Thursday will be a key day for the ongoing labor talks between the NFL and the NFL Players Association, as the NFLPA convenes a meeting of the board of player representatives with an offer on the table that may or may not progress to a full vote of the union’s rank and file. On Tuesday, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith spoke about the current state of the negotiations, and what could happen if negotiations don’t lead to a deal.
"[P]eople need to understand that it’s really easy to call for a work stoppage; it’s really hard to win one,” Smith told ESPN.com. “So that’s why I started notifying players four years ago about saving their checks, making changes to their debt structure, and the reality is that if we want to hold out and get everything we want, that’s probably going to mean a two-year strike.”
A two-year strike? That isn’t happening. A two-week strike will be very difficult to pull off, because football players want to play football -- and they don’t want to sacrifice the money that comes from playing football.
That’s why the union ultimately took the best deal that the NFL put on the table in early August 2011. The players didn’t want to miss games and game checks. Given that reality, Smith is now trying to once again engineer the best possible deal in light of the reality that his constituents aren’t ready or willing to walk off the job and stay off the job.
The centerpiece of the current talks continues to be the 17-game season. As PFT explained on Monday, there’s concern that not enough players will embrace it, even with financial and other inducements. Russell Okung, a member of the NFLPA Executive Committee and a candidate for NFLPA president, is firmly against it. Regardless, the 17-game thing is the main issue, with the everything else a detail that will be worked out once the money for an extra game is resolved.
“Any collective bargaining deal is going to be a package of things,” Smith told ESPN.com. “Is it going to be an agreement where you get 100 percent of everything you want? Probably not, and one of the reasons that we’re in a position of bargaining right now is because the league didn’t get everything they wanted in 2011. If they would have retained the unilateral right to increase games, my guess is we wouldn’t be talking about the possibility of an early deal.”
Smith is right. Prior to 2011, the league had the ability to expand the season without the NFLPA’s consent. After 2011, the league retained only the power to shrink the preseason. The thinking was that, at some point after the ink dried, the league would explain that it’s exercising its right to reduce the preseason -- and that the NFLPA would respond by saying, “We can’t have that. We’d better expand the regular season.”
As Thursday approaches, here’s the bottom line: If the current offer is deemed to be sufficiently attractive to the union, a deal will be done soon. If not, the situation will continue to linger until the offer is made sufficiently sweeter, with the March NFLPA presidential election providing mutual incentive to get a deal done, since a change in leadership could set the process back considerably.