It’s instantly become trendy to assume that court-ordered mediation will end up being a waste of everyone’s time, with no agreement coming and both sides intent on deferring any real discussions until the motion to lift the lockout has been decided by Judge Nelson and reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
We prefer to be slightly less pessimistic, in large part because we get irritated when everyone is saying the same thing.
That said, I can attribute cautious optimism to something more than contrarian tendencies. At this point, no one in the media knows anything about Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan, who’ll preside over the mediation.
The outcome of a mediation in many respects is influenced by the skill of the mediator. If Boylan can balance toughness with reasonableness and persuasiveness, he can get the two sides to realize that, as Peter King of Sports Illustrated pointed out in this weeks MMQB column, they aren’t really all that far apart.
Last week, Rich Eisen of NFL Network suggested on PFT Live that he believes the parties wish they could go back to March 10 and give settlement another try. With Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan presiding over mediation, they will.
Besides, I know from first-hand experience that mediation, if entered into earnestly and in good faith, can be successful, no matter how far apart the two sides may have been when the process began. If the mediator sets the right mood and pushes the right buttons and ignores the folks in the room who are being unreasonable and if the parties decide to make real moves, the two circles of the Venn diagram possibly will make contact.
So let’s all give this a chance before proclaiming that it’ll fail. Sure, the gloom-and-doomers are more likely to be right. But who cares about being right at a time when everything about the greatest sport on the planet seems so wrong?