Dear Mr. Goodell,
I may not be the hardest of hard-core football fans, but I'm up there, and I don't like what I see. I'm sure that common sense, or economic necessity, will prevail and we'll see football again this year. And the media will act like nothing ever happened, and many fans will return. But I can't in good conscience give you money that could be better used by my family for other things. I love your product, and the community which supports it, but not what your business has become.
If you should be doing anything this year, it's figuring how to make do with less, reducing costs to fans, giving them greater value in exchange for the increased pain they bear in supporting your expensive product. What you should not be doing is squabbling over what is, to many of us, already an obscene amount of treasure.
This is my way of saying that there will be four more seats available for someone else in Cleveland Browns Stadium this year. I will not be writing you a check. I'll have to give up that dream of "owning" those seats and passing them down to my son.
Sir, consider me the canary in your gold mine, an early-warning sign as to whether the air has become too toxic. I've been here every day for decades, watching attentively from my cage.
But, today, I'm gone.
