NFL Owners Get Tough on Drug Testing, Ease Up on Free Agency

In two of the boldest decisions ever reached at their winter meetings, the NFL’s leaders this week resolved:

--To act unilaterally on steroids, forcing players to undergo unannounced, year-round testing.

--To take a more conciliatory stance in player relations, leading to some form of free agency.

In the long term, the league’s move toward free agency could prove the more historic, bringing the players back into collective bargaining.

Short term, though, the NFL’s tougher stance on steroids is causing the most commotion.

From Washington, NFL Players Assn. leaders said they won’t immediately challenge NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue on random steroid testing.

“We don’t have a collective bargaining agreement with the NFL,” said Doug Allen, the players’ assistant executive director. “So we don’t have any (base) for a protest.

“But if any player feels his rights are being violated, the association will assist him in every way it can to make a (courtroom) challenge.”

The NFLPA’s executive director, Gene Upshaw, was unavailable, but Allen said it’s impossible to make a judgment on Tagliabue’s plan because the commissioner’s presentation was incomplete.

“How is he going to administer these tests?” Allen asked. “In drug-testing programs, the details on exactly how you’re going to do it are what’s important.

“Last year, when (the NFLPA) gave (its own street-drug) tests, the results in several cases differed from the NFL’s. Some of the suspended players were (cleared) in our tests.”

Earlier in the week, Allen, Upshaw’s assistant for many years, was the target of criticism by Tagliabue, who said that he gets along with Upshaw, but that “Allen has his own union.”

Allen said: “I have no idea what he meant. I’ve only met the man once.”

To some listeners, Tagliabue’s remarks seemed to fit into the NFL’s divide-and-conquer strategy in union relations. There is a feeling that Allen is more aggressive than Upshaw in advancing players’ rights, prompting NFL leaders to act more belligerently toward Allen.

In any case, Tagliabue emerged this week as much more of a union basher--at least in public--than predecessor Pete Rozelle.

Repeatedly, Tagliabue suggested that NFLPA leadership doesn’t speak for the athletes.

Since taking office five months ago, Tagliabue has met privately with players of four clubs, and this week he sought to create the impression that all were solidly against Upshaw and Allen.

“The players kept telling me: ‘Save us from our union,’ ” Tagliabue said.

Said Allen: “That is obviously nonsense. Management is always trying to make you believe that the players are being led astray by the leaders. The fact is, Upshaw was reelected last June for three years. He was unanimously reelected.”

Some attending Tagliabue’s first convention as commissioner this week said his aggressive stance might have been a pose to intimidate players while he works behind the scenes for a quick collective bargaining agreement.

They pointed out that his actions were milder than his words. Most prominently, Tagliabue removed the Management Council’s Jack Donlan from responsibility for a labor-peace solution and gave it to a new committee of club executives.

Although Donlan will head the committee, the real power has passed to the four committee members--club vice presidents John Shaw of the Rams and Bill Polian of Buffalo and club presidents Mike Lynn of Minnesota and Steve Gutman of the New York Jets.

This group has a mission to develop a peace proposal that will meet most of the expectations of most owners and players in the four problem areas--limited free agency, payroll cap, a salary scale for at least younger players and a method of financing the plan from, at the least, pooled TV revenue and pooled gate receipts.

“The clubs are ready to adopt some such package,” Philadelphia owner Norman Braman said. “There are far more than 21 votes for something of this kind. What (the committee) has to do is develop a plan that will fly.”

The league has spent the last three years without a collective bargaining agreement with the players because of a disagreement over free agency, which the players insist is a precondition, and which the owners have said they will never grant.

Why are the owners relenting now?

“They just signed television contracts for more than $3 billion,” Donlan said. “And they would like to find a way to keep that money.”

After signing two lucrative television contracts in the ‘80s, they found a way to spend it--passing most of it on to the players.

“Last year, the players got 59% of the (NFL gross),” Shaw said.

On some clubs, they got up to 63%.

Can the new committee work out a plan that would be closer to 50-50 for the players and owners?

“It’s going to be hard to do,” Lynn said. “The great problem is the disparity of income between the richest and (poorest) clubs.”

Said Shaw: “Smaller-gross cities will have a harder time (paying for) free agents than big cities. We have to find a way around that.”

The real question, perhaps, is whether the NFL has embraced free agency too late.

Increasingly, NFL players have seemed content with what they have already earned--without the help of collective bargaining contracts.

NFL player salaries average more than $300,000 annually. They went up 30% last year and 43% in the last two years--without any collective agreement--and have continued to rise since the NFLPA recently decertified as a union.

Not long ago, Upshaw, speaking to a group of players, said: “To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, why don’t you ask yourself: ‘Am I better off now than I was three years ago?.’ ”

Put that way, the problem of a decertified union isn’t a problem at all. Although the NFL’s owners have cut off the players’ benefits package--which included severance pay, insurance, and pension contributions--that package was only worth about $25,000 a player per year when it was eliminated. Since then, salaries have gone up about $90,000.

Moving toward toward free agency, Tagliabue conceded: “What the players want is bidding for their services.”

Or as Doug Allen said: “The owners doubled their television income this year by playing one network against the other. In other words, they did it with a free market. Well, a free market is all we want.”

NFL Notes

Roger Staubach and Pat Haden, two of the more celebrated quarterbacks of the 1970s, were on the NFL’s new Former Players Advisory Board that met for the first time Friday with Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. They spent six hours conferring on drug testing, minority hiring and college eligibility.

One of Haden’s principal areas of interest is college eligibility, he said after recommending an adaptation of the Joe Paterno system at Penn State.

“Paterno brings in former Penn State players who also played in the NFL to tell his squad what it’s really like in pro ball,” said Haden, a Los Angeles lawyer who is also a CBS football analyst.

The NFL’s new international spring league, the World League, granted its first U.S. franchise to Orlando.