The opening kickoff of next fall’s National Football League season appears doubtful, as the flatly bizarre business template of professional football creates inevitable instability. Unlike nearly any other business, the NFL needs a collective bargaining agreement, because its method of operating would otherwise be illegal.

How so? Imagine Silicon Valley’s powerhouses holding a draft to claim exclusive rights to top graduates of Caltech, MIT and the like. “Sorry, pal, you can’t work for Google, because we drafted you.” Outrageous? A violation of free-market principles? Absolutely.

The NFL football system is completely contrary to what we conceive of as the American way. What is a team’s reward for beating everyone else? The worst draft pick. The team that performs the worst is awarded the top prize in the draft. What kind of perverse incentive system is this?

It is more than ironic that the sport loved best by capitalistic Americans is socialistic to the core – help the downtrodden and penalize the best.

Revenue sharing is hardly a free-market mantra. For those who argue that a draft to maintain competitive balance is necessary for big-time football, let’s look at it in a slightly different context. Would you be in favor of Division I football teams holding a draft of high school players, with the worst-performing schools going first?

Consider the PGA Tour as the ultimate American template. Only those who perform well get paid. Golfers whose performance is inferior get booted from the tour and have to play their way back on.

Remarkably, this pure survival-of-the-fittest arrangement is in place even though there are no “owners” in the normal sports context. The players collectively run the tour through elected representatives and choose their own commissioner. Players are free to make their own sponsorship arrangements. Though strikes and lockouts have afflicted the other major sports, golf marches on without any unrest.

The current football lockout is all about the owners’ wish to retain a higher percentage of gross revenues. Consider the most basic question: What value do owners bring to the football table? The short answer in the current world is “none.”

Al Davis, Mike Brown, Bill Bidwell and others are no more than warts on the body of football. The available revenue streams are such that owner capital is simply not required.

Teams have no intellectual property necessary for operation of the game itself. The Tampa two defense is not patentable, and Ndamukong Suh cannot be cloned. In short, owners are not necessary for the functioning of a professional football league. People pay to see Tom Brady, not Robert Kraft.

Lock out the owners, and let’s have a professional football league established with free-market principles.

Michel Nelson is a vice president and senior trust officer at Iowa Savings Bank in Carroll.