Warning Signs Ahead
NFL Gag Order Shows All is Not Well
By Tim Benz

The National Football League is exercising a gag order on its owners over matters concerning the pending expiration of the league’s collective bargaining agreement.

If the goal of the gag order was to prevent an owner of a team from saying anything inflammatory, perhaps the league should’ve implemented it sooner.

“The players’ union has unrealistic expectations,” Houston Texans owner Bob McNair told the Pittsburgh Sports Report shortly before the gag order was handed down, “I don’t think the percentage (of what the players get) should go up at all.”

How do you like your gag Mr. McNair? Cloth? Or electric tape?

As PSR reported in February, if the NFL doesn’t have an extension of the collective bargaining agreement by the end of the 2006 season, the 2007 season will be played without a salary cap. The CBA ends after the 2008 draft in April. The “cap-less” season of ’07 is supposed to be a self- imposed threat to-and-by both the owners and players to get a deal done. So far, the desired effect has not been reached. Saber rattling has begun. And heels are starting to dig in.

“It’s difficult for the league now and the profit margins are slim. And you can’t just go out and start to increase your cost everywhere. We can’t just go out and increase our costs and pass it off to the fans,” continues McNair. “They (the players) get a percentage of the revenue now. And it’s going up much higher than the national average for everyone else. All the teams are going to have payrolls in excess of $100 million. I think the union needs to understand that we need to have a healthy league and without a healthy league the players are not going to do well.”

Wait a minute?! Financially difficult? Slim profit margins? The fans needing to make up the cost of payrolls? Is this the National Football League we are talking about here? It’s not the NFL Steeler player representative Alan Faneca knows.

“I seemed to notice a lot of corporate sponsorships when we were in Texas,” said Faneca of his trip to enormous Reliant Stadium in Houston when informed of McNair’s quotes.

Furthering any players’ argument for a bigger chunk of the revenue was a recent Forbes Magazine article that stated no NFL team was worth less than $650 million. The magazine stated that at least three teams (the Redskins, Cowboys, and Patriots) were worth more than a billion. The owners annually discredit this yearly story. As McNair said, “You don’t see anybody from Forbes buying any teams do you?”

And as Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney pointed out (again, before the gag order), “Well, the players get a share of all that too you know.”

But the size of the share is more the issue for the players. And, as chronicled in that same 2/05 PSR article, how some of the higher end teams are attaining such wealth is becoming an issue for other owners. Teams such as Washington, Dallas, and New England can bring in massive revenues through parking and local media deals that other teams can’t match. And that money doesn’t go into the big pie that gets divided up with the players and helps set the salary cap.

In recent months it has become clear that NFL owners may have different agendas in rewriting a CBA. In the case of McNair in Houston, and Robert Kraft in New England, and Dan Snyder in Washington, the goal seems to be make as much money as possible and give as little to the players as possible. Sure, the Rooney family in Pittsburgh and their small to mid-market brethren across the league share that same opinion on giving up as little as possible to the players. But they want their big market buddies to kick in a little bit more too.

This is the NFL after all. This is American communism. This is where the Iron Curtain meets the Steel Curtain.

So far, the players seem to be on the same page to a much greater extent. “I think our ideas are all a little more unified because we were all in the same position,” said Faneca. “Whereas (for the owners) you have different teams in different cities that are able to make different amounts of money. And that creates different issues for them.”

“There’s a lot of different ways they can come at you,” says New England player rep, and former Steeler, Mike Vrabel.

Then again, National Hockey League players talked about being unified for a while too. But even before the time the lockout actually started, fragmented opinions started to pop out from all corners of the union. Some high salaried players were begging to reach a deal while others will still militantly holding out. Meanwhile some lesser-paid players were painting picket signs while others were publicly pleading to get back on the ice.

And even now there are rumblings of different goals to reach in this next agreement from the players too. Faneca’s co-rep with the Steelers is Kimo von Oelhoffen. He pointed to three relatively small things as major points of emphasis from the union’s point of view: lower rookie salaries, better benefits and various medical concerns.

Nothing about a bigger salary cap. Nothing about claiming a bigger share of the revenue. Not even anything about guaranteed contracts. In fact, von Oelhoffen went so far as to ENDORSE the league’s stance on non-guaranteed contracts.

“We’ll never get ‘em. It’s not even being talked about,” he said, “Because look at the brutal physicality of this game. Look at how hard this game is on your body. If you start guaranteeing contracts, especially for the young guys who are making so much so early it’s ridiculous, you’ll see guys getting six year guaranteed deals and walking away and retiring after one.”

Meanwhile, Vrabel sounds as if he may have bigger goals. “We gotta stay strong. We gotta stay committed to what we are trying to do as a union so we can get the most possible benefits that we can get out of this system. “

Because the NFL’s record of labor harmony has been unparalleled in professional sports since it’s last work stoppage in 1987, many sports fans have written off this unsettled situation in the following way: “Nothing to worry about. It’ll get done. It’s the NFL. They do things the right way. Why should this time be any different? Plus, there is so much money at stake here, how could they sacrifice that for a work stoppage? Cooler heads will prevail.”

Well, cool heads were going to prevail in the NHL too, right? Then the great game on ice got put on ice for a whole season. A lot of money was at stake in baseball too before the league went AWOL and erased the 1994 World Series. Yes, a lot is at stake to lose if picket lines are drawn. But a lot is at stake as well if a new CBA is drawn the wrong way in the eyes of any one party in this mix.