New-Look NFLPA Promoting Involvement Of Players

With a new regime gradually settling in at the NFL Players Association, one current player who has found himself in a key early role says that the union wants the guys who play the game to be involved.
Ravens cornerback Dominique Foxworth, who by all appearances already is being groomed by new Executive Director DeMaurice Smith to succeed Kevin Mawae as NFLPA president, attended the first negotiating session for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement.
“It wasn’t just a campaign promise,” Foxworth said of Smith’s vow to include players in the process, according to Liz Mullen of SportsBusiness Journal. “A lot of people get up and say something and then not do what they said. I know he has done it.”
Foxworth wouldn’t talk about the details of the June 3 meeting, explaining that all sides agreed to keep the talks confidential.
But the opening issue continues to be the reason for the owners’ decision to opt out of the current deal, with the union believing that the owners are attempting to cry poor mouth without revealing whether and to what extent they’re making a profit.
The league is walking a fine line in this regard; if the owners say that they pulled the plug on the CBA two years early because they’re not making money, then the owners risk opening the door to an involuntary inspection of books that likely reveal otherwise.
Packers president Mark Murphy recently danced on the tightrope in this regard.
“It’s a real concern that our player costs continue to grow at a rate much higher than our revenue’s growing,” Murphy said. “It’s not sustainable, and it’s the reason we opted out of the collective bargaining agreement.”
Though it’s unknown whether the union will seize on Murphy’s words as the basis for a legal challenge to the league’s refusal to share financial data, the possibility that Murphy has said too much prompted one management-side league source to summarize his reaction in two words.
“Oh shit.”