As the Hatfield-McCoy thing between the NFL and Comcast continues to rage, details have emerged regarding an outside-the-box effort by Comcast in 2006 to get its hands on the eight regular-season games that the league has held in its back pocket for broadcast on NFL Network.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that, in 2006, Comcast offered a combination of rights fees and partial ownership of the Versus channel, if the eight games would be aired on that station, which at the time was called “Outdoor Life Network.”

Comcast believed that the owners would be able to shield the equity stake in Versus from the 59-cents-on-the-dollar revenue distribution to the league’s players.  The NFL and the NFLPA disagree with that assessment.

Former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue supposedly acknowledged that the Comcast offer might have been too good to pass up.  ”Perhaps the owners are making a mistake here,” Tagliabue reportedly told Comcast’s CEO, Brian Roberts.  ”Your offer may be better.  Sometimes the owners have to learn the hard way.”

When the NFL passed, Roberts reportedly told Tagliabue, “Your relationships with the cable industry are going to get very interesting.” 

Needless to say, things have gotten more than very interesting since then.  The most popular sports league in America can’t find a suitable home on many major cable systems for its in-house network, causing the effort to lose, by all appearances, a lot of money — and reportedly resulting in discussions with ESPN about a partnership aimed at salvaging what has become a slowly sinking ship.