NFL Ready to Battle Its Players

The economy is so bad, the President will soon be out of work.

The unemployment rate is so high, it’s closing in on Jim Everett’s quarterback rating.

Times are so tough, even in the normally gilded sanctum of professional sports, that the Angels had to lay off their radio broadcasters, the Dodgers can’t pay anyone to catch a baseball and the Minnesota Twins simply can’t afford another defeat.

Time to despair?

Not in the offices of the owners of the National Football League, that august body that decided last week to take 538 potential jobs off the market.

Forty-seven positions with the 1994 Baltimore Ripkens--gone.

Forty-seven positions with the 1994 St. Louis N’Clarks--gone.

Four hundred and forty-four positions with the 1993 World League--gone, gone, gone.

Ordinarily, this would be construed as a sign of a corporation on the verge of folding. Not so with the NFL.

The NFL isn’t folding.

The NFL is merely getting ready to play its first hand.

Beaten again in the courts by the players--Is the NFL playing for the No. 1 draft choice, or what?--the league is faced with the dread prospect of returning to the bargaining table with the players, so the owners are girding for the ugliness by trading in their global football experiment, and their plans for 1994 expansion, for chips to stack against the union’s.

You want more career opportunities, the owners are saying to the players, let’s discuss our latest restrictive free-agency proposal.

You want to help out your fellow fullbacks and tackles, what do you say to a salary cap?

All is fair in love and labor negotiations, so the owners announced last week that they have suspended operation of the World League for at least one year and shelved expansion “indefinitely”--just their little way of showing Gene Upshaw that there are no hard feelings over the Freeman McNeil antitrust ruling.

Before that ruling, the NFL was revved on expansion. The World League was to expand from 10 to a dozen 37-man teams next year, targeting Paris and Dusseldorf as the latest stops and causing sports editors to be flooded with resumes from prospective Paris beat writers.

And the NFL was to expand itself in 1994, from 28 to 30 teams, most likely into Baltimore and St. Louis, thus paying off two dogeared IOUs.

Now, all expansion is on hold and all new jobs are being held hostage. All the owners want to expand at this point is their leverage against the players.

What this indicates is that football owners, while not as stupid as baseball owners, are working on closing the gap.

By shutting down expansion, the NFL owners are shutting themselves out of two $125-million entry fees, plus two more football-starved markets. And by shutting down the World League, the NFL is risking all the inroads it made in Europe the past two years--inroads, the NFL has seen, that lead to gold.

(Next to Cobi, the most popular T-shirt logo during the Summer Olympics was the head of the Barcelona Dragon. And there are more avid football fans in London today than there are in Anaheim--although schedule the Rams and the Patriots in American Bowl ‘93, and that could change.)

This is the way the owners have chosen to play it, however, and though they are loathe to admit it, they are playing from behind.

The biggest chip at the table is the college draft, and it belongs to the players. Previous court cases have found the NFL draft illegal, but it lived on under the protection provided by the players in the labor agreement.

That protection expired with the 12th round of the 1992 draft.

No draft, what becomes of the NFL? Total anarchy has been predicted, probably with accuracy. College campuses would be overrun with scouts and guys with shiny metal briefcases stuffed with $1,000 bills. College coaches would be transformed into auction barkers. Marshall Faulk would become a one-man circus.

“Do I hear $4 million for the Next Barry Sanders? Yes, the lady in the blue and gold. Do I hear $4.2? Yes, the man with the lightning bolt on the helmet . . . “

The NFL would become major league baseball.

The NFL does not want that to happen, so it will have to negotiate.

What the players want: Unrestricted free agency after four years.

What the owners want: A return to 1923, when the Canton Bulldogs and Dayton Triangles cracked skulls for two hours and then passed around the leather helmet for spare change.

What the players want: A raise in the minimum wage and better health and retirement benefits.

What the owners want: A salary cap George Halas could call his own, with marquee players bound to the mother franchise for life. See what happens? You invent the horseless carriage, these players are going to want to move around.

What needs to happen: A splitting of the difference, beginning with the owners’ acknowledgment of the calendar (it is now 1992) and their record in the courts (what is it now, 0-157?)

That done, free agency after five years doesn’t sound too outrageous, does it? Maybe throw in a salary ceiling, a salary basement for good faith. Owners keep the draft, players get--imagine this--some say over where they work and live.

Just get them into the smoke-filled room, if not out of common sense, then for the common good. Hundreds of jobs are at stake.