The first NFL preview magazines have showed up on the shelves of my local bookstore. For the first time in many years I didn’t make a special trip to go find them. I stumbled on to them while I was in the store looking for something else.

I bought two fantasy football publications: Sporting News 2011 Fantasy Football and Fantasy League Football 2011. The NFL is largely about money for owners and players so I’ve made it at least somewhat about money for me too – I play in several fantasy football leagues and have had a fair amount of success over the years.

But as for buying the actual preview magazines, it seemed a bit pointless given the lockout and lack of a free agency period to this point. We’re a couple weeks off of when training camps would normally start and there has not yet been anything resembling an offseason.

Lindy’s, which publishes my favorite preseason annual, seemed to recognize this. They published their typical June version with a publisher’s note saying they planned to publish again in August if there was movement toward the season taking place.

With all due respect to Lindy’s, I’ll wait until then to buy the magazine.

As the gap in content on this site shows I’ve been unenthused about pro football of late – more unenthused than I have been for a season since I was about seven years old. I keep reading media reports indicating that progress is being made and that a new collective bargaining agreement could be agreed upon in the next couple weeks.

Then, over the last couple days of June, reports started trickling out that talks might have gone backward. And Friday morning the NFL Network’s Albert Breer today texted that negotiators are taking the holiday weekend off.

Enough is enough. You’ve got judges waiting to issue rulings that would almost certainly throw negotiations into flux enough where losing the preseason at a minimum would almost be a given. You’ve got $9 billion in revenue and supposedly a framework for how to split it up. You’ve got players like Donte Stallworth coming out publicly acknowledging what we at Zoneblitz have been saying for a couple months already: the lockout has already irrevocably reduced the quality of play fans will see in 2011, whether the season starts on time or not.

Get it done.

I’m long past tired of being deep into the summer with no on-field NFL news coming out. I don’t want more reports about how talks are going in hotels around the country over whether there will or won’t be an NFL season.

Get a deal done.

I’m a few-year subscriber to NFL Sunday Ticket. It’s July 1st. Now I’m setting a deadline. You have until July 15. If a deal is not announced in the next two weeks I am cancelling that subscription and taking the season off. I’ll still watch games and I’ll follow the news through the NFL Network and the Internet, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to put a few hundred dollars extra into catching the games.

I know my cancelation by itself is not going to make that much of a difference to the NFL owners or players. And I am not saying DirecTV is to blame for the lockout. They’re an unintended, albeit very well financed, victim of the NFL’s inability to reach a deal.

But the NFL gets $1 billion a year from DirecTV through 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal, and canceling that $300-plus Sunday Ticket subscription is one of the few tangible ways I have as a fan to make sure my opinion is heard on this ridiculous and irresponsible lockout.

If this lockout thing continues to carry on, I will do whatever I can to reduce or eliminate the amount of money I spend on the league and its various partners in response to the owners and players ruining the 2011 offseason. And I hope other fans follow suit. Stop buying single-game tickets. Cancel your Sunday Ticket subscriptions. Don’t buy the jerseys and t-shirts. Part of the reason this hasn’t been solved yet is that owners and players believe fans will come back no matter when the lockout is solved, whether it costs preseason games, regular season games or an entire season.

The only way to make a statement is to hit them all collectively in the pocketbooks. It worked after the 1996 Major League Baseball strike. And you’ll note they have not had a work stoppage since.

It needs to work here. There are other ways to watch the games you want without putting that money into the pockets of the NFL and its partners. Be heard, NFL fans.

I want training camp and the NFL season, not court talks.

Enough is enough.

Get it done.