On the day after the N.F.L. shut down with its first work stoppage in more than 20 years, the parallel tracks of its future
The planning for the legal battles ahead was under way Saturday — the N.F.L. added the high-profile lawyersDavid Boies and Paul Clement to the legal team that will fight the players’ antitrust suit. But the league’s competition committee, which sets the playing rules for the game, was meeting, a reminder that eventually, perhaps even on schedule, there will be football again.
How quickly the football season takes its normal shape will be determined, though, far from the playing field. The fights have moved to the courtroom. The owners announced Saturday that they would lock out the players, and the players have asked for an injunction to prevent that from happening.
The players also filed an antitrust suit against the N.F.L., with quarterbacks Tom Brady and Drew Brees among the plaintiffs. The N.F.L. is awaiting a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board on its claim that the union’s decision to dissolve itself Friday was a sham. The league also is expected to appeal the ruling that it improperly negotiated television contracts to guarantee payment during the lockout.
Decisions in any of these cases could swing leverage and perhaps drive the parties back to the negotiating table.
“This is no different than any other industry where the parties scare each other with lawsuits,” said Gabe Feldman, the director of the sports law program at Tulane UniversityLaw School. “There’s a lot of time between now and a true litigation Armageddon. They’re not fighting over a fundamental shift in the sport. It’s still just a dollars issue, and if you’re fighting over $500 million, that seems like a lot, but not relative to the $9 billion you’d be giving up by not playing,” he said, referring to the N.F.L.’s revenue last year.
John Mara, the Giants’ president, sat in on many negotiating sessions. “At some point we’ll probably be back in front of the mediator,” he said. “And we will have wasted a lot of time and a lot of money.”
Mara, like many others in the N.F.L., thinks it could take a while — probably months — for negotiations to resume while the various legal entanglements work their way through the system.
The impetus for both sides to resume talks — especially for players, who walked away from the negotiations deeply frustrated on Friday — may take weeks to present itself.
Players are convinced that owners had planned to lock them out ever since the owners opted out of the old collective bargaining agreement three years ago. But owners would certainly prefer to be negotiating now. They were so eager to avoid a court battle that during a Thursday afternoon conference call, owners gave Commissioner Roger Goodellpermission to do whatever he had to do to get a deal.
The offer the league said it made Friday would have given owners one-third the amount of additional revenue they had initially sought when negotiations began — or about $325 million extra each year.
One person briefed on the deal said some small-market owners even wondered how they would live with the deal that was left on the table, because they thought it had gone too far.
In the end, though, the sides were not close to a settlement. DeMaurice Smith, the head of the union, said that during negotiations, players had offered owners $550 million over four years — $137.5 million a year — without the demand for financial verification, still a gap of $200 million a year. They had not figured out a rookie compensation plan, had not yet settled on whether to eventually have an 18-game regular season, and had not yet agreed on how much money each side would allocate for retired players.
Owners were confounded that the union would not look at the additional financial information they offered last Monday — Smith said the union’s bankers told them it would be useless in helping to determine if owners needed more revenue — and owners took that as a signal that the union had already decided it could get a better deal in court.
But players’ positions had hardened in part by what they considered an indication that owners did not respect them: few owners were directly involved in negotiations, and on Thursday, players were particularly upset that they never negotiated face-to-face with the owners’ full labor committee.
“If you were to look at a timeline of all the negotiations in the past two years, the players were always there and always involved,” the players’ spokesman George Atallah said. “There’s no measure for their level of frustration.”
If players are granted the injunction by a federal judge in Minneapolis to block a lockout — the case is expected to be assigned to Judge David S. Doty this week, and nearly everyone expects the players to get the injunction — the off-season will suddenly look routine. CONTINUE READING
