Metaphors

Here are statements from less than a month ago:

Clearly talking tough with the underlying threat of..."Get a deal now or kiss the cap bye-bye forever." As mentioned in numerous other threads, if you lose the cap you also lose the salary floor, revenue sharing as we know it and probably a couple of teams.

Now here is today's statement:

Ummm...why can't you continue negotiating during an uncapped year? Bluff called. The players now realized (or realized all along but didn't state it publicly) that they stand to lose big in 2010. Besides the hundreds of players sitting on RFA tenders instead of UFA megabucks, owners are likely to use the uncapped and unfloored year to align their salary structures more to their liking...meaning less than 60% of revenue to player salaries.

One other interesting quote:

Total and complete crap. The players have agents that are paid to be informed of trends in the market. That is a not-so-subtle threat of a collusion lawsuit if salaries tumble across the league in a suspicious way.

I read this as the players getting slowly backed into a very tight, scary and money-deficient corner. While owners laugh in a large room wallpapered with the DirecTV contract.

Brady2Welker

I think the NFLPA will crack long before the owners. As crazy as some of the owners are, they found a way to make bank before buying a team. The majority of them still have a foot in their various organizations that got them their cash and thus aren't in need for the money because they have other skillsets to net them cash.


As far as players, if you aren't a super-star player; (Brady, Manning, now Brees etc) who can gobble up endorsements, the odds are you have very little income going into 2011. Most of these guys don't manage their finances very well either, I predict that they'll be quaking in their boots if they have to pay for their large houses, and expensive cars without sunday game checks.

patsfan-1982

good i hope there is a cap there would be a lot more FA's and it would make the off season a lot more fun for fans and the players that will get paid.

BradyFTW!

Ownership will always win at this. Players aren't disciplined enough or wealthy enough to hold out, while the owners (most of them, at least) have been preparing for this for at least the last few years.

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tanked_as_usual

preparing for what? empty stadiums?

the owners caused this mess by agreeing to the deal they could not stomach

you don't think players can prepare the same way?

gonna be interesting what some of you will have to say about brady when he starts to speak up on behalf of the players.........

DarrylS

Owners have a very unique position of power here, they will get paid by the networks in '11 regardless of whether or not they have a product on the field, 50 billion worth of pay...

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tanked_as_usual

true.....but there is so much for the owners to lose on the longer term.......

but the bottom line is that it would be a 'lockout', so it is the owners call.......

I'm just wondering how on an individual basis that a lockout can't be considered a breach of contract .... I guess unless there is some verbiage in there

chevss454

Yes, but don't forget, it's really just an advance of payment since any amount paid to owners during a lockout is subtracted from amounts owed at the end of the contract. It's not free money.

Patsfanin Philly

Yeah but it sure makes it easier to pay the bills when you have the cash on hand. The owners have been preparing by having asst coaches signing contracts for lesser pay if there is no season in 2011 and they will trim staffs and stil have debt service on their stadiums etc but they will ( unfortunately) shed support staff, parking staff and concessions.....
They could always rent their stadiums out to college teams if they'd be willing to play on Sundays....

spacecrime

Yes. Exactly. They are preparing for a year without statium income. That's what BradyFTW said.

Again, agree. And since they found they cannot stomach the deal, they will do the next deal differently. Learning from past mistakes is one of the reasons why they are business savvy enough to afford teams.

Nope. As BradyFTW said, the owners have multiple sources of income and except for a very few NFL players who have endorsements, the players not only have none, they are famous for not managing money properly.

Not just football players, workers in general are not smart. When conditions are intolerable, when workers are just as well off without their job as they are with it, strikes are powerful things and the united stand of workers is immovable.

Football players don't fit this. They have nothing in common with coal miners, 19th century millworkers, etc.

In 1972 I worked in the auto industry, in the Scout plant of International Harvester in Fort Wayne. The workers went on strike. They planned for it by demanding more overtime, building a strike fund. The owners planned for it by letting workers work all the overtime they wanted, stockpiling Scouts.

I was on salary, working in Engineering, and kept my job through the strike.

When the strike came, the strikers had enough money to last a couple months, some more, most less. The company had vehicles to last three months in stock. The workers struck, the company locked out. When stockpiles of Scouts got low, the company negotiated with the now desperate workers. They all got a raise, about what the company offered to begin with (we basically ended up with what Ford-GM-Chrysler-AMC got).

The company lost nothing, in fact had higher earnings due to no salaries. The workers lost two+ months pay. Some were hit hard with medical bills.

No, workers cannot prepare as well as owners.

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“When we look at the board, based on everything we want in a football player at that particular time, we evaluate them and take the player that fits best for our football team. That’s what we always do, and I think the last nine years we’ve put a pretty competitive team out there on the field every year. I think that’s how you do it – you get good football players. Sometimes they are not always at the No. 1 position, but I don’t think you pass up good football players to get the guys who aren’t as good just because they’re at a position that somebody feels you need.”
BB on his draft philosophy, April 2010