The owners and players have to get a deal done today or agree to another extension. On Thursday, the NFL’s lead attorney Jeff Pash and NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith who is also an attorney got into some verbal sparring. It was like they were in a court room and the media was the jury they were addressing.
It started at the end of the day, when Pash came out and talked to the media while point fingers of blame at the players association, accusing them of not making a legitimate commitment to the negotiations.
“It’s a process, it’s not an event and things can come together quickly, things can fall apart quickly. All I can say is we’re committed to the process. It’s not glamorous, it’s not easy, but we really do believe in the value of collective bargaining. We really do believe in our relationship with the players’ association and, I’ve said it many times: If both sides have an equal commitment to getting this deal done, it will get done. I don’t know if both sides have an equal commitment. You’ve heard plenty of what I’ve heard as well.”
When asked to explain what he was saying, Pash continued then concluded: “Obviously, we have the commitment; … I’m not suggesting anything about the other side.”
Smith who was heading home, got in his car went part of the way heard what Pash had to say, then decided to come back and 
respond to his comments.
“We’re committed to this process. We have been committed to this process. But for anyone to stand and turn to the American people and say that they question that. … Look. I understand that there’s probably some things that Jeff Pash has to say. But this is the truth: We know that as early as March of 2009, from the discovery in the television case, that the National Football League engaged in a strategy to get $4 billion of television money – to lock out our fans, lock out our players – even if the games weren’t played. “
Smith was of course referring to the owners scheme to use the $4 billion dollars from the television networks to outlast the players in a lockout and thereby force them to agree to give them a larger percentage of the $9 billion dollars of yearly revenue.
Smith ended with the following closing statement.
“When I get ready to leave, I will leave each and every one of you in the media with what we call the decision tree, because this is exactly a document from the National Football League, that talks about how they were going go about securing television money, and I quote, ‘for cash during a lockout.’ So, with all due respect, when someone wants to stand up and say that he questions or doubts one party’s commitment to the negotiation process, all I would ask is for all of you … stick to the facts.”
Billionaire and millionaire crybabies.Greed is not good.
We will know something at 2pm today..
My hunch is that these negoitiations are falling apart and the
NFLPA will support walking away from the bargaining table and decertifying as a Union and then will appeal to the Court System to get involved and straighten this out through some type of Binding-Arbitration thru the Courts..
This will take months of litigation and if things go down this track, I don’t expect any football, free-agency, or football activities until late July/Early August at the earliest… Let’s hope I’m wrong, but I got a bad feel about this afternoon’s annoucement by NFLPA Directop DeMaurice Smith….
Paulman — you’re not wrong. According to my source from last night, they are going to decertify and go into litigation. Damnit all to hell.
Though there’s a glut of info out there in regards to these ongoing negotiations. I pretty much had my mind made up. If there is an extendd lock-out, the owners bear most if not all the blame. Pash’s quoted comments speak volumes about intent. Smith’s clarification as well.
My question is with the players decertified couldn’t they elect to play for another league, like say the UFL? They could essentially, move on, have more leverage on the NFL owners and eventually get paid if a prolonged work stoppage resulted from these negotiations.
The only recourse the owners have would be to start another “Scab League” and a lot of us already know how that went the last time they tried it.
Even with the Television money I have to believe that without any football players the owners can’t keep all of the money indefinitely since there would be no services rendered. They would have to eventually face repayment or litigation from broadcasting conglomerates for some of that. While a judge can determine what is legal and what is not the final deal is still going to have to come down the parties agreeing on a contract which may or may not happen pending the outcome of the court case. The players should create a new union and negotiate player centric CBA with the UFL to make the NFL owners investments worthless. Once the most popular players would be signed to the UFL teams a broadcast deal would be certain and that would just speed up the process of the broadcast companies trying to recoup some of their monies from the NFL owners. That set of actions would in turn would get the NFL owners running back to the negotiation table.
Even with the UFL only having, I think, 5 or 6 teams right from the start that could potentially be 5 or 6 teams that are essentially ProBowl caliber teams. The Players could pool their money, buy the UFL for pennies on the dollar rebuild the whole thing from scratch with whatever owner/player rules they wanted and force the NFL owners to buy-in or be left out in the cold. The thing is every fan wants everything to go back to “normal”, but with the NFL owners clearly going above and beyond the call of duty in trying to cheat their most valuable partners out of a fare share of the pie AGAIN it seems like it might be time to for the players to do what the owners like to do so often…”Blow it up and start over.”
“the Philadelphia Eagles with their 1st Selection of the 1st Round select
QB Jeff Garcia from the Omaha Team from the UFL”…