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On the heels of Friday’s report that the NFL owners could decide as soon as Tuesday to pull the plug two years early on the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, the New York Times reports that NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw fully expects that to happen.
In addition to Friday’s report on ESPN.com regarding the possible vote not to extend the CBA through 2012, a story on FOXSports.com indicates that the owners are leaning toward opting out sooner rather than later.
“[T]he subject is going to come up whether this is a better time than in November,” one team source told FOX. “There’s a broad concern that [the NFL] doesn’t want this to become a focus that takes away from the regular season.”
May 17th, 2008 at 10:41 am
As much as I’d miss NFL football, a 2 year lockout would serve to sober up the likes of Upshaw and the high and mighty agents.
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May 17th, 2008 at 10:54 am
1st any significant lockout/strike (ie losing a season or more)
would put football on an equal footing with baseball and hockey
(neither of which I follow or care anything about any more)
What I THINK will happen, is ownership will give the players
slightly less of a percentage of a great scope of money, but
will demand things like harsh penalties for withholding of
services while under contract (Ocho Stinko, T. Owens et al)
AND for “legal misbehavior”, such as teams being allowed to terminate
contracts for such things directly. I always thought that
escrowing big chunks of signing bonus to the completion of
a contract made a lot of sense. So you get your $20 mil
signing bonus, which is guaranteed absence of getting arrested
or deciding you have out performed your deal, but 18mil of it is
held in escrow at market rate interest, and released over the course
of the contract, with the balance released when you are cut or
put on waivers. This also allows teams to spread the cap consequences
of a signing over a number of years, but punishes them for cutting a
player early in his contract.
One thing I have always believed is that there should be a
cap exception for any player that has played all his professional
snaps for one team, and that his contract should count as a vet
minimum regardless of what it is..
Call it the Cortez Kennedy Exception.
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May 17th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Yeah, if they pull the plug now rather than during the season, it will never be mentioned again. There will be no speculation about what it all means. No speculation about whether a new CBA will be in place or if there will be a lockout/strike. Nope. Ending things in the off-season means no talk about it during the season.
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May 17th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
I never really went back to following baseball after their strike (was it 94?). I would hate to see the same thing happen to the NFL.
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May 18th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Upshaw is the biggest POS ever to be involved in the NFL. He cares not about the game or players, just how much he makes in the end. I’d bet that if Goodell gave him a $10M check, he’d allow the owners to write whatever type of CBA they wanted.
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