This article appears courtesy of The Boston GlobeBy Ron Borges
Globe StaffGRAPEVINE, Texas -- After spending nearly 12 hours cobbling together a revenue-sharing plan acceptable to at least 24 disparate and at times desperate owners, the National Football League last night approved its union's final offer to extend the collective bargaining agreement for six more years by a 30-2 vote at 7:35 p.m. Central time, 25 minutes before a union-imposed deadline.
The approval is contingent on the union signing off on a local revenue-sharing plan primarily developed by the Patriots' Jonathan Kraft and the Jets' Woody Johnson, a plan that was shaped and reshaped several times during the evening hours to account for the needs and concerns of both low-revenue and high-revenue teams, who were at loggerheads when the day began. That plan was also approved 30-2, with only the Cincinnati Bengals and Buffalo Bills opposing either proposal.
The salary cap will now be based on 59.5 percent of total gross revenues rather than the 64 percent of designated gross revenues of a year ago. Last year, roughly 87 percent of football revenues were used to set the cap figure, leaving the 13 percent of local revenues that have skyrocketed in recent years because of the increased income produced by a number of new stadium deals, such as the building of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass.
With time running out on the union's 8 p.m. deadline, the owners began to fudge even that issue, claiming the union had not specified whether the deadline meant Eastern time -- even though the union office and the league offices are in Washington and New York, respectively. Ultimately, management defined the deadline as 8 p.m. Central time because they were meeting near Dallas, buying themselves an extra hour. Union president Gene Upshaw was not in position to protest because he was on a plane headed to Hawaii, where the union will hold its annual meeting of the 32 club representatives and its executive board tomorrow.
Although the owners made two efforts to reach Upshaw Tuesday night to explore further discussions, he refused, making clear there would be no more negotiations. Faced with a fast-closing deadline and the need to also come up with a plan acceptable to 75 percent of the owners on local revenue sharing -- a condition demanded by the union -- the owners began to cherry-pick pieces of the four revenue-sharing proposals that existed at the start of the day until they had a plan all owners found acceptable, if not exactly pleasant.
'It's too expensive, a lot of people think, but at the end of the day it was better than not having labor peace," Giants owner John Mara said of the final deal.
As Kraft and commissioner Paul Tagliabue worked to form coalitions and come up with language in the revenue-sharing plan that would satisfy both high- and low-revenue opponents, they came up with a hybrid form of what was originally known as the Patriots-Jets proposal. Kraft had been working for the past six weeks on several scenarios for revenue sharing that he had worked up in his laptop computer, but in the end still had to make last-minute changes and adjustments to ensure the final proposal would be supported by the minimum 24 votes necessary.
Asked if he was satisfied with the final plan, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis said, 'The whole idea was no one is totally dissatisfied. We had to have labor peace. Without strong labor peace there was always the possibility of a new league. I've lived it as a coach and as a commissioner [of the old American Football League]. With the need for [television] product in this country today, it would have been simple to have a new 10-team league with no salary cap, no draft, and no labor agreement with our players. It was possible. The players would have problems, too. They would have had anarchy."
With a new revenue-sharing plan in place that accounted for the needs of the low-revenue clubs, which had formed a tightly-held alliance of nine teams, as well as dealing with at least the worst concerns of high-revenue clubs, who were adamantly opposed to writing what several had contemptuously termed 'welfare checks" to low-revenue teams that were still profitable, the league avoided a bloodletting tomorrow in which many well-known veterans would have been lopped off team rosters to get them under an unexpectedly low salary cap of $94.5 million.
Instead the teams now will function with a cap of $102 million this year and $109 million in 2007.
At the moment, the NFL was unsure when clubs would be required to be under the new cap. The free agency period that was set to open at 12:01 a.m. tomorrow morning, with many teams ready to pounce on the likes of New England wide receiver David Givens, is expected to begin at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
The agreement also ensured the chaos of an uncapped year in 2007 had been avoided, as was a likely federal court battle the following year over antitrust violations that would have threatened the continued existence of the NFL Draft and other anticompetitive measures the union had previously agreed to.
After the long day was over a number of owners came up to Kraft, who was representing the Patriots in the absence of his father, who was on a mission in Israel, thanking him for his efforts. Johnson, for one, seemed to bury the 'border wars" hatchet that has so long hung over Patriot-Jets relations when he credited him with playing a key role in brokering the final deal.
'We'll all share the pain, I guess," said Johnson, who presently heads a low-revenue team but will very likely have a high revenue one within five years when his new stadium being built jointly with the Giants is completed in New Jersey. 'Jonathan was very good. I was skeptical yesterday [that an agreement could be reached]."
Although the bulk of the details have yet to be revealed, the top 15 revenue-producing clubs will contribute an increased percentage of their local revenues into a shared pool with the top five teams contributing the most and then downward from there. The low-revenue clubs would draw from that pool to make up for the shortfall in local revenues that had grown to as much as $100 million in some cases. It was that disparity between the Cowboys, Patriots, and Eagles of the NFL world and the Jaguars, Bengals, and Bills, among others, in local revenues that had split the ownership and made extending the CBA a tricky proposition at best.
'Before we came out to face you [after the vote] you wouldn't have seen a lot of happy faces," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said. 'We were willing to make some sacrifices to get it done."
Throughout the long day of ups and downs, Kraft did not lose heart despite occasional heated debates, many furtive discussions, and several remodelings of his original proposal.
'We needed to make it meaningful but simple," Kraft said of the final plan. 'Ultimately no system lasts forever. Eventually it's got to be blown up but not at this time. It's always better to have labor peace. My dad and I care deeply about the league. It was important to us to put the time and energy into getting this solved.
'The union put the onus on us. Gene did a great job for his membership. The fact it took this long shows that."
