Remembering to share.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS [biz] - National Football League

As Pat Bowlen and his 31 fellow National Football League team owners contemplate a player lockout that could sack the 2011 NFL season, you're going to hear plenty about a key contention point: what share of the league's revenue should go to players.

More so than salary caps, adjustments to health benefits or controls on rookie compensation, the percentage of revenue to be devoted to players is the 300-pound gorilla--or in this case the 300-pound left tackle--that overshadows all.

The rest is details. But determining what percentage of the league's roughly $8.5 billion in revenue goes to its labor force is huge. In a coarse lunge at the numbers, a single percentage point equates to around $85 million to be distributed among the 1,696 players on NFL team payrolls. If player salaries were uniform--they're not, but let's disregard that for a moment--a one-point swing in revenue allocation to labor would equal about $50,000 per player annually. Under the current collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association, players receive about 60 percent of league revenues. Owners think that's too much. You may, too.

The popular perception is that for all their Sunday afternoon heroics, NFL players are overcompensated athletes as far removed from the common fan, economically, as Broncos defensive specimen Elvis Dumervil is removed physically from that guy you see at the 24-Hour Fitness, sweating on the elliptical machine. The owners' distaste for the revenue share formula is so pronounced that they decided to opt out of their contract, setting the stage for an anything-goes compensation system in 2010 and a possible lockout in 2011.

But are NFL players really getting a richer share of their employers' take than the rest of us? Not really. Since the 1960s, U.S. workers have taken home around 56 percent to 59 percent of the gross domestic product in wages, fringe benefits and health insurance, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis unit. Compensation among the four major U.S. professional sports leagues is similar.

Even in Major League Baseball, where the absence of salary caps would seem to be an invitation to run up player revenues, the average ratio of player compensation to total revenue from 1994 through 2007 was 58 percent, according to a paper published last month in the Journal of Sports Economics. So how cool is that? Turns out whether you're a plumber or a CFO, you're basically...