NFL Owners Initiate Lockout; Players set to Sue the League
Despite speculation by the NFL and NFLPA about each others positions and the circumstances that led to a lockout of the players, ended up fulfilling each others self-fulfilling prophecies.
The NFL claimed for weeks leading up to this lockout that the NFLPA would deny reasonable terms to a new deal and pursue action in federal court. The NFLPA claimed for weeks that the NFL had no intention on bargaining in reasonable terms and were committed to locking the players out.
Each ended up being the exact position of both sides as the current CBA expired on March 11th, 11:59PM with both sides walking away from the negotiating table.
The NFL and the NFLPA broke off negotiations to work out a new deal between the two operating sides of the business that is the National Football League on Friday. The original deadline date was set for March 4th by the original drafting of the CBA that was to expire. Not even 17 days of negotiating with a special third party federal mediator could bring the two sides to an amicable resolution.
What prompted the last minute, intense negotiations in the final week before the CBA expired was when Minnesota judge David Doty, who has been presiding over NFL labor cases for over twenty years as the ultimate arbiter of grievances between the NFLPA and NFL Management Council and has often ruled in favor of the players, blocked the NFL from being able to use an estimated $4 Billion dollars in money it had acquired in current and future television contracts. The ruling came just a couple weeks before the CBA deadline and lost the NFL a mountain of leverage it could have used with those TV dollars if it ends up going into a season with the lost revenue of no football being played in 2011.
With the loss of that leverage, the NFL came down to a more level playing field with the NFLPA. Because talks got much closer with the help of an independent, third party mediator to help induce compromise between the two sides, the CBA that was set to end on March 4th was twice extended to March 11th. That date has now come and passed with no new deal in place and no extension of the current deal to continue talks.
The most glaring of the issues remains to be the way that the NFLPA and the NFL owners split up an astronomical $9 Billion pie between them.
Owners have been getting the first billion off of the top of the revenue pile under current terms, but opted out of that most recent CBA in May of 2008 because they wanted to get a new deal in place to increase their personal revenues. The league has stated that many teams are operating under their profit potentials or even at a loss because players are being overpaid. This is the basis of their argument for wanting to increase the amount of money they earn from $1 Billion to $2 Billion.
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