Players Strike Back With Strong Letter to Roger Goodell, Call His Statements ‘False’

The players' executive committee struck back at the owners Saturday by sending a four-page letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, strongly refuting the owners' weeklong claims that they offered the players a fair deal.

In response to the public-relations battle that has gone on during the lockout, the letter opens by reminding Goodell in bold print that "we were there at the negotiations and know the truth about what happened."

Later in the initial paragraph, the letter stated, "At all times during the mediation session, we had representatives at the table with the authority to make a deal. The NFL representatives at the mediation did not, and the owners were mostly absent."

After a four-paragraph introduction, the letter calls out Goodell, lead labor negotiator Jeff Pash and the owners for claiming they met the players halfway before bluntly stating, "Your statements are false."

Here are some highlights from the rest of the letter.

1. The owners proposed the players' salary cap plus benefits would start at $141 million in 2011 and increase to $161 million in 2014, regardless of NFL revenues. The executive committee claims these numbers were "based on unrealistically low revenue projections," and it would have given the owners 100 percent of all revenues above the low projections. If NFL revenues grow by 8 percent over the next four years, which has been the same growth rate during the last decade, it would have resulted in the players giving back $3.6 billion from 2011-14, based on those salary cap proposals. And if revenues increased at a slower rate of 5 percent annually, the players would still have lost more than $2 billion over the next four years.

2. The owners' proposed a CBA term of 10 years, but they didn't include the players' share of revenues after the first four years, so those last six years were essentially left open to question.

3. The league's TV contracts will expire after the 2014 season, and TV revenues are expected to double to $8 million annually in the next set of contracts. Clearly, the players didn't want to get shorted on that revenue stream.

4. The owners "continued to ask for an 18-game season … even though the players and our medical experts warned you many times that increasing the season would increase the risk of player injury and shorten careers." This is a PR twist on the players' part because they'll accept the 18-game proposal with prorated raises and added health benefits. But the injury risk is undeniable.

5. The executive committee claimed the NFL's final proposal was worse than its proposal the week before. Additionally, that last proposal was the only one the NFL made during the final week of negotiations, and it came at March 11 at 12:30 p.m., which was four and a half hours before the players' deadline to decertify.

6. The letter was signed by Kevin Mawae, Charlie Batch, Drew Brees, Brian Dawkins, Dominique Foxworth, Scott Fujita, Sean Morey, Tony Richardson, Jeff Saturday, Mike Vrabel and Brian Waters.