Article By Eric Casperson on 4th March, 2011
The NFL is scheduled to meet with mediator George Cohen on Friday to discuss another extension to the current CBA, according to the NFL Network.
The players and owners already passed a 24-hour extension. The CBA was supposed to expire yesterday at 11:59 p.m.
A second extension would give both sides 10 days to discuss the details of a new CBA.
The whole disagreement between the parties has been mostly over revenue money. Owners are now asking for even more money than before in order to cover team and stadium operations costs.
The owners, under the current CBA, receive $1 billion per season for those costs, but they want another $1 billion per season on top of that.
Other “sticking points” are an 18-game schedule, the rookie wage scale and retired player benefits.
All the sticking points seem to favor the owners and their interest of expanding their money supply.
They want to double the amount of operations money and risk their own players getting hurt in two more games in order to make some more revenue. They also want to impose a rookie scale on the drafted players so they don’t have to pay them outrageous amounts.
I think the owners are going a little over their heads on these issues. They have the money.
The Green Bay Packers, who are the only publicly owned team and play in the smallest market in the league, reported a revenue of $258 million and an operating profit of $9.8 million last year.
The issue the owners seem to be having is the rising costs of player salaries.
However, with the teams still in the dark numbers, owners are still making out fine to me.
Both sides need to come to a reasonable agreement where both parties are happy. The NFL cannot afford to have another lockout. Professional football is America’s most popular sport and cannot let the next season and beyond just go down the drain.
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