The NFL and its players reopened their pen-pal partnership on Thursday, but there's no reason for fans of the game to get dizzy over another public-relations spin.
After Judge Susan Nelson told the sides on Wednesday that she would need a couple of weeks to make a ruling on the players' request to block the lockout, she advised the owners and players to resume mediation in the meantime. Since they made so much progress through mediation in late February and early March, it sounded like a perfect stopgap solution.
So, the two sides pretended to heed Nelson's advice on Thursday, saying they were willing to resume mediation.
Great news, right? Nope, not in the slightest.
The owners want George Cohen to oversee the mediation sessions in Washington D.C., where they occurred for about three weeks before the lockout. The players, though, want Nelson to preside over the mediation sessions in federal court in Minnesota.
The two sides are far more than 1,500 miles apart, though, and there is absolutely no middle ground to speak of. Basically, the players believe their best chance of ending the lockout is through litigation (in the courts), but the owners prefer to control the situation through bargaining sessions in mediation, which would result in a new CBA.
The owners won't agree to federal mediation because they know it's never happened before in professional sports, and they don't want to set a bad precedent. For the owners, this tactic is much more about future negotiations — in the NFL and other sports — than it is about resolving the current issue. Quite frankly, the players would hold almost all of the leverage in future CBA disputes if the owners decided to negotiate in court.
And the players won't go to Washington for their own legitimate reasons. Since the NFLPA decertified, the players can't resume any collective-bargaining talks because they would be acting as a union. Legally, they would completely destroy their court case in Minnesota because it would show their decertification was anything but.
The NFL has said it will offer the players assurances that it won't hold that legality against them, but the players would still lose leverage by going back to Washington. A month ago, the players' greatest leverage was the threat of decertification and litigation, and they wouldn't have that leverage if they went back to mediation.
So, there it is, two sides that are completely willing to negotiate on their own terms, but fiercely opposed to traveling to the other side's home court. Each side can say what it wants to the media and write letters to every judge in every courtroom in America, but the bottom line is that it's all semantics. They're stuck, and there's nothing they can do about it.
All they can do now is wait for Nelson's ruling. If she grants the injunction to block the lockout — the feeling is Nelson will rule in the players' favor — the players will still have to win the owners' ensuing appeal in front of a three-judge court, which will be more difficult than winning over Nelson. If the players win the appeal, the league will open for business and there will be a full regular season in 2011, and they can figure out the CBA another time, even if that takes years.
But if the NFL is victorious in court, the two sides will be back to square one, and this work stoppage could get uglier than anyone ever expected.
