Every morning, I get up at 6 o’clock, scratch myself and go upstairs to watch the news and eat my cereal.

My roommates — who are all huge critics of athletes, yet never seem to do anything remotely athletic — always turn on ESPN. Personally, I am not bonkers about balls and statistics, so I tend to immediately change the channel.

Lately though I feel like CNN is accidentally being broadcast over sports television airwaves.

Constantly I see the big muscular men hidden behind suits and dress shirts on these sports shows. I haven’t seen more than two minutes of NCAA Tournament coverage. If it weren’t 50 degrees one day and 15 degrees with heaps of snow falling from the heavens the next I would have no idea it’s March.

These burly men I reference are those of the National Football League, and the reason for their spruce appearance is the current state of the NFL — a lockout plaguing the season and drying up bar patrons around the country if this issue does not get resolved.

I mentioned I am not the biggest sports fan in the world, but I love buffalo wings and  pitchers of cheap light beer. If the lockout isn’t resolved by September, I’m going to have to double my Sunday alcohol intake to wash away the depression from not getting blackout drunk naturally.

After the initial momentary loss of feeling, thinking that my forthcoming Monday nights may be sober and grease-free, I decided to do some amateur research on why these disagreements are happening so I could make fun of the situation with some degree of accuracy.

In the most concise and generalized single sentence, the owners and the players cannot agree on a fair and just division of the revenue.

What? There are vapid disagreements over how to divvy up multiples of billions of dollars? Is this league full of crybabies?

I’m not siding with either one of these parties. All I’m saying is I work my butt off and don’t even make $12,000 a year. The fuss is over amounts that most people won’t see accumulate in their lifetimes as professional armory thieves.

Football is most likely the biggest source of domestic income in America, and I’m not talking strictly the league itself. Imagine everything that will suffer if this lockout extends into Autumn: TV stations, beer, bars, chicken wings and taxis picking up the drunken fans.

These are just the game day consequences. No football season? That also means no Madden 2012, unless Electronic Arts can find an appealing and profitable way to make a game out of Aaron Rodgers debating with team owners.

People are losing their minds out there over this. A man in Cleveland is suing the NFL for infringing on his right to buy tickets to nonexistent games that have no certainty of happening. Hell, let the man buy the tickets if that’s his fix.

Football is truly the greatest connection between any two random Americans on any given Sunday in the fall. The crisp afternoons are spent with howling fans littering the sports bars, shouting obscenities at missed tackles and incomplete passes (like they could do better) while they stuff their gullets with grease.

Well, NFL, they can’t do better, and football is the lifeline that gets them through the remaining days of the dreary week. Think about the masses you pack into a stadium that consider you their heroes before you go fretting about a million dollars here or there. Without these fans, there wouldn’t be any money being frivolously invested into the pigskin.

All this worrying is really getting in the way of my beer drinking.