Who let the lawyers loose?

Friday, February 04 2011

DeMaurice Smith is a smart fellow who wears nice suits, speaks in complex, complete sentences, and always finishes with a smile.

Jeffrey Pash is just as bright, a guy whose résumé includes a stint with the National Hockey League, who somewhere along the way became a fan of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

Smith, the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, and Pash, the league’s general counsel, have been charged with explaining this week, calmly, politely, why there might not be any NFL games played next season, why the unbroken string of Super Bowls might stop at XLV, why a business that rakes in $9-billion a year in revenues, and by and large treated the economic meltdown like a speed bump, might intentionally go dark.

Judging by the overflow crowds at their press conferences, it is a subject of considerable interest.

Yes, the lawyers have moved in on the NFL’s annual self-aggrandizement fest for the first time ever, sharing the spotlight with the star quarterbacks, the genius coaches, the massive offensive linemen being asked how many hamburgers they can eat at a sitting, the Mexican television reporters with their vast array of wacky props.

And yes, though an NFL lockout costing an entire season seems wildly irrational, remember that Pash’s former employers at the NHL opted to kill the 2004-05 season in order to force their players to capitulate, then emerged from that lost season in surprisingly good shape (at least in their strong markets, and the NFL really only has strong markets). Note also that the architect of the NHL’s strategy then, Bob Batterman, is now working with Pash for the NFL owners.

So what, in a nutshell, are the issues?

To oversimplify, the NFL’s owners believe they erred in 2006 when in order to get a deal, they agreed to a salary cap based on roughly half of designated revenues, including new monies they might generate. That’s why they decided to opt out of the contract early, as was their right, in the hopes of knocking that percentage down to something they consider more manageable.

“There’s no difference of opinion [with the players] as to the economics,” Pash said.

“My guess is that there is a little bit of a disagreement,” Smith countered dryly.

The owners would like the players to accept a smaller cut and a rookie salary scale, with the promise that the found money would be invested in the game and make everyone richer in the long run. On Wednesday, when he took his turn at the podium, Pash spoke of all kinds of wondrous things the owners might create: new stadiums in Los Angeles, Minnesota, San Francisco and Atlanta, more international games, perhaps even a team in London. (He did not mention that they could also opt to stick those newfound profits in their jeans.)

“We need a more sustainable business model that fuels growth,” Pash said, and yes, you may have heard that line before.

What the owners would also like is for the players to agree to an 18-game regular season, which would increase both gate and television revenues, and fly in the face of the lip service paid to player health and safety issues.

No one, even as propaganda, has the gall to argue that NFL teams are losing money. But there are indeed large disparities among franchises, between small and big markets, between owners who got in decades ago and have accumulated huge equity but might not have the healthiest revenue streams (Ralph Wilson in Buffalo, for instance), and those who bought in late, paid a premium for their teams, invested enormous amounts of their own dough in new stadiums to generate cash, and are burdened with significant debt (Jerry Jones here in Dallas being the poster boy).

The players, naturally, say that if you want us to buy the notion of a partnership, open your books, show us not just all of your revenues, but all of your costs, and by the way, if you do lock us out on March 4, we will litigate, we might decertify and go the antitrust route.

The problem for Smith is that historically, his membership has been known to break ranks. That’s not so surprising given that careers are short and contracts in the NFL are not guaranteed. Go to the barricades to make life better for future generations of players, and by the time they get back, for many there might not be a job. Thus the worried, dissenting voices that are already being heard, and thus the theatrical show of unity Thursday, with Smith backed on stage by a group of former and current players, including the great and reclusive Barry Sanders.

“Let us play,” Smith said, offering up the union’s catchphrase, the mantra of the commercial it hopes to air during the Super Bowl broadcast, a pitch directly to the hearts and minds of the paying customers.

In an economically embattled country, perhaps soon to be deprived of its real national sporting pastime, wonder if anyone will be listening? (source Globe and Mail)