Once NFLPA has new executive director, NFL likely will move quickly on new CBA
The NFL Players Association is keeping very quiet regarding its plans to replace former executive director Lloyd Howell. It's believed that the union will emerge from next month's annual meetings with a new director.
Whenever it happens, here's a safe bet: The NFL will contact the next executive director sooner rather than later regarding the possibility of working out a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The fact that the NFL has waited to pick a date for Super Bowl LXII due to the lingering possibility of an eighteenth game adds urgency to the equation. They'll need to lock in the convention center and the many hotels the league will need for the week in Atlanta. Which will mean picking a date soon. Which will mean knowing whether there will be an extra week in the season soon, too.
And while the NFLPA said during its pre-Super Bowl press conference that the players have no appetite for an eighteenth game, interim executive director David White acknowledged that "it's a point of negotiation." Unlike Howell - who at one point said, "Who doesn't want more football?" - White is playing the game in order to get the best deal.
Here's the basic reality, which the league will likely explain to the next executive director (and it could indeed be White) in no uncertain terms. The NFL will get another game, if it wants it.
Come 2031, the owners will do what they did in 2011. They'll lock the players out until the players accept the NFL's non-negotiable terms.
Eighteen regular-season games per year. Sixteen international games per season. And, possibly, a reconstruction of the salary cap formula that gives the players fixed cap figures each and every year in lieu of a roughly 50-50 revenue split.
Whoever gets the job will be in the same position that DeMaurice Smith was, both in 2011 and 2020. If the players aren't prepared to miss regular-season games, the players eventually will accept whatever they have to accept to return to work.
In 2011, it took an offseason lockout to prove the point. In 2020, Smith tried to get ahead of the inevitable by taking the best deal on a seventeenth before the players experienced the pain of having the league shut down from March until late July.
This time around, the owners may say to the next executive director that the deal offered in the short term, if not accepted, will get worse over time. "Take it now, it's this. Take it next year, it's this minus that. Take it after a lockout, and it's this minus a lot more than that."
Whether the next executive director calls the bluff remains to be seen. Chances are it won't be a bluff.
The NFL's labor-management relationship has a massive imbalance in bargaining power, because one side is willing to resort to the nuclear option and the other is not. Until that changes, the owners have the leverage to dictate terms, tactfully and unmistakably.
The best evidence of a plan to move quickly comes from the fact that Super Bowl LXII still doesn't have a date. Until it does, the NFL will be keeping the door open for a new CBA that expands the regular season to 18 games in 2027.