NFL Owners Vote to Extend CBA

Peace has been achieved in the NFL, as owners voted 30-2 in favor of extending the current collective bargaining agreement with the players for another six years. Commissioner, Paul Tagliabue happily announced today that a potential ticking time bomb had been defused as the current CBA would continue through the 2011-2012 season. The only team owners to oppose the continuation were Cincinnati and Buffalo, two of the lowest revenue teams in the NFL.

The deal was brokered on what was essentially the 11th hour of negotiations. As was reported on NFL.com, “Tagliabue said an agreement was reached at 6:59 and 59 seconds CT, a second before the deadline to notify the union. League spokesman Greg Aiello originally announced the deal had taken place at 7:35 p.m. after league officials said earlier the 8 p.m. deadline didn't specify what time zone.” In the end, it didn’t seem to matter exactly when the deal was brokered, just as long as it was. Gene Upshaw, director of the NFL Players’ Association was quoted as saying, “This agreement is not about one side winning or losing. Ultimately, it is about what is best for the players, the owners and the fans of the National Football League. As caretakers of the game we have acted in the manner the founders intended. Moving forward, this new agreement gives us the opportunity to continue our unprecedented success and growth.”

The debate, which was almost fever-pitch over the past few days, was not really one between the owners and the players, but rather one between the high-revenue team owners and the low-revenue team owners. Low-revenue teams, such as Cincinnati, Buffalo and Indianapolis complain that bigger market teams, such as Dallas, Washington and Philadelphia, are not contributing their fair share to the player pool, which is the amount of overall revenue (both in ticket sales and other non-football income) that is redistributed throughout the league. The new deal ensures that the poorest 17 teams in the league do not have to pay into the player pool, and will have a sliding scale for the 17 teams that do have to pay into the system. With the restructuring of the player pool, the players will take home 59.5% of the new, expanded pool, whereas, under the old system, players used to take 65% of a smaller pool, known as defined gross revenue.

Without the deal in place, the NFL would still not have suffered from an NHL-style lockout. The current CBA would have carried the league through the 2007-2008 season. The major obstacle would have been that the salary cap teams were facing would have grown from $85.5 million to $94.5 million. This would have sent big market teams scrambling to sneak under the wire, and would have resulted in many on the league’s big name players being cut from their current rosters in order to make such room. The new deal locks down a cap increase of close to $16.5 million, landing the next year’s salary cap at $102 million for the 2006-2007 season. If the agreement was not reached, the 2007-2008 season would not have had a salary cap, allowing big-market teams to simply buy the best players in the league, and crush the small-market teams. As well as this, free agency had been suspended on a day-by-day basis, tying the hands of many teams to adjust in the off-season.

With the deal in place, free agency is set to begin at 12:01am Saturday, giving teams 48 hours to comprehend the new labor agreement and assess how they wish to restructure their teams. The reason for the pressure to conclude talks this far in advance of the end of the current CBA was the feeling that players would not have negotiated if they were close to a non-capped year.

[Sources: NFL.com]