NFL Capsules: League - No legal ground for court to halt lockout
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The NFL asked a federal judge Monday to keep its lockout in place, saying there are no legal grounds to stop it while accusing the players of trying to manipulate the law with a bogus antitrust lawsuit.
The NFL filed its arguments in federal court in St. Paul, Minn., where U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson has scheduled an April 6 hearing on the players' bid to stop the lockout.
The NFL said any decision on a lockout should wait until the National Labor Relations Board rules on an unfair labor practice charge against the now-dissolved players' union that contends the players failed to negotiate in good faith. The charge, filed Feb. 14, was amended on March 11 to include reference to the union's decertification.
The NLRB said the case is still under investigation and had no further comment.
The legal salvo is just the latest in the fight between the league and players, who failed to forge a new collective bargaining agreement on March 11. That same day, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning and six other current NFL players filed the antitrust suit and injunction request in federal court here, and the NFL owners locked out the players, putting the 2011 season in jeopardy.
The NFL made three main points in Monday's filing. It said the injunction issue shouldn't be in federal court at all, the decertification of the union was a sham and the players' claim of "irreparable harm" has no merit.
Stopping the lockout, the NFL argued, would open all 32 teams up to additional antitrust claims even for working together to solve the labor fight. Antitrust claims carry triple damages for any harm proven, meaning hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
In arguing that Congress has barred judges from halting lockouts, the league cited the Norris-LaGuardia Act — Depression-era legislation passed with the intent of limiting employers' ability to crack down on unions, including their ability to seek court orders halting strikes. The NFL contends the law also protects an employer's right to impose a lockout in a labor dispute.
The league said the NFLPA dissolved eight hours before the labor agreement expired simply to avoid a six-month delay in filing its multimillion-dollar antitrust lawsuit — a delay spelled out in the CBA.
Decertification, the league says, proved the players did not want to negotiate in good faith and is a step used whenever it serves the union's purposes at the bargaining table.
The 57-page court filing includes statements from the players themselves that the league says backs its argument.
"We decertified so that we could fight them from locking us out and go back to work," Jeff Saturday, the NFLPA vice president, said the day after the March 11 decertification, according to the court filing. "And we feel like ... we can still negotiate this anytime you want."
According to the filing, NFLPA president Kevin Mawae said in a Sept. 29 interview that decertification was an "ace in our sleeve" that worked in the late 1980s in favor of the players.
"It's been a part of the union strategy since I've been in the league," Mawae said.
The league also cited comments from Baltimore Ravens receiver Derrick Mason nine days before the union was dissolved.
"So are we a union? Per se, no. But we're still going to act as if we are one," Mason, an NFLPA player representative, said on March 2, according to the court filing.
The NFLPA did not respond specifically to Monday's filing, but spokesman George Atallah said: "The NFL's actions don't match their words. They say they want a fair deal, but instead they locked out the players and now are trying to preserve that lockout through litigation."
The league, meanwhile, accused the union of an illegal "heads I win, tails you lose" strategy, claiming the players want the NFL subject to antitrust claims "if it ceases or refuses to continue football operations" yet also "subject to antitrust liability if it does not" in a "flip of a switch" approach.
The players' antitrust suit — forever to be known as Brady et al vs. National Football League et al — attacked the league's policies on rookie salaries and free-agent restrictions such as franchise-player tags.
Peter Ruocco, the NFL's senior vice president of labor relations, wrote rebuttals to those contentions as part of Monday's court filing.
He argued that franchise tags are lucrative options for players, noting that Manning signed a multiyear contract worth nearly $100 million after being designated a franchise player in 2004.
As for the league-wide limit on rookie salaries, in which teams are permitted a certain pool to spend on players they draft, Ruocco noted that rookies last season, as a whole, signed contracts totaling $658.9 million in guarantees.
Ruocco also wrote that missing offseason workouts does not do "irreparable harm" to players, as they allege of the lockout. He noted that players work out on their own regardless.
NFL players would "undoubtedly argue" that free agency should begin promptly if the lockout were to be lifted, Ruocco added. That, he said, would create "considerable uncertainty" about the rights and abilities of teams wishing to re-sign their players and have a "detrimental effect" on the league's competitive balance.
That scenario would be "difficult, if not impossible, to unscramble the egg and return those players" to their original teams if the NFL were to win this case.
NFL players got 53 percent of incremental increase
Figures obtained by The Associated Press underscore the substantial divide between the NFL and the locked-out players on a core issue: What portion of additional revenue goes to players.
Players' share of incremental increases to all revenues under the NFL's expired contract was about 53 percent from 2006-09, according to calculations by the accounting firm that audited the collective bargaining agreement for both sides.
The NFL has repeatedly said that 70 percent of extra revenue went to players, a main justification for changing the sport's economic system. The league's numbers remove the portion of revenues — about $1 billion a year — taken off the top for owners to spend on expenses.
Data prepared in 2010 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained Monday by the AP show that about $3.8 billion of the $7.2 billion in incremental revenue over those four years — 52.9 percent — went toward players' salaries and benefits.
The league and players agree on the $3.8 billion; they disagree on how to look at revenues. Setting aside the off-the-top expense credits — for things such as stadium improvements or NFL Network — makes the players' take a higher percentage.
The figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers — calculated last year at the request of the NFL Players Association — include that upfront money, because it is part of the league's gross revenue.
"The NFL wants to artificially inflate the percentage of incremental revenue going to players by excluding revenues that never go to players," NFLPA spokesman George Atallah said. "League officials ... have been selling a lockout to owners based on misleading and incomplete financial information. They excluded the cost credits to be able to tell owners that player costs are rising faster than all revenues. This is not true."
Responding from the owners' meeting in New Orleans, NFL general counsel Jeff Pash said: "The concept is in the collective bargaining agreement we negotiated that total revenue is the basis on which the salary cap is calculated. There is no dispute between us and the union that the players received 70 percent since we entered into the agreement (in 2006). If you want to change the denominator, you can change the percentage.
"The figures we or the union use to compute then comes out to 70 percent — or even 75 percent at times. In terms of what's in the collective bargaining agreement, 70 percent is accurate," Pash added.
Earlier Monday, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello wrote in an e-mail to the AP: "Expense credits were used in the last agreements by agreement with the union to cover certain expenses needed to put on the games. The NFL did not exclude anything unilaterally."
Owners locked out the players more than a week ago, creating the NFL's first work stoppage since 1987. That came hours after the NFLPA renounced its status as a union, allowing players to file a class-action antitrust lawsuit in federal court.
The main sticking point throughout CBA negotiations was how to divide the NFL's more than $9 billion in annual revenues. All along, the league has said it needed to rework the CBA because too large a portion of new revenues have been devoted to players' salaries and benefits.
Pash said Monday that "both sides agreed the cap rate of growth had to be slowed."
A year earlier, Commissioner Roger Goodell made a similar point during his annual Super Bowl news conference.
That 70 percent figure not only made an impression on owners — it also made players wonder whether there was, indeed, an adjustment that needed to be made.
"One of the owners' big problems with the deal, as they reported from 2006 forward, is they had the argument that player cost was north of 70 percent, say. When that number was first presented, it caused everyone on our side of the table to sit down. It caught our attention: 'If it is 70 percent, we need to address it,'" said former player Pete Kendall, who has been advising the NFLPA during negotiations.
"It also spurred some discussion and research, and we had PricewaterhouseCoopers look at the numbers," Kendall said last week while at the players' meetings at Marco Island, Fla. "And what they came back with is, the only way the NFL could arrive at that was if they excluded the deductions they take (at the outset). But that is money that came into the league."
According to the figures obtained by the AP:
— In 2005, player costs were $3.32 billion, and all revenue was $6.49 billion;
— In 2006, the first year under the just-expired CBA, player costs rose to $4.1 billion, an increase of $780 million, which is 61 percent of that year's $1.28 billion increase in all revenue to $7.77 billion;
— By 2009, player costs were $4.5 billion, while all revenues were $8.88 billion.
Pash also said the union never considered a proposal that would have allowed players to invest, along with owners, in football and non-football projects. NFLPA spokesman George Atallah said players previously offered $1 billion in cash givebacks in exchange for equity in the 32 clubs, but NFL outside counsel Bob Batterman "told us he's not interested in being our partner."
-- Howard Fendrich
Moving kickoff, touchback a touchy issue
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Kickoff returns are among football's most popular and exciting plays. The NFL's competition committee wants to make them safer.
Committee chairman Rich McKay said Monday at the owners meetings that moving kickoffs up to the 35-yard line and bringing touchbacks out to the 25 have spurred "healthy discussions" among coaches and general managers. So much so that some alterations could be coming to proposed changes, which also include eliminating the blocking wedge and limiting coverage players from long run-ups.
Owners will vote on those proposals Tuesday, along with amendments to defenseless player rules for receivers, and allowing the replay official to review all scoring plays at any time in games.
"This is a rule 100 percent based on player safety," said McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons, referring to the kickoff proposals. "We've seen higher rates of injuries than we are comfortable with and we're trying to remedy it."
Several coaches expressed concerns to the committee about so many changes to such a "game-changing" play. They worried that bringing touchbacks out to the 25 instead of the 20 would affect field position too much. They also fear an increase in touchbacks.
McKay said there will be more meetings before Tuesday's vote.
"I don't blame anybody for saying this is a big change — it is," McKay he said. "Nor do I blame anyone for pushing back. That's good. They made a lot of good suggestions."
During the committee's meetings last month with players in Indianapolis, kickoffs drew much attention. McKay said players voiced their concerns, adding that video showed a rising rate of injury.
The league reduced the number of players allowed in a blocking wedge to two in 2009. Now, it wants the wedge gone altogether.
Restricting how far coverage players can run up before the kickoff to 5 yards also is a safety measure.
As for replay, McKay said coaches complained of too much pressure when it came to challenging scoring plays, especially when they're playing on the road and the play often quickly disappears from the videoboard.
"If there's a doubt, we think the referee should review it," McKay said.
College rules allow replay officials to review every play. The NFL won't nearly go that far, but McKay reasons that with 20 percent of coaches' challenges coming on scoring plays, the burden to confirm scores should be on the replay official.
Of 53 challenges last year on scoring plays, 21 were upheld, reversing the call.
Passing this rule change would also eliminate the third challenge a coach gets if he is successful on the first two. The third challenge was used only eight times last season.
A proposal to ban players from launching themselves to make a tackle likely will pass. The committee was alarmed by the number of players using the technique, and NFL senior vice president Ray Anderson said the league could unilaterally act to outlaw it.
"We want to do it in a more inclusive, democratic way," said Anderson, the NFL's chief disciplinarian. "If it's a critical point we think we just have to act on in the best interest of the game, we have the authority to do it."
The change would not apply to the area between the tackles at the line of scrimmage.
Another amendment would expand the definition of a defenseless receiver to a player who attempts or makes a completed catch and hasn't had time to protect himself. He would be protected from hits to the neck or head area.
The league also wants to keep all of its fields green, so a team that wants to paint its field would need NFL approval.
"We don't want any red fields like at Eastern Washington," McKay said with a smile.
-- Barry Wilner
Trio of Titans start workouts at Nashville school
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Tennessee Titans are locked out, so cornerback Cortland Finnegan has started a workout regimen for his teammates.
He joined safety Chris Hope and tight end Craig Stevens on Monday at Father Ryan High School. It's a small start, but Finnegan says he expects up to 20 Titans working out consistently every day at 9:30 a.m. once they get back from offseason trips.
Finnegan had a binder of workout plans and procedures with him. They are trying to stick to the same schedule of what they normally would be doing at the team headquarters.
Stevens says they are waiting for quarterbacks to do on-field work. Hope says he hopes the work together will substitute for the chemistry often built in the weight room during offseason work.
UFL
Glanville will coach UFL team in Hartford
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Jerry Glanville, the colorful former coach of the NFL's Houston Oilers and Atlanta Falcons, is returning to the sidelines as head coach of the UFL's Hartford Colonials.
UFL commissioner Michael Huyghue said Monday that bringing in Glanville is part of the league's strategy to hire coaches who "have a winning pedigree and are household names.
Glanville joins Jim Fassel in Las Vegas and Dennis Green in Sacramento as UFL coaches who had previously worked in the NFL. Glanville, who was 63-73 as an NFL coach, succeeds Chris Palmer who led Hartford to a 3-5 record in 2010, then left in February to become offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans.
