The Washington Redskins football team is hearing it from all sides lately.

Last week they were criticized -- unfairly in my opinion -- for suing season ticket holders who had lost their jobs and could no longer afford their seats.

Now a coalition of tribes -- Cheyenne and Arapaho, Oneida of Wisconsin, Cochiti Pueblo, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Navajo, Oglala Sioux and Standing Rock Sioux -- is asking the United States Supreme Court to revive a challenge to the team's trademark.

So, a week ago, I decided to tackle the NFL's blackout policy, basically arguing that the current economic situation warrants the lifting of this archaic rule. That said, the topic has been in the collective conscience this week, what with the NFL kicking off on Thursday.

What is interesting is that several teams (including the Arizona Cardinals, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and my Cincinnati Bengals) have been granted a 24-hour extension to get these games sold out. Typically, a team needs to be a couple of thousand tickets away from a sell out in order to get such an extension. I wonder first if this extension may have been made to placate the teams more than to allow the fans another day to get the games sold out.

Living in Cincinnati, I have become well acquainted with the National Football League's (NFL) "blackout rule." This rule states that if a game is not sold out by the Thursday before a home game (actually, 72 hours before a game for Monday and Saturday games), the game will not be shown on local television. I don't think the policy is necessarily fair, but I understand the thinking behind the rule --- why show a game on local television if the home team can not sell out the stadium? However, I think there are some extenuating circumstances this year that Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to consider.

First things first. At a meeting on Thursday with NFL writers, Goodell said as much as 20% of the NFL's games could be blacked out this season. Goodell noted that as few as 80% of this season's games will be carried in the home team's market --- a far cry from the 95% of the games that have been carried in the local markets in the past four years. In fact, last year just nine of the 256 regular season NFL games were blacked out for the home team.

Way back when there was this idea called the United States Football League. It had a few good years and a few big names (Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, and Reggie White) before it failed. Then there was the World League of American Football, featuring teams across the U.S., but no true big-name players. Eventually the World League became just that, with expansion into Europe and the moniker NFL Europe;then that league failed.

Then there was the once-popular Arena League, which boasted Kurt Warner and owners like Jon Bon Jovi. The Arena League lasted nearly 20 years before it took last season off and appears ready to fade into oblivion. Oh, and let's not forget the Extreme Football League (XFL), run by Vince McMahon (of WWE fame). I mean who can forget "He Hate Me?" This terrible business decision lasted one season (and I was suckered into an XFL fantasy league).

Cincinnati-based consumer products giant Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) reported fourth-quarter earnings this morning, topping the Street's expectations on earnings but missing on revenue.

As for earnings, P&G pulled in 80 cents per share in the fourth quarter, topping the consensus estimate by a penny. On the revenue front, PG made $18.66 billion in the fourth quarter, well short of the Street's expected $19.32 billion.

It has been a busy week in the world of sports business, with several stories vying for the spot as the big story of the week. That said, let's take a look at the news that surfaced.

First, Manchester United Football Club (that's soccer ladies and gents) announced that it will replace American International Group on its shirts with Aon in 2010. The agreement is called a basic 20-million-pound-a-year rights fee. Supposedly, the soccer team received bids from three or four different companies, but settled on Aon. Supposedly the deal includes Aon paying commissions to the club from the sale of insurance policies to the club's fan base along with match-related bonuses. It appears that Manchester United will make an extra five million pounds a year from this deal.

Something interesting is happening in the world of the NFL as this weekend's draft approaches. With so much talent in the pool, it appears that every team with one of the top 10 picks is trying to trade out of their current draft position.

In the past, teams used this chart to determine the value of draft picks when trying to trade up or down in the draft. Basically, if you wanted to trade into the top spot from the 16th spot with just draft picks, you would have to find a way to get the team in the top spot as much value as possible. The difference between the 16th and the top pick is 2,000 points, so equaling this value could be rather difficult (just ask the New Orleans Saints who traded an entire draft to pick Ricky Williams).

Quite a run John Madden had, wasn't it? Quite honestly, I don't remember Madden as a coach - probably because he retired when I was five years old. More members of my generation will remember Madden as the bumbling color commentator for the likes of Pat Summerall and Al Michaels, interjecting insightful analysis like "boom" and "bang." Perhaps more will remember him for his unfettered bromance with Brett Favre, but I remember my first John Madden experience. I was sitting on the floor at my grandparent's farm watching a late-afternoon football game when this giant, jolly fat guy broke through the screen at the end of a Miller Lite commercial --- little did I know that "guy" would become one of the biggest endorsers of my lifetime.

It has become customary to receive "swag" when there is a big event. The Emmys, the Oscars, the MTV Awards, they all give away what is called a "swag bag" -- now Under Armour (NYSE: UA) is getting in on the action.

First off, swag is defined as promotional merchandise that is given away to garner a following for a product. I'm not quite sure when this practice came to pass, but it is now an accepted practice to give away your stuff to celebs. I'm not going to get into how wrong it is for Brad and Angelina to get free stuff just for showing up on a red carpet, but this practice has infiltrated the sports world, too.

Back in December, owners of the Arena Football League (including Jon Bon Jovi and John Elway) announced that its 2009 season was canceled. This week, the group will convene in Chicago to determine a restructuring plan that will hopefully revive the league in 2010.

Again, I swore that I wouldn't write about the Super Bowl, mainly due to my hatred of all things that have to do with the Steelers, but I found a rather interesting article about the MVP award on the New York Daily News' site. It is tradition that the Super Bowl MVP (given to Santonio Holmes - from The Ohio State University - this year) gets to pick a car as a reward. In the past, General Motors (NYSE: GM) has given the car to the MVP on the field (I seem to remember Eli Manning getting a nice car last year) and has made a big to do about the presentation - but not this year.

Trust me, Holmes did get his car - a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid Platinum (nice to see he cares about the environment) with a price tag of $85,200. Of course, this Cadillac comes from GM, which has received more than $9 billion from the Treasury. What I found interesting is that it was Cadillac's request for no mention. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told the Daily News of Cadillac's request.

With the Detroit auto industry on the brink of extinction in 2008, the city's football team couldn't be counted on to give residents something to get excited about.

Instead, they gave the city another dubious record to go along with the auto bailout: On Sunday, the Detroit Lions lost to the Green Bay Packers to become the first team in history to go lose 16 games and win zero in an NFL season. The 75th season in the team's history goes down as arguably the worst campaign in the history of professional sports.

Perhaps Congress could get together and authorize $50 million in subsidies to help the Lions build a winning team next year. In case you missed it on Dec. 26th, General Motors (NYSE: GM) shares rose 13% to $3.66 on news that GMAC would be able to tap some bailout funds. Shares of Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) closed at $2.29 on Dec. 26 after an 8% gain . Today in pre-market trading, Ford is up another 7% to $2.45. General Motors, however is down 7 cents in early trading to $3.59.

It's bad enough that the industry that provides the city's major source of employment is in sharp decline. They should at least have a football team that isn't an embarrassment.

The Kansas City Star reports that the Arena Football League will cancel its 2009 season. Pete Likens, the director of communications for the Kansas City Brigade, told the newspaper that the players union agreed to the move last night and the owners will hold a final vote later today: "It's pretty much a done deal to suspend the 2009 season and work toward a single entity-league. We plan to start up again in 2010."

In 2006, the league sold a stake to ESPN and hoped that the increased television time would put it on solid financial footing, but clearly that didn't happen. The AFL had reportedly been working on a deal to sell a 40% stake to a private equity firm back in October in exchange for $100 million, but that didn't happen. The league has been without a commissioner since July.

The league has apparently decided that its survival will depend on a transition to a single-entity ownership structure, where a small group of investors own the league as a whole. Currently, the league is operated similar to the way the NFL is, with individual franchisees owning each team.

Bored NFL fans will now have to find something more productive to do with their summers.

In a report not yet posted on its website, Forbes has determined that the average National Football League team is now worth $1.04 billion, a gain of 8.57% over last year, according to Reuters. When Forbes first started looking at NFL team values in 1998, the average was just $288 million.

I'm a little bit skeptical of the valuations because, in a market as illiquid as major sports franchises, it's a huge guessing game. Teams are bought in large part for sentimental/ego reasons, so price/sales and price/earnings ratios are less meaningful than with conventional investments. If two billionaires grew up listening to the same team on the radio and the current owner is looking to sell, the winner will be whoever wants it most.

But it's still interesting: even though Major League Baseball teams play about 10 times as many games as football teams, only one MLB team is worth more than $1 billion (The New York Yankees), according to Forbes' latest report.

Part of the reason may be that the NFL, with its non-guaranteed contracts, is able to keep its player costs down. Tom Van Riper recently reported that "The owners already voted to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement early, meaning that play could come to a halt after two more seasons."

So the owners are looking to pay players even less in the face of continued increases in team values. The players' union might have a very good rationale for protesting. This could shape up to be a pretty interesting bargaining session.

File this one under "Get over yourself you washed up former running back."

Jim Brown, a former star running back for the Cleveland Browns, is suing Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) because a football player on the All-Browns team in a video game wears his number and looks like him. He's seeking an injunction and unspecified damages to punish the company for "taking a free ride on the trade value" of his name.

Oh please. Mr. Brown, no one is going to buy or not buy a video games because it contains or doesn't contain your likeness. The "trade value" of your name is precisely zero. Somewhere between starring in The Dirty Dozen, serving as an announcer for Ultimate Fighting, and numerous arrests related to assault and spousal abuse, people just kind of lost interest.

This isn't a material event for Sony or Electronic Arts, but it's an interesting tale of the long half-life of a former star's ego. It's also a great waste of the legal system's resources.