NFL Players Association showed that it at least has some sense of reality, releasing a video of players on the bargaining committee basically thanking the fans for sticking through the lockout and expressing their excitement at getting back to business. It might not be the most original idea, but they certainly deserve credit for being self-aware enough to make the gesture.
How much rebuilding of the fans' faith is required, though? As frustrating and maddening as the lockout was, some credit is deserved for both sides' apparent realization that they needed to get a deal struck before any actual games were missed. The regular season isn't scheduled to start until Sept. 8, meaning teams will have more than six weeks to get themselves together.
oday, the labor impasse has been broken. Peace is at hand. A 10-year contract is in place, camps are opening … and the upcoming season is 16 games. So is next season. Maybe, under extraordinary circumstances, they will re-open talks about expanding to 18 for the 2013 season.
But not now. Check off another box next to Smith and the players.
There was a time, not even a year ago, that Bill Polian, president of the Colts and as influential and respected a member of NFL management as there is, said on a radio show that the 18-game season was a “fait accompli.” A done deal. In April, at the draft in New York, commissioner Roger Goodell – fresh off a round of lusty booing every time he walked onto the stage – said that fans at the site had told him how much they favored the “enhanced” season.
His – and the owners’ – selling point all along was that 20 weeks of football was much better divided up with two preseason and 18 regular-season, because fans didn’t want to spend good money on meaningless football. Oh, and more weeks of meaningful football guaranteed more television money, better attendance, better in-stadium revenue and the like.
Maybe the owners never intended this to go through and be part of the new deal – maybe they were the ones using it for leverage. If so, they sold it well, so well that it’s now utterly unclear what they got out of the deal. Because the union stuck to its guns on the 18-game season. It is off the table, and it’s not going back on, no matter what you say or do.
Goodell kept pushing that line throughout the spring, on his tour of season-ticket holders in the various cities. We keep hearing that the fans want it, he repeated. "We have not abandoned our position on that. We do think it is the right thing for the game,” he told Titans fans in May, according to the Nashville Tennessean.
Yet whenever the question was raised to anyone connected with the union, the answer was always an unequivocal, unshakeable “no.”
Now, the players and league have a contract that eases some of the physical punishment of the year-round job of football, with off-season workout schedules more manageable, hitting curtailed and training camp, full-pad two-a-days eliminated.
The 18-game season, meanwhile, is a distant memory. Not a fait accompli; not even close. Nobody seems to miss it, or even miss talking about it.
The players took their stand and didn’t get what they didn’t want. Contrary to the commissioner’s belief, that is what’s right for the game.
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