When NFL players went on strike in 1987 and the league replaced them, fantasy football wasn’t really a thing yet. It now is, and a repeat of ’87 would create havoc for the millions with a passion for this twisted branch of the football tree.
Let’s play it out. The CBA expires in March 2021. The owners, happy with the current deal, don’t lock the players out, allowing the two sides to operate with a contract while negotiations continue.
Negotiations continue to fail, and on the eve of the regular-season opener, the players walk out. The NFL replace them with teams consisting largely of the players cut on Labor Day weekend.
For daily fantasy players, it truly would become a game of skill, since it would take real work to know who will be getting reps and touches -- and who will be turning those chances into points. For full-season fantasy players (and particularly for keeper leagues), a huge mess would be looming.
One approach would be to freeze the rosters of regular players and create new rosters of replacement players. At a minimum, that would require plenty of work and creativity for the fantasy platforms, which aren’t built to have a primary team and a reserve lineup. Also, what happens if/when players start crossing the picket line and returning to the game, like plenty of players did in 1987?
For the NFL and the NFLPA, the stakes will be dramatically higher. But fans will have a much more at stake if a strike happens in 2021 than they did in 1987. And that surely will be a factor in the P.R. battle to come.