I'll probably have something to say on Sheryl Swoopes next week. There was a piece about her coming out in Broadsheet, our new women's news blog, and I didn't feel the need to jump in just to get my card punched on the media cycle. The issue isn't going away.

A little trade secret: Frankly, I'm a little burned out after the baseball playoffs, just kind of charred -- October is a very long month in my house -- which is why I usually limp to the end of the last week of the World Series and then take a vacation. I generally do the same after the basketball/hockey playoffs end, and sometimes after the NCAA Tournament. There's a feeling of reaching the finish line and just wanting to kind of chill for a little bit, let the mental batteries recharge.

I can't do that this year because November is Salon's 10th anniversary month, and I was asked to delay my vacation till December, which I agreed to do. But the point of all this is to say that I just didn't have the wattage to tackle Sheryl Swoopes coming out and what I think it means. If it hadn't been mentioned elsewhere, I'd have tried to slap something together. I was glad I didn't have to.

A vacation would help, but the weekend will do. I'll get to it next week.

As for the Packers, I think they're really bad, and with the injuries, they aren't getting better. The Football Outsiders efficiency ratings, which isn't the be-all of everything but which I trust a lot, has the Packers as the 25th best team in the league, just ahead of Minnesota and just behind Cleveland and Baltimore.

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With Fran Tarkenton gone will anyone wear Vikings merchandise? Gee, I don't know.

Oh, you said Randy Moss. Sorry.

Do you know how silly you'd have sounded over most of the last 40 years if you'd mentioned the Eagles and Patriots as being popular merchandise movers? The Eagles might be pretty happy to share T-shirt revenues with the Jaguars by next year if current trends continue!

What teams share: TV money, which is something like 60 percent of all revenue. The home team gets to keep 60 of ticket receipts -- excluding luxury boxes, which is important -- and throws the other 40 percent into the pot. They also share licensing money, which I think pretty much means all or at least most merchandise.

They don't share luxury box revenue, naming rights, sponsorships, stadium advertising, concessions and local broadcast rights, which would cover both radio and local TV, such as preseason games. So you can see there's plenty of room for one team to outperform another, though the effect is muted because the shared money creates a pretty high baseline.

I'll show you what I mean:

In its 2005 valuations, based on 2004, Forbes estimated that Washington had the most revenues (net of stadium revenues used for debt payments), $287 million. Arizona was at the bottom of the league at $153M. So the Cardinals' revenues were 53.3 percent of Washington's. But Arizona's way off by itself at the bottom of the list. The next lowest, at $164M, was Minnesota. That's 57.1 percent of Washington's revenue. The Vikes aren't off by themselves. They're in a large pack, just at the back of it. So they're a good representative of the bottom of the league.

Compare that to, say, baseball. The Yankees had $264M in revenues. The team at the bottom, the Montreal Expos (as they were still in 2004) had $80M, or 30.3 percent. But they were even more of a special case than the Arizona Cardinals. Next up was Minnesota (again!), at $102M, or 38.6 percent. That's a big difference from 57 or even 53 percent.

And consider this: The bottom revenue team in the NFL had 53.3 percent of the top team's revenue. The same percentage of the Yankees revenues would be $140M. Fifteen teams -- half the teams in baseball -- didn't make that much in 2004. In other words, the Arizona Cardinals, bad as they are, are closer to the top team in revenue than the Cleveland Indians, Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, Chicago White Sox and 11 other teams are to the Yankees. If you go by the Vikings' percentage, another four teams don't make the equivalent, almost $151M. So the second lowest revenue producing team in the NFL is in better shape relative to the revenue champ than 19 of the 29 other teams are relative to the Yankees.

It's really something when you think about it. And Jerry Jones and co. want to become more like baseball? Like I said, good luck selling those tickets to games against the Packers in 10 years.

The Las Vegas Packers, that is.

Jones and the NFL went to court in the '90s over his selling some sponsorships that contradicted league contracts, such as making American Express the official card of the Cowboys, despite Visa being the NFL's official card. They settled, leaving Jones with some marketing deals outside the league's reach.

The Yankees are big outliers, yes, but so are the Washingtons in the NFL.

MLB

Yankees $264

Red Sox $201

Mets $180

Mariners $173

Cubs $170

Roughly 3 teams per $10M below that.

http://tinyurl.com/7h85c

NFL

Washington $287

Patriots $236

Cowboys $231

Eagles $216

Texans $215

Roughly 5 or 6 teams per $10M below that

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/30/Revenues_2.html