Some folks in league circles believe that NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw realizes that his job security currently depends on insecurity regarding the Collective Bargaining Agreement.  Once long-term labor peace is achieved, Upshaw faces a potential uprising from within.  Until then, the players need Upshaw’s expertise in dealing with management. 

More importantly, the players need to maintain the appearance that they’re all on the same page, and standing behind Upshaw.

In his most recent comments regarding the tenuous labor situation, Upshaw did little to persuade his detractors that he’s merely hoping to retain relevance by stoking the fires of unrest.  On Saturday, he called the NFL owners “greedy,” and he said that the strategy being followed by the league “points directly to a lockout.”

The owners could vote as soon as Tuesday to cancel the current CBA two years early.

Upshaw also insists that the players won’t take less money than the 59 cents on the dollar that they currently receive from all football revenues.  The players get that money through the team-by-team salary limit, which also includes a per-team spending minimum.

One way around this is to speak not in terms of percentages of revenues, but in terms of raw dollars.  If the players are given a firm guarantee as to the amount of the salary cap each season for the life of the deal, then the owners will still have a pure profit incentive for growing additional revenue.  As it currently stands, the incentive isn’t as strong as it could be because 59 cents of every extra dollar goes directly to the players.

The other problem, about which most in the media have forgotten, is the issue of supplemental revenue sharing.  Because the salary cap is now determined by total football revenues, the disparity between the earnings of teams like the Redskins and Patriots and teams like the Bengals and Cardinals results in a salary cap that eats more deeply into the lower-revenue teams’ profits.  Put simply, the unshared revenues generated by some teams increase the player costs of other teams.

The owners hastily agreed in 2006 to a supplemental revenue sharing system, and there have been indications that plenty of the teams don’t like it — either because of the amount of the money they have to give up or because of the amount of extra money that they get.  Regardless of whether a long-term deal can be reached with the players, a long-term understanding among the owners will be necessary to keep the system working.