balta1701-A

It's possible, but I'm not sure I'd say "Likely". The reality is...the Owners have now suffered 2 straight major defeats in court. If they can't pull out a win on appeal, then basically in the eyes of the U.S. legal system, they have not been acting in good faith. If they win on appeal, then yeah, it gets worse, because both sides keep appealing upwards.

Link I'm not sure the legal logic is wrong, but man that's Bizarre. Thats a whole lot of statutes being brought to bear here. I'm wondering whether there isn't a good chance this drags things out longer, if this decision is stayed on appeal.

Yeah, isn't a normal offseason about that number?

That's simply not true, they're announcing the game now because the schedule is coming out now...because now is the normal schedule release time.

Supposedly, if the lockout lasts through August 1, this trip to London will be canceled.

Peter King

Not directed at you specifically, just using this post as a segue. People were correctly annoyed with the Union suggestion that the players not attend the draft. The owners are now asking draftees to do the exact same thing regarding the NFLPA's events. They're just doing it surreptitiously, through agents, rather than publicly like the union did.

This is where you and I differ. Defining "Good faith" for me is missing the point of my statement. A good faith offer, as you say, is one that is designed to move the process towards a deal. I do not believe that the owners' final offer was designed to move the process towards a deal. It was timed and written such that it could never be accepted under the circumstances, and by some accounts it had a poison pill in it (players shares of total revenue shrinking to below 40% by the end of the CBA). Most importantly perhaps, it didn't do anything to address the largest matter of substance that the Union has focused on; improved disclosure. It was, in my view, an offer timed and written so that it wouldn't be accepted, so that when the Players Union did decertify and go to the courts, the Owners could come out and say "we made a final offer that was better than any offer we made, it was in the Players' hands and they walked away". So that some fraction of the people outside, writing on message boards and the like, would blame the players for walking away and not the Owners for how it went down up until the moment when it went away. That's why I don't think it was a good faith offer. I think it was entirely to play for the cameras.

The problem last year is that if Martz had wanted to send Olsen out over and over, he wouldn't get passes thrown to him because Cutler would have been on the ground. Martz HAD to hold Olsen in to block last year. That was one of the changes they started making after the bye week/slaughter by the Giants.

No idea where else to stick this, but it's interesting. Colts President Bill Polian talking about what a good draft success rate is.

Well, first of all because teams can't trade players for picks right now, until a CBA is agreed to, and that's not happening before the draft.

That's the point though...if the NFL owners had made a good faith offer on the Friday of the deadline...then it should have been the NFL owners offering an extension. If they were making a serious new offer to the players that they thought there was some chance the players would accept, or at least could offer a counter-offer based on it...then they needed to make a show of good faith to go along with their offer. If its a serious offer, then the opposing side's legal team is going to need days to weeks to go through the fine print and make sure there's no poison pill in the proposed text (by some accounts, there was). The owners chose to make that offer with no accompanying sign of good faith. The players were given no reason to believe it was a good faith offer and every reason to believe that the owners were just playing for the cameras.

That was entirely from me paying attention during the extension week. There was no additional offer made prior to the expiration of the original CBA other than the 1 week extension. After that, the $300 million offer didn't appear until Friday, hours before the CBA expired. It might well have been less than 12 hours. You can look at the statements out of the mouths of the players. They didn't take the offer as being serious at all, based on the timeline. Here's Saturday saying it. The only way that an entirely new offer could have possibly been considered by the NFLPA was if the NFLPA asked for a CBA extension, and if the owners granted that it would have hugely weakened the legal or negotiating cases of the PA because the PA would have been asking for the extension based on that offer. It'd make it nearly impossible for them to have turned it down. If there was legitimate trust between the 2 sides....then maybe the players would have done so. But if there was legitimate trust between the 2 sides, then why wait until the morning of the 2nd deadline for the CBA expiration to make a legit offer unless you're not really trying to make a deal?

There's a different way to look at the actual last offers made by each side...I'm not quite sure that either of them were serious. Including the Owner's deal. Let's look at it this way. First deadline for CBA expiration comes up. Owners continue with general proposal outline for $1 billion in give-backs. Negotiating teams agree, last-minute, on a 1-week extension. Owners did not budge from $1 billion in give-backs prior to extension. Another 6 days passes of mediated talks. No formal proposal is submitted to the players. Owners don't talk at all about reducing the $1 billion #. Players continue demanding to see detailed accounting records prior to accepting any givebacks. Less than 12 hours before CBA extension expires, owners submit a completely new proposal with $320 million in givebacks. As far as I know, no proposal for a CBA extension is given. There is about a 4 hour (or less) period where the Union has to decide whether to propose an extension based on a completely new proposal, differing from 2 years of statements and proposals from the owners. If the Players go to the owners and ask for an extension to negotiate based on the new proposal, effectively they're accepting it with barely enough time to have read it. That's how the arbitrator would have reacted, that's likely how courts reviewing the events later would react. If the players trusted the owners, they might well have done so. But at this point, wouldn't you feel like the owners have been stringing you along? Giving you a fully new proposal hours before the negotiating deadline?

Ok, let's use this as the interest thread. I'll pin it or bump it if I have to. Anyone else interested in a Mock draft? Really needs 10-15 people to get off the ground well.

The whole point of this lockout is that the teams were crying poor. They wanted the players to give back a billion dollars in earnings per season relative to last year. They are saying that their profitability has deteriorated over the last few years.

A team with a pretty decent return game/return man might be exceptionally impacted by these proposed kickoff rule changes. I'm not sure how they'd enforce the "Wedge" part, probably something about positioning, but this could seriously change the special teams game. Moving the kickoff up and putting an extra 5 yards on touchbacks would certainly increase the amount of touchbacks and dramatically curtail the number of returns in a game.

There's a lot of ways to effectively "cook the books" though, which is why the players were so strident on wanting to see the books. You can count employing 193 different members of the McCaskey family in the front office as a cost, when really they're all just the ownership. You can count the owner's 3 private jets as team expenses or private expenses. You can count the stadium as a fixed cost, but if you're creative with your bookkeeping you can ignore the several hundred million dollars chipped in by the city/state government to keep the team there. Do you really need 19 different assistant to the assistant coordinators, or are any of those jobs just makework? If the Owners are being 100% honest and their costs have gone up at a faster rate than revenues, such that they're getting squeezed, I don't think the players would push very hard on cutbacks...but the players want that to be established for them. They don't trust the owners right now at all...and I'm not sure they should. No one here trusts the McCaskeys when they cry poor, I doubt many other cities trust their ownership when they cry poor.

First of all, right now there is no "union". Secondly, the "Union" backed off on asking players to skip the draft.

If they're drafting one as highly as the guys they're scouting are likely to go, they're looking for a guy who can replace Hanie as well...maybe not this year, but the year after.

Well, about the only thing I can think of that would seriously cut demand for NFL Football is a long work stoppage where people get away from the sport and even become vindictive about it.

It seems like the Bears are targeting replacements for Hanie/Collins in this draft in addition to the positions we knew about. That's interesting.

Possibly/probably because of the negative publicity its received, the NFL players union has publicly stated that it will not encourage draftees to boycott the events in NYC, but it does suggest that the feel of the event may be different.

At least we can all agree on disliking Adrian Peterson.