The only ones happy about a potential NFL lockout are chickens.
With negotiations between the players union and team owners at a standstill, chicken-industry execs have a bone to pick with the NFL, fearing the market for wings could collapse if there’s no Sunday football this fall.
“It will be a major blow,” Joe Sanderson Jr., CEO of Sanderson Farms, the fourth-largest poultry company in the United States, told ABC News.
“If we don’t have Sunday football, the demand will go down tremendously, and of course, if that happens, the price will go down.”
That may be good for those who fondly remember the days of 5-cent wings about 20 years ago, but frightening for chicken growers who are already getting sauced by the high costs of farming.
According to Sanderson, wings account for 12 percent of his company’s output.
“We sell about 3 million pounds of wings a week,” Sanderson said. “And a lot of those wings go to sports bars.”
Football fans consume about 5 million to 10 million pounds of chicken wings during Thursday, Sunday and Monday games in each of the 17 weeks of the NFL season, according to the National Chicken Council.
On Super Bowl Sunday, a whopping 90 million pounds are consumed — or about 450 million wings.
Before the lockout, the National Chicken Council estimated that in 2011, more than 13.5 billion wings would be sold.
“With the wholesale price of chicken wings going for about $1 a pound, it could cost the industry as much as $10 million a week,” said Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council.
“We really hope the NFL’s players and owners go back to the bargaining table and get it settled,” said Lobb.