With the NFL preparing to stage what could be the last conference title games until early 2013 (or, if the Mayans and George Lucas are right, ever), the New York Times has published a profile of NFLPA executive director De Smith.
It reveals a man who is communicating with his players like a football coach, preparing them for an off-field battle similar to the games they play every Sunday in the fall.
“We are at war!” Smith reportedly “yelled” at 20 new player representatives from various NFL teams.
(American soldiers everywhere would love to trade their M-16s for Smith’s pens and three-piece suits.)
“Nobody gets strong without fighting,” Smith said. “Nobody stays strong without fighting. Nobody negotiates their way to strength. Nobody talks their way to a good deal. Nobody sits down and just has miraculous things happen.”
We realize that Smith needs to create the impression that he’s fighting for the players, while also allowing in very subtle yet tangible fashion the perception to be created that his predecessor, Gene Upshaw, didn’t fight as much as he could or should have.
“When people talked about the model in the past, that Gene and [former Commissioner] Paul [Tagliabue] had such a great relationship so they were able to make these deals work out, well, neither of those guys is here anymore,” Smith told Sridhar Pappu of the Times.
De Smith perhaps has been listening a bit too much to Bryant Gumbel. Though Upshaw and Tagliabue indeed had a strong relationship, many think the union and the league wouldn’t currently be in this mess if Upshaw hadn’t pulled off such a player-friendly deal in 2006. And though some may think that the owners are merely calling what was a fair deal a bad deal in the hopes of preying on Upshaw’s inexperienced successor, the truth is that the owners exercised their ability to drop the last two years of the current labor agreement in May 2008, three months before Upshaw’s diagnosis and shockingly fast death from pancreatic cancer.
So, basically, the current storm was coming, with or without Upshaw calling the shots for the players, who’ll eventually have to decide whether to take what the owners are offering or not play football for the kind of money the NFL pays.
Smith told the player reps that the owners ask him, “‘What can you sell to the players?’ Sell to them? I work for them! . . . How condescending of a world is it where every time we sit down with these guys they say to us, ‘What do you think you can sell?’”
If Smith is merely trying to create the impression that he’s fighting harder than Upshaw while intending to ultimately do a fair win-win deal, then we understand and agree with the approach. But if Smith truly intends to carry such aggression and belligerence to the bargaining table and beyond, well, at least I’ll get to go to a few college football games in 2011.
Meanwhile, and with all due respect to the New York Times (translation: “here comes the insult”), the lengthy article mentions nowhere the concept of decertification, which would allow the union to block a lockout, avoiding the parade of horribles that Smith plans to unleash via P.R. and political efforts, if/when a lockout happens. Despite spending countless hours and thousands of dollars to meet with players from every team in an effort to secure the ability to decertify if necessary, the NFLPA is skittish about a strategy of shutting down the union and then daring the league to impose across-the-board rules regarding the draft and free agency, because there’s a good chance that a system premised on a college draft and a rookie wage scale and 18 regular-season games and a salary cap funded by revenues after $2 billion per year are reinvested in the sport and true free agency after four or five years of service with only the “franchise player” and “transition player” exception would survive an inevitable antitrust lawsuit from the players, forcing them to eventually re-unionize and strike in order to get a better deal than what the owners want them to take now.
The article also fails to mention the collusion case filed by the NFLPA less than two weeks ago, an action that the union curiously and persistently has failed to publicly acknowledge, either because the case isn’t all that strong or because the union doesn’t want its P.R. and political efforts to be undermined by the perception that the players have spilled coffee all over themselves and now want to sue someone because the coffee was hot.
That said, the bottom line is that the image of Smith as the leader in a critical off-field labor “war” is either very good for the sport, or very bad for it. We’ll continue to be optimistic, as we continue to search for more (any) tangible reasons for optimism.
Based on the Times article, the best approach may be to simply renew my season tickets for West Virginia football.