NFL 'Mediation' Won't Work Unless Attitudes Change

Call me a Scrooge, but I'm not buying this mediation thing. It's nice that the NFL and the NFLPA have agreed to meet in the presence of a federal mediator -- it might prompt them to be more polite to each other than they've been so far. But I don't think it's going to make any actual difference or lead them to a new collective bargaining agreement.

And the fact that they've supposedly agreed to seven straight days of negotiations? Please. They agreed to two straight days of negotiations last week and couldn't get through one without one side (the owners) storming out.

All of this is talk and posturing, most of it's baloney, and none of it is going to help prevent a March 4 lockout. The only way that will happen is if both sides share the same goal. And right now, they don't.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has said many times that he wants a fair deal done before the current one expires -- and I believe him. But I don't think his words reflect the feelings of every one of the league's 32 owners. Multiple people connected with this situation have told me, over the past several months, that there are owners willing to go very hard-line on this to secure the deal they want, that there are owners who are willing to sacrifice regular-season games to a lockout if that's what it takes to undo the damage they say the current CBA has caused them. As long as that's the case, no one should expect this thing to get resolved any time soon, no matter how many days of talks are scheduled or how many federal mediators suddenly appear on the scene.

The problem right now is that the hard-liners have no reason to move. They're not going to lose any money by locking out the players March 4. Heck, as long as they're guaranteed the TV money from the deals they have with the networks, they're not going to lose any money by canceling a game or two come September. Given what they'll be saving in overhead by not having to pay the players or open their stadiums, it's actually easy to see why some owners might be willing to wait out the players and see if they break. It's not that bad a business strategy.

There's a lot of talk from both sides about the fans, but the fact is each side is out for itself in this dispute. The players are trying to protect gains they made in the last negotiation. The owners are trying to undo those gains and push hard in the other direction. It's not that they're not considering the fans, it's that the fans aren't the most important factor, no matter how much fans believe they should be.

If you're looking to take a side, the players' side feels more reasonable. The owners are effectively saying they got such a raw deal last time that they can't survive unless they make radical changes. They say this as they reject the players' request for them to prove it. And they're basically trying to negotiate backwards. Sure, the players won the last time. But rather than accept that they took a beating and negotiate off the point at which they currently find themselves, the owners would like to go back in time, pretend the last deal didn't happen and negotiate from the point at which they believe they'd be if the last deal had been more favorable to them.

That's not the way the world generally works, but NFL owners don't seem to care about that. They're determined to get what they want. They believe they can last longer into a work stoppage than the players can. They see all the history of CBA negotiations between this league and these players and they remain confident that the players won't hold together. And so they can wait.

They can agree to mediation because it looks good. It backs up their unfair labor practices charge from earlier in the week -- makes them look as if they're the side that wants to get this thing done. But they really don't have to get the deal done, not by March 3, Aug. 3 or Oct. 3 if they don't want to.

And make no mistake -- right now, there are enough owners who don't want to. And until that changes, none of what's happened on the NFL labor front in the past couple of days will make any difference at all.