Rating fashion looks at the NFL draft (photos)

Watching the NFL draft unfold every year is about more than just analyzing picks and how they fit with their new teams. It's also about analyzing suits and how they fit, both on the players themselves and in the annals of draft outfits, sharp or sloppy.

While you take time now (while scanning Netflix for 'Legally Blonde') to debate which looks worked and which didn't, start working on your mock draft for 2013, and take odds on who will look the sharpest: Matt Barkley or Denard Robinson?

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Pitcher's dog not allowed in new city

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Mark Buehrle's dog Slater (right) isn't welcome in Miami-Dade County. (US Presswire/Buehrle family photo)

Mark Buehrle's left arm may have been greeted warmly down in south Florida this offseason, but the same can't be said for one of his family's four dogs. According to the Miami Herald, "Slater" Buehrle, an 18-month-old American Staffordshire terrier, falls under a pitbull ban that has been in place in Miami-Dade County since 1989. That means the Buehrle family didn't have the option of moving anywhere close to the Miami Marlins' new ballpark after Mark  signed a four-year, $58 million deal with the team last month.
Mark Buehrle, a dog lover who made headlines when he said he hoped Michael Vick would get hurt, avoided the ban by moving his family to a dog-friendly development in south Broward County. And while he says he wouldn't have signed with the Marlins if there had been no housing alternatives for Slater and the rest of his family, Buehrle still wants to speak up against the injustice of the ban.

From the Miami Herald:

Mark Buehrle believes "it's kind of ridiculous that because of the way a dog looks, people will ban it. Every kind of dog has good and bad, and that depends on the handlers. If you leave a dog outside all the time, it'll be crazy. Slater would never do anything harmful.''
Mark Buehrle grew up with cats, rabbits and fish, but got his first dog with Jamie. They married in 2005 and are spokespeople for Utah-based Best Friends Animal Society, which accepted 22 of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick's pit bulls.

The Buehrles have three other dogs — Viszlas named Diesel, Drake and Duke — and adopted Slater after Jamie fell in love with him during work with an animal rescue group. Judging from his festive getup in the picture above, he sure doesn't look too menacing.
As a dog lover who has admired Mark and Jamie Buehrle's work with "Sox for Strays" in Chicago, I agree 100 percent with the pitcher's stance. Without getting into a long drawn-out debate on the subject, the danger with pitbulls lies more with the responsibility of its owners and not the breed itself. There's absolutely no reason why a well-trained dog and its family should be discriminated against through government legislation.
The good news, of course, is that at least this tale has a happy ending. Though Slater and the Buehrles were forced to go live elsewhere, perhaps their story will help end a ban that causes a much bigger hardship for other families.
After all, not everyone who moves to Miami-Dade County for a job has the luxury of being able to choose where to live. The awareness the Buehrles are driving could prevent dog owners from having to make a decision they shouldn't have to in the first place.

Mark Buehrle pets a fan's dog at U.S. Cellular Field. (Getty Images)

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It may be a make-or-break week for NFL

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA head DeMaurice Smith will begin four straight days of negotiations Tuesday in Manhattan as the dialogue between the two sides continues. The owners and players will not be involved in person until Thursday; the next two days will be more about trading and fine-tuning proposals with legal teams involved so that when the talks expand later in the week, there's more to talk about — and perhaps even something to agree upon. Goodell and Smith may not be in the room at the same time early on, where it's about the legal language of a new collective bargaining agreement.

Last week saw a major swing in talks, from the near-disaster on Thursday to the more reasonable conclusion on Friday, when everybody seemed to get  back on the same page. According to the NFL Network's Albert Breer, both sides are still very wary of something being shoehorned in at the 11^th hour that isn't equitable — by all accounts, the blowups on Thursday had a lot to do with the players' perception that the owners were trying to re-introduce expense credits off the top of the revenue pie. Mediator Arthur Boylan, who must balance all arguments while keeping a host of judges appraised of the progress, is generally credited as the one person who held things together, keeping the two sides talking until 1 a.m. Friday morning. According to NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello, the two sides kept discussions open to a point through the holiday weekend.
This week is the most important to the process so far; any backslide from here could complicate things into the season and put multiple regular-season games at risk. The moment the owners start losing serious revenue is the moment most of them would be just fine with pulling whatever deal is proposed and heading back to the courts for more leverage if they can get it. The reason is simple — the revenue gained from the 2011 preseason for the owners is estimated to be anywhere from $700,000 to $1 billion.

It's always been a major money-grab for the owners (reduced player costs and comparatively higher revenues), which is why Roger Goodell tends to plug his ears and yell, "LA LA LA I AM NOT LISTENING TO YOU" whenever someone brings up the idea that the NFL should either reduce the cost for preseason tickets or simply cut the preseason in half without adding two regular-season games. The pressure is on both sides to get something on paper and agreed to in the short term so that the league year can start and the process can move forward.

The "drop-dead" date for a new agreement to facilitate a full preseason seems to be July 15, and if things go too far beyond that, there's simply no way to open the league year, get the CBA in effect, have a preseason and free agency in time, and start operations in a cohesive fashion. At that point, deserved or not, the owners will blame the players for revenues lost even more than they already do, and we're basically back to square one. The owners could claim that a deal is now not there to be made, the Eighth Circuit Court would likely renew its involvement (Boylan has been communicating with the court regarding the talks), and things could head down the rabbit hole in a big hurry. The court could deem the lockout illegal and force the owners to open their doors, but both sides have been told that if they leave this in the court's hands, they'll each get a deal they won't like.

That would put us back in this same situation a couple years from now, with a force-fed labor situation running out of gas and a group of owners ready to slam the doors shut. It's worth taking the time to get this CBA right in ways that the two sides didn't in 2006, but it's also very clear that time is running out. For a new deal to happen in time, everybody involved will have to bend, accept that they're not going to get everything they want, and understand that the only way the NFL is going to hit its projected (and enormous) revenue projections over the next decade is to keep the American public from realizing that it can, indeed, get along without the grand old game.

This week is the big push, and that's the one thing all sides have in common.