As the NFL and the NFL Players Association continue with another effort to strike a new deal on a labor agreement, a player involved in past disputes has a message for the modern player.
“When I look at the NBA and this free agency frenzy, it makes me think of that ‘big boat’ we missed during our NFL strike,” former NFL defensive back Everson Walls said on Twitter. “MLB and NBA did it right! So when you hear an NFL player complain about salaries, blame the players from 1980s. We truly failed you!”
Walls’ remarks raise an interesting question. Did the players of the ‘80s have an obligation to help today’s players, or to help themselves? In 1988, one year after the failed strike, Bears linebacker Wilber Marshall signed a five-year, $6 million contract with Washington, which gave up a pair of first-round picks to get him. At the time, that was the biggest contract ever given to a defensive player. Today’s best defensive players are making much, much more -- even with inflation taken into account. So it’s not as if today’s players are huring, especially relative to what the players from three decades ago made.
Also, look at it this way: Should today’s players take a stand and strike (or absorb a lockout) for the benefit of NFL players in 2050? Or should those players strive to get the best and the most that they can for themselves and their families, in exchange for the players’ skills, abilities, risks, and sacrifices?
The failed 1987 strike proved that players of any given era aren’t inclined to miss game checks, especially with relatively short career shelf lives. Thus, until players draw a line in the sand and allow all or part of a season to be lost, all future negotiations must be regarded through that prism.
If anything, the failure of yesteryear came not when the players aborted their strike in 1987 but when the players settled their antitrust lawsuit by agreeing to a free-agency system that allows for the application of a franchise tag, limiting the movement of the best players at the best positions. If the players, who had won a verdict declaring the NFL’s free-agency system in the absence of a certified union illegal, had merely dug in, the league may have agreed to full and unfettered free agency, allowing the best players to force their way to the biggest paydays, driving the market upward at all positions and forcing teams to spend to the cap and not quietly hoard cash as raw, unadulterated profit.
So, basically, Everson Walls shouldn’t be apologizing to today’s players. The players, and the lawyers, who settled the antitrust lawsuit should be.
