Matt Taibbi offers my favorite idea yet:

Remember how we had replacement players in 1987? Here’s my question: how come we can’t have replacement owners? I realize it’s impossible, but I’d love to see every city do bond issues or IPOs and raise money to create temporary ownership structures… do a new draft, create new teams from every city, get lease deals for functioning local university stadiums, and then strike brand-new TV deals and just kiss the NFL goodbye in favor of a new league, only with all the same players. The thing is, pro football is such a draw, you could make a billion-dollar business overnight even if the games were only broadcast on the Food channel, or, hell, PBS. Again, I realize it’d never happen, but I’d love to see a situation where all the teams were publicly-owned and the players got 80% of all revenues, with the rest of the cash going to pay for road repairs, teachers’ salaries, and so on. Then I’d love to see Jerry Jones or Jerry Richardson and all those assholes strapped to chairs and forced to watch their former profits spent on new school gymnasiums and wheelchair ramps for courthouses and that sort of thing. I would be willing to go without football for a full year – no, make it two years – if at the end of it I could watch a weeping Dan Snyder taken on a tour of a new Public Football League-funded school for the blind.

This reminds me, I should really watch The Replacements when it’s on a dozen times this weekend.