addressed the question<\/a> of whether a new CBA could be negotiated within the next year.<\/p>\n\u201cI would say extremely unlikely,\u201d Tretter said. \u201cI became president during COVID, which I think taught me to really view things in foreseeable chunks of time. As you move too far forward, there\u2019s too many variables to deal with. I was elected in March, started April 1st. The first part of my job is making sure I understand what our members want, because this is a membership-ran institution. <\/p>\n
\u201cI will not be able to do that until throughout this season as I go and visit each of these 32 teams. So there is nothing that could be done until I talk to my guys and make sure I understand what they want and what they\u2019re looking for. And then that\u2019s also understanding, can I get everybody on the same page in that amount of time? Which is probably a difficult ask as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo I think my first step is getting out and talking to all 2,500 members and making sure I understand what they care about, and then getting our guys to understand what we should be fighting for. And that\u2019s gonna come from their feedback. There\u2019s gonna be a lot of work that goes on by me and the staff and then bringing that to the executive committee and bringing that to the board [of player representatives] and making sure they have a say, making sure they understand the trade-offs and what the discussions would be. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s a ton of work to be done before a conversation could even start happening, let alone going through an entire collective bargaining process. Those aren\u2019t one-month discussions. This is a 500-plus-page document of clause after clause after clause that would need to be negotiated. That is a very heavy lift on that timeline to get anything done.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s right about all of that. Even if the league would make the union a great offer right now, it becomes very difficult (if not impossible) to properly build the consensus needed with the executive committee, the board of player representatives, and ultimately the rank and file.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have an agreement for the next five years, so I don\u2019t even think we\u2019re thinking of, \u2018Well, how fast could we get this done?\u2019 It\u2019s, \u2018Do we want to even have a conversation if that\u2019s what\u2019s going to be slid across the table to us?\u2019 And right now we have a deal, I think we\u2019re happy with and we\u2019re OK with and things are operating well under and what\u2019s the motivation to speed up a process? And I don\u2019t think we\u2019re looking to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The overriding question of whether a work stoppage may happen is premature, to say the least.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re still so far away from that,\u201d Tretter said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s weird how quickly these conversations have started, and it\u2019s because the league is interested in doing something. They\u2019ve been clear about that. But we are still five years away from this time. That is so much time. That is over a life cycle of a player, on average. It\u2019s longer than the average career length. So we\u2019re still so far away from a work stoppage, a strike, a lockout that, though you\u2019re always planning for those scenarios, that\u2019s not just something that we\u2019re really like diving into right now, just because we are so far into a deal with so much more runway to go before that would ever happen that I don\u2019t think anybody should be concerned, because we have five more years of football guaranteed. There is a very long time before something would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so the union will continue to wait. At some point, however, an opportunity to get an even better deal could be lost. The challenge becomes picking the right time to accept the terms the NFL would impose a lockout to get, and to secure extra benefits by agreeing to do it early.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to the potential for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the NFL Players Association has considerable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":["post-762217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}