Sunday, March 12, 2006
NFL labor deal
Lost amidst Ron Borges' hagiography of Jonathan and Bob Kraft is confirmation of what I thought all along about the NFL labor negotiations. The deal wasn't so much about negotiations with the union, but about negotiations amongst the owners on how to divvy up the enormous amount of money the league generates. And yet, while every journalist who covered the league recognized these two key components, they seldom differentiated which was most important. Why is that?
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In fairness to Borges and whoever covered the labor negotiations for ESPN.com, I started writing a piece suggesting this about a week ago (?), only to decide that the articles were clear enough in talking about the issue between the owners that I couldn't really abuse them for failing to make it clear.
It's not that they weren't clear that this was a major stumbling block. But many of the reporters I read and heard interviewed (Peter King, Boomer Esiason, Chris Mortensen, to name a few) put the Players Association negotiations and the owners negotiations on par. I always felt the major stumbling block would be the owners negotiations -- there were a lot of complex issues at stake, as opposed to the labor deal itself. The PA deal mostly boiled down to A) what percentage of revenues went to the players; and B) which revenue streams were included in that percentage. Insofar as that, it was pretty simple. You had two diametrically opposed parties who came to a mutual agreement. But the ownership deal was a horse of a different color. You had competing factions, bad blood between various groups, the feeling that all parties weren't trying as hard as one another, etc. Ultimately, the deal was cobbled together with a set of provisions intended to help some people compete, but to force others to run their businesses well. To me, that negotiation was always going to be the tougher one.
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