Contract negotiations present a constant battle between players and owners in every league.

Hall-of-Fame tight end, and three-time Super Bowl Champion, Shannon Sharpe, believes that NFL owners are some of the worst when it comes to being selfish and painting themselves as the good guys.

“The NFL owners have done a great job because they’re the only group of people that can convince the common folk that the millionaires are more selfish than the billionaires,” Sharpe said on the latest episode of NightCap with co-host Chad Johnson.

“What they frame it as is if a millionaire doesn’t give a billionaire a pay cut, he’s selfish, he doesn’t want to win. And the fans jump on it with both feet.”

Sharpe, who says he understands both perspectives because of his 14 seasons as a player, recognizes that at some point the players don’t have a choice because the owners have more money and, therefore, more power.

Sharpe referenced the NFL strikes of 1982 and 1987 that lasted eight weeks and two months, respectively.

“What [the players] found out is that the stadiums still filled,” Sharpe said of what came of the strikes. “They don’t care about the players, all they care about is the logo. Players come and go, that logo stays the same.

“What the players found out is ‘we gotta take what the owners give us,’ and the owners know that. So they do what they do. That’s why they don’t have guaranteed contracts.”

The NFL is the only major North American sports league that does not have fully guaranteed contracts for all its players, as the MLB, NHL, and NBA all do.

Sharpe noted the extreme measures that the MLB took in the strike of 1994-95 that cancelled over 900 games, including the entire postseason.

“You see what baseball did?” Sharpe asked Johnson. “Baseball shut their entire season down, no World Series, no playoffs. That’s what they needed to do to the NFL. No playoffs, no Super Bowl.”

“All the players have to be aligned [for that to work],” Johnson responded. “And that’s hard.”

Sharpe acknowledged the difficulty of getting an entire league to agree, especially the NFL, which has nearly 1,700 players on active rosters, not taking into account those on practice squads.

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