Krause: It’s time for all sides to stop talking and end the NFL lockout

It seems as if everywhere you look today, there are issues – some obviously more important than others – where posturing is getting in the way of progress.This is certainly true on the national front, where the debate on the debt ceiling is getting increasingly divisive and ridiculous (and please, this isn’t to take sides, just to state an observation that I’m sure I share with most reasonably well-informed people). It makes you want to scream at these politicians to just go away, make whatever deal you have to, and let us all know when it’s done. Just stop all this jawing back and forth.I feel the same way about professional sports job actions, be they lockouts or strikes. To me, the semantics between the two make little difference. As a fan, I don’t care. I just want to see football when it’s time to play. And as a person who works for a living, I find it offensive – as I’m sure most people do – that people half my age (and younger than that, even) whose minimum salaries are well into six figures are in this ridiculous fight over how to divvy up $9 billion.Oh, please. Give me that problem! Give my employer that problem! Give all our employers that problem!But worse than the actual incongruity of obscenely rich people holding out to get richer is the day-to-day waltz that’s been played for the last three weeks about how this issue is almost settled.I hate the word “almost,” because it makes me ask, “almost according to whom? Sal Paolantonio and John Clayton of ESPN?”Every day, we wake up to the same mantra: that the players and owners are well on their way to an agreement. Well, I’m sure I speak for many when I say, “stop being on the way to an agreement and just settle the silly thing!”Just stop talking about it until it’s done. Because every time you hear something like you heard Tuesday, about Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson gumming up the works at the last minute, your hostility doesn’t immediately go to them (though it eventually finds its way there), but to the last talking head who told you “it’s almost a done deal.”It reminds me of how, in 1994, Hall of Famer (I had to get that in there!) Peter Gammons would report breathlessly on ESPN about how the baseball strike was close to being settled. That’s all we heard for about a month. Well, it took a decision by future Supreme Court justice Sonya Sotomayor that supported the players’ contention of unfair labor practices by the owners – made the day before the 1995 season was to open – to finally end it.So, as Yogi Berra said famously, “it ain’t over until it’s over.”I can understand where Mankins and Jackson are coming from. They are two of the most visible victims of the pre-lockout shenanigans the owners pulled. The Patriots, it seems to me, went out of their way to play hardball with Mankins, who is/was probably their best interior lineman. And when Mankins stood up to them, that just made his situation worse.That said, however, this is no time for these players to dig in to the detriment of a settlement. They’re going to have to deal ? and so are the owners. And until they do, I wish ESPN (and everybody else) would declare a moratorium on all this projection that this is “almost” a done deal.Just do it already.Steve Krause is sports editor of The Item.