Tom Curran • E-mail

The NFL keeps baby-stepping toward a work stoppage.

The latest wobbly move? Team owners, so anxious to get out of the Collective Bargaining Agreement they agreed to with the players 26 months ago, opted out of the agreement Tuesday morning. Unanimously.

Why would they do that? This is the explanation NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell offered in April at the NFL’s Annual Meeting.

“We knew when we entered this CBA that the pendulum would swing the way of the players. We just didn’t know how much how fast.”

And that’s what it boils down to. The players’ gains have been too rich for the taste of their employers. Before laying out the player-owner issues, let’s first answer what this opt-out means to people who care about the game but don’t make money from it – the fans. The opt out means the CBA will expire in 2011. Long time off, you say? It is. But the stuff actually starts hitting the fan at the end of the upcoming season because of fail-safe devices put into previous CBAs to save the league from getting to the point of a work-stoppage.

If no new agreement is reached, 2010 will be a season without a salary cap. The owners don’t want that, can’t afford that and NFLPA head Gene Upshaw has said more than once that, if the salary cap ever goes away, it’s never coming back. The impact of an uncapped year starts to hit next March when the 2008 contracts expire and the next crop of players becomes free agents. How do you structure contracts that comply with a salary cap when there may not be one? How do you structure rookie contracts? Should agents advise the most attractive players on the market to sign one-year deals so they can cash in during the uncapped 2010? And no salary cap means there’s no salary floor, either. Will cash-starved teams go the way of baseball’s Twins or Rays and employ shoestring budgets?

Meanwhile, players with four years of service who would be eligible for free agency in 2010 will suddenly find that the rules change and they aren’t eligible to go where they want for six years. All that uncertainty is what led to the current CBA agreement in March of 2006. The previous agreement was going to expire in 2008, and 2007 was going to be the uncapped year. But owners were so wary of edging closer to that uncapped year that they pushed back the start of free agency twice in order to get a new CBA done."

And when it was completed, it was unanimously viewed as a KO win for the players. Without getting into too much economics (because I’m even more overmatched than normal when I talk economics), the NFLPA got the owners to agree that the salary cap each year would be a percentage of the total gross revenues of the 32 teams. Every cent the organizations made would be subject to sharing with the players. Previously, some revenues – local TV and radio contracts, in-house sponsorships and naming rights, for instance – were not shared.

And the salary cap rose from $85.5 million per team in 2006 before the new agreement to $116 million per team this year as the players currently share in 58 percent of the total gross revenues (the percentage gets as high as 60 later in the current agreement).

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Teams spent to the new ceiling, making six-year, $42 million contracts with $18 million guaranteed commonplace when – two years ago – that was “star” money.

At the Super Bowl in Arizona, NFLPA head Gene Upshaw made strident comments that laid out the union’s stance.

“I just don't want the owners to believe that somehow there is a Santa Claus. There’s not one. There is not a player in the league at this point that doesn't understand if we ever get to that territory where there’s no cap, we’ll never have another one again.

“The owners’ attitude has been the players have too good of a deal, that the deal that we bargained and agreed to gives the players too much. I can’t convince the players that they should take less so the owner can make more. I can’t sell that.

“I don't know what (ownership’s) problems are. I have no idea when I hear that it’s not working, that the partnership needs to be adjusted, that we need to tweak it, but whenever I hear those words, I know being around this business so long, that it always means give us something back. Well, that's not going to happen on this watch, that's for sure. I can tell you, we're getting 60 percent of the revenues, when it's all said and done, we're not giving any of it back.”

Tuesday, the owners made a move that shows their intent to get some of that revenue back. Baby-stepping toward a work stoppage.

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