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No locker room smells as foul as the concept of the personal seat license that has become as popular in the NFL as the forward pass. On any given Sunday, a dozen or so franchises are using the PSL the way a common burglar uses a crowbar to pry open a back door in the dead of night.

It works like this: Your friendly neighborhood football baron demands that you pay thousands of dollars for the privilege to buy an overpriced ticket to his games.

You don't just pay for the ticket. You pay for the chance to pay for the ticket.

Why? NFL owners want you, Joe Six Pack, to help them cover the costs of their new gameday palaces, which double as monuments to themselves. Jerry Jones, for instance, is asking Dallas Cowboys fans to lay out as much as $150,000 — you read it right, a hundred and fifty grand — for a crack at purchasing a season ticket inside his new billion-dollar-plus stadium in Arlington.

Never mind the $325 million in public funds committed to the project; Jones wants to siphon much more out of his average fan's American Dream to support America's Team.

If that means pricing Texas Stadium lifers right out of the new place, hey, life's tough. Jones' cheapest PSL comes in at $2,000 and the fees head north in a hurry, soaring over the six-figure barrier like a tailback hurdling the scrum on fourth-and-goal.

Sure, the Cowboys originally figured their new stadium would cost about $400 million less than it will now. But that's Jerry Jones' problem. At least until he made it his ticketholders' problem.

The Cowboys didn't invent the PSL, nor does the NFL own a patent on it. This scourge has snaked its way into major league baseball, the NHL and the NBA.

But pro football has become the home office of the personal seat license, a truth hardened by the Giants' recent decision to charge their fans between $1,000 and $20,000 for the right to buy a ticket inside the $1.6 billion stadium now under construction in the Jersey marshes. The Giants rained on their own Super Bowl parade, blitzing their delirious fans from the blind side.

"We didn't go into this project with any idea of doing this," said Giants co-owner John Mara. "But the stadium ended up costing a lot more than we thought. We thought we'd do it for $1 billion or less, but the cost of construction and the price of steel and concrete climbed dramatically, and the credit market was severely affected over the last couple of years.

"Then our lenders and the NFL required us to pay down the debt in much faster installments than we'd anticipated. We're not attempting to blame anyone for that, but it left us with a decision we agonized over for a long period of time, yet it was one we had to make."