise as local demand for labor.

The National Football League on the other hand would seem to be about as solid an investment as they come. Not so much - it would seem you could add Forbes' wealthiest sport to the Forbes Layoff Tracker. The league is reducing - "RIFFING" to us HR folks - 150 staff of their 1100 staff or about 14% and reducing the cost of this years playoff tickets - likely anticipating those sales to slump.

Revenues for the on field product are good - most of the games are sold out - but the league correctly identifies that those tickets were bought well in advance of the melt down. Oh, and there is that small matter of a reliance on corporate box revenue - if the corporations aren't there, hard to sell seats to them. My guess is that the League is VERY concerned with companies not re-upping their boxes. Revenues stand at approximately $6.5 Billion, but they're handling this in a planful way...refreshing really, given the debacle going on in Washington over the auto makers.

Back in October, the NBA announced staff reductions of 9% - it is curious to me how the NBA had the insight to a "wobbly economy" over a year ago, yet those in the know at the government ranks seem to be taken aback by this enough that by the time they realized anything was wrong the only thing to discuss was the value of a banking bailout.