NFL Players Reject Owners’ Offer : Labor: Salary based on performance and seniority is not acceptable. Sides at loggerheads heading toward June 15 trial date.

As the NFL’s players and owners head toward a showdown in a Minneapolis courtroom June 15, they seem to be about as far apart as they have ever been in their long argument over the rights of professional athletes.

In their most recent confrontation, for example, the players rejected still another offer by the owners.

Neither side, apparently, has even contemplated the kind of compromise measures that could bring a settlement.

Highly placed representatives of both groups maintain that there are no areas in which compromise is possible.

Some NFL people can’t believe that. Some are saying, privately, that both parties, having determined to play chicken, are simply waiting for the other side to break at some point before the mid-June deadline. Or even a few days into the trial.

That’s the view of those who hold that the opponents have too much at stake to lose in Minneapolis.

The case is one that former UCLA running back Freeman McNeil and seven other NFL players brought against the league in 1990 for unlawfully restricting their rights to seek employment. The suit has the appearance of one that could go either way.

So the question is hanging there: Are the owners and players playing chicken?

On Monday, the owners made a few minor improvements in their proposed “Performance-Base Compensation” package, which both parties refer to as the PBC.

The players instantly rejected it.

The issues:

--The owners want a new salary system combining performance and seniority. Free agency would be possible for some players in their fourth season, and for others, later--maybe. There would be a firm salary cap.

--The players don’t want anything except free agency--after they have put in one or two NFL seasons.

“The PBC isn’t a wage scale,” an owners’ representative said. “It’s like being a salesman on salary with a commission. There would be performance pay for playing time, team achievements and many other things.”

The owners’ man was contradicted by a players’ man, who said:

“The thing that the (owners) are actually proposing is a wage scale that would allow them to hold down wages for (every player’s) first three pro years. Then, if the guy isn’t a top player, they’ll have the option to cut him before his fourth year and start over with a cheaper rookie.”

Long term, a compromise seems probable on such terms as these:

--For the owners: a realistic salary cap. And possibly a two-round college draft each year. As the players say, the draft is as unrealistic as a wage scale if there’s a cap on total payroll costs.

--For the players: free agency at a realistic point. As the owners say, it’s unrealistic for players to expect free agency before their third or fourth pro season.

Short term, both sides still think they can get more.

THE GOALS

Gene Upshaw, the NFL Players Assn.’s executive director, is the spokesman for a large majority of players who tend to distrust the owners and their proposal.

“The PBC proposal doesn’t mean what (the owners) say,” Upshaw said. “What they want is to be able to tell their players: ‘We’d like to pay you more, but Gene tied our hands with this agreement.’ The PBC is just a dressed-up wage scale.”

What do the players want?

“There’s really only one thing,” Upshaw said. “They want a league commitment to (free agency) at some reasonable point in their careers.”

The owners see Upshaw’s posture as the height of intransigence.

Joe Browne, the NFL’s vice president of development, said: “Without getting into the specifics, that has been the (NFLPA’s) inflexible position since the (owners) first attempted to solve the current litigation back in the ‘80s.

“However, the rank-and-file players have said publicly that there are other matters of equal importance to them. The owners remain open to discuss all issues and options.”

The contradictory player-owner positions have been hardening for a long time. It has been 10 years since their last collective bargaining agreement, which expired Aug. 31, 1987.

Who’s really blocking a settlement?

The key to the correct answer to that--in the view of some NFL watchers--is in the league’s constitution, in which it is ordained that any nine of the 28 owners can block any course that the majority chooses.

Current examples:

--At the league’s convention at Phoenix last month, a minority of 11 owners ended instant replay for at least this season.

--In labor relations for many years, a minority of nine owners have immovably resisted free agency in any time frame that would be acceptable to their players.

Members of that minority own the Cincinnati Bengals, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, Chicago Bears, Washington Redskins, Detroit Lions, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and two other clubs.

If this were a majority-rules league, NFL critics say, the dispute would have ended long ago with some meaningful form of free agency in a new collective bargaining agreement.

Instead, it’s off to Minneapolis.

THE RISKS

Does the NFL really want to go to court again?

Both sides are rolling the dice:

--The players will have to plead the most important case of their lives in the summer of an economic recession before a jury of hard-working or unemployed Minnesotans. These jurors may not be sympathetic to people who make $400,000 a year or more.

The fact that an NFL player makes that for only four years, on average, may not be a convincing argument.

--The NFL’s 28 club owners stand to lose even more in an open trial. This is an antitrust suit, and the NFL almost always loses such cases because so much of what it does is illegal without the antitrust shield the league had until last year.

If the NFL does lose on free agency, the value of its franchises could well drop from $100 million to $50 million--or lower--as the owners brace to pay the salaries that can be commanded in a free market by obviously skilled employees.

Finally, the annual college draft could be terminated. That would be financially devastating to those who own NFL clubs if, in the meantime, they haven’t successfully bargained for a salary cap.

The draft is scheduled to end after this month’s renewal, unless the players or courts agree to extend it.

Even more ominous for the owners, if the fight gets as far as Minneapolis, two sharp, new swords will be hanging over their heads.

Specifically, this will be the first important sports case tried since the courts stung the NFL with two adverse decisions last year:

--U.S. District Judge David S. Doty ruled that because the NFL Players Assn. is no longer a union, the league is no longer exempt from antitrust laws. Doty’s judgment, based on the NFLPA vote to decertify, has since been accepted by other courts and by such U.S. agencies as the Internal Revenue Service.

--U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the NFL’s antitrust exemption is void because the league’s decade-old collective bargaining agreement expired five years ago.

Those decisions cleared the way for McNeil, Raider halfback Marcus Allen and other players to sue for their free-agent rights, which, they assert, were merely on hold when the NFLPA was a union--as Doty indicated--and when the player-owner agreement was binding, as Lamberth noted.

Accordingly, are the league’s minority owners, in the last analysis, playing Russian roulette? Many observers think so.

The NFL remains publicly optimistic.

Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, commenting on life after the end of the draft this month, said, flatly, “We’ll have the draft in 1993.”

The fight goes on.