The Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NFL and NFLPA is set to expire after the 2020 season and the union shot down the notion of extending the current CBA beyond that point during a press conference in Minneapolis on Thursday.
NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said that there’s no circumstance where he could see the NFLPA agreeing to “simply put a page on the back of it where it’s extended until 2035.” Smith pointed to how painful the negotiations for the current agreement were in 2011 and said that such agreements are always “grinding, exhausting elements that come out of two parties that want fundamentally different things.”
Smith said that he’s open to early talks that could result in an agreement that forestalls a work stoppage, but that he and the union are not expecting that to be the outcome.
“We prepare for war,” Smith said. “If we’re able to get a collective bargaining agreement done, that’s great. All of these men went through a unilateral declared war on players in 2010 and 2011.”
The contract structure for first-round picks and workplace safety were among the issues that players on the NFLPA Executive Committee brought up as discussion points for the next CBA.