The Green Bay Packers franchise's

Green Bay — Football players usually worry about wrecked knees, torn hamstrings and concussions. Not staph infections.

"I never think about it," said new Green Bay Packers jerseys cornerback Tramon Williams. "I don't even know anything about that."

Red Batty would like to keep it that way.

The Packers equipment manager has the never-ending job of cleaning and maintaining the team gear. A few years ago he added something new to his already manic daily routine: the Sani Sport machine.

It is a machine that according to its manufacturer kills dangerous and contagious staph and e-coli bacteria and the H1N1 virus, all of which could sideline a player like any injury.

And the Packers have avoided these nuisances A.J. Hawk all because their equipment guy is a hockey fanatic.

Batty grew up five minutes from the Forum in Montreal, where he followed the NHL's Canadiens devotedly. Even while working in Green Bay, he kept up with the NHL and had heard of guys like Joe Thornton, who needed surgery to correct a staph infection.

"It shuts you down for a while," said Batty. "And there's many other cases of it."

Aware of the bacteria's scary consequences, Batty heard about Sani Sport and met its inventor, another Montreal native, Steve Silver, who owned a company that manufactures skate sharpening machines. Silver explained to Batty how the machine works.

"Red Batty was the first NFL equipment manager to embrace our technology," said Silver, president of Sani Sport. "He is tremendously well respected and is admired by his peers."

Batty went to his bosses at the Packers, who signed off on the $10,000 purchase immediately. Batty has been using it for the last four years.

"After that, I got Steve invited to the NFL equipment manager meetings, and from there it skyrocketed," said Batty.

Thirteen NFL and 27 NHL teams have a Sani Sport.

Batty uses the machine year round. He can clean 10 helmets in one cycle, five or six shoulder pads in another and then 20 pairs of shoes. It looks like a giant oven, but Sani Sport actually uses ozone to kill the bacteria.

"Ozone is very effective at eliminating bacteria," said Silver. "Sani Sport generates ozone and filters it into a cabinet where the gear sits."

The machine then applies a protective coating to the gear.

"In training camp we'll pull it out and we'll do certain positions per day," said Batty. "We focus strictly on the helmets and the pads; that's where the target area is at."

There's a pretty good reason that some teams won't. While the owners are trying to B.J. Raji cry poverty in an era when their sport is a literal license to print money, player costs are tied to revenue. So while the Packers or Buffalo Bills or Jacksonville Jaguars may be able to say that their net profits are going down, that isn't necessarily tied to player costs. The most recent CBA, ratified before the 2006 season, called for the salary cap to reflect specific per-year percentages of overall revenue. And it's not the players' fault that the Packers have a lower profit than major-market teams; in fact, the players are just as responsible for recent jumps in revenue in the first place. That's why tying player costs to revenue is fair.

And this is the constant tug-of-war between the NFL and the NFLPA - the league wants people to believe that player costs are spiraling out of control at the same time that the owners are trying to expand the regular-season schedule and take an 18 percent chunk out of the players' profit percentage. If the Packers are facing declining operating profits from year to year, it's just as likely that bad investments, or fuel costs, or training camp costs, or stadium renovations, or the difference in sales between Brett Favre(notes) jerseys and Aaron Rodgers(notes) jerseys, could be at fault.

What the NFL does not want to do is to open the books of the Washington Redskins, or the Dallas Cowboys, or either of the major New York teams. The league knows that a cry of declining profits would not have the same effect from Jerry Jones or Dan Snyder ("Wah! We used to make $300 million per year, and now we're only making $250 million!) as it would from a Packers franchise that still has a perceived mom-and-pop feel due to its small-town location and public ownership. Jones, who has tried to bend the league to his wishes whenever possible, and Snyder, who tries to make a buck on anything that isn't nailed down, make far less sympathetic figures.

The players are well within their rights to ask for full financial disclosure when the league is demanding enormous givebacks to offset dings in profit. The 1/32 response was fairly transparent, and not terribly effective. Especially when Packers president Mark Murphy was the one who first tried to pull the wool over America's eyes on the revenue model 18-game schedule. And it isn't as if the NFL is doing anyone any favors here -- as the league's only publicly held corporation, the Packers are required to release annual financial statements.