Today NFL Commisioner Roger Goodall talks about the likelyhood that NFL owners are going to go with an uncapped season next year.
http://www.tsn.ca/nfl/story/?id=309055
Speaking Friday at his annual state-of-the-league address during Super Bowl week, Goodell said fans "expect solutions ... and we should deliver" on a new collective bargaining agreement.
The NFL Players Association said Thursday it is bracing for a lockout in 2011 after the current labour pact expires. Goodell said he and the league's owners want an agreement and it's "absolutely false" that owners would want to see a work stoppage.
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NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said Thursday the union views the chance of a lockout as a "14" on a scale of one-to-10, something Goodell said he hopes won't become a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
There was a bit of discussion in this topic about the possibility of an upcoming uncapped season.
http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthr...hlight=lockout
A couple of things to keep in mind are that the cap is currently forcing all teams to spend to the floor and is forcing more owners to spend more than they want as opposed to limiting a few from spending whatever on who ever. The free agency rules in a non-cap environment get very strict and a lot of guys who are 4 or 5 year players looking for a big pay day will suddenly have a lot of restrictions and won't end up getting the long term deals with guaranteed money they're after. The numbers I heard are that owners claim revenue of 3.6 billion and player costs of 2.6. Of course owners will not open up the books to back these claims, and really they never will.
Also a real key thing is that in the last TV contract the owners got guaranteed TV money even if there are no games. So the owners are going to get pretty good revenue by not playing games for the time being. Football careers on average are even shorter than hockey careers and at this time there is not much else in terms of other leagues for players to go play in.
Another thing I heard on the Sirius NFL channel is that the owners have hired the guy who did the NHL labour negotiations (not Bettman but the actual negotiator) so they're willing to wage a war even though Goodall says thats not what they want.
A lot of owners recently have had to build or upgrade stadiums with money out of their own pockets. It does increase the value of their franchises, but to me it looks like they want todays players to take a pay cut to increase profits to help them pay this off and make more money down the road plus get the increase in franchise values. More or less a promise to pay the players down the road if they take a cut today. Problem is that 80% of the leauge will be done with football by the time they pay them back.