DeMaurice Smith didn't get what he was hoping for Tuesday, but the head of the NFL players' union did walk away from his latest meeting with NFL owners with some good reasons to feel encouraged about the state of the negotiations.Smith has said publicly that he's waiting for the owners to submit to the union a proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement, since it was the owners who opted out of the last one. That didn't happen Tuesday, as the only issues discussed in a five-hour meeting were "non-core" issues such as the drug policy and potential changes to the commissioner-controlled player discipline system.
But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was actually at this meeting (he wasn't at the last one, in July), and the fact that anything at all was discussed made it the most encouraging session of the three the sides have held so far. In addition, they did resolve to meet again soon -- most likely in mid-October -- and continue Tuesday's discussions.
"Today's meeting was good," union spokesman George Atallah said in a printed statement that constituted the only comment offered by anyone on either said. "We discussed some non-core CBA issues. Another meeting is scheduled in the coming weeks at which time we will respond to the league's non-economic proposals."
Smith had been hoping for a proposal that had to do with the core issues, of course. As he's said many times, it's the owners, not the players, who opted out of the current deal and have put the 2010 season at risk of being played without a salary cap and the 2011 season at risk of not being played at all. So Smith has been very vocal about wanting to know the specific economic reasons the owners don't think the current system works.
But while he didn't get any such insight from the other side Tuesday, the union had several reasons to feel good about the events of the day.
First, it's encouraging from the players' perspective that the league is willing to talk about alterations to the drug policy and the discipline policy. Players have pressed Smith to pursue changes to the latter, since they're not comfortable with a system in which Goodell is the sole arbiter of NFL justice, and Goodell has said that he's open to discussing anything. And the StarCaps case, in which two Minnesota Vikings defensive tackles have mounted a court challenge to the league's right to suspend them for taking a drug the league told them they could take, has prompted both sides to examine possible changes to the drug policy.
Further, the fact that Goodell attended the meeting was a positive sign for the union. The commissioner infuriated the players by not attending the last meeting in July, and Smith was public about his feelings on that matter. Last month, after Goodell told reporters that it was time to stop negotiating in the media and start talking face-to-face, Smith shot back with, "I was at the last negotiating meeting and he wasn't."Goodell's presence at Tuesday's meeting gives the union reason to believe the league and the commissioner are at least paying attention to their concerns and that they're not immune to public pressure. Since public pressure must necessarily be part of the union's strategy in an environment where the public is far more likely to side with the owners, that could bode well for said strategy.
There remains a lot of work to be done. Smith is still no further along than he was six months ago on getting the owners to provide the audited financial statements he seeks. And the owners have made it clear that they're in far less of a hurry to do a deal -- that they're willing to play the 2010 season without a salary cap while the union feels it's important to meet the March deadline that would prevent that from happening.
But the fact that there were some talks Tuesday, even if they weren't as substantive as they eventually need to be, is progress. And at this point, they'll take it.
