Yeah, I'm with Douche on this one. As far as I knew, the NFL took the 18 game season thing off the table relatively quickly as that was probably just a ceding point anyway to make it look like they were willing to negotiate. NFL.com published their final offer to the NFLPA and again, it looked very reasonable to me as an impartial observer and didn't include the 18 game season.
Here was their offer;
from NFL.com:
» Only an additional $325 million off the top for the owners rather than the $1 billion they initially asked for.
» Maintaining the 16 regular-season games and four preseason games for at least two years, with any switch to 18 games down the road being negotiable.
» Instituting a rookie wage scale through which money saved would be paid to veterans and retired players.
» Creating new year-round health and safety rules.
» Establishing a fund for retired players, with $82 million contributed by the owners over the next two years.
» Financial disclosure of audited league and club profitability information that isn't even shared with the teams. That was proposed by the NFL this week, and rejected by the union, which began insisting in May 2009 for a complete look at the books of all 32 clubs.
The owners are just businessmen so of course they're going to try to get as much profit as possible from their teams, especially those who own bad teams in small cities. I don't blame them for being successful businessmen like the rest of Socialist America. On the other side of that token though, they are businessmen and most likely won't be very keen on just not playing an NFL season at all and losing potentially $6 billion worth of revenue so I highly doubt that's their goal here.
If the players want to be greedy, shoot down a reasonable deal, start suing people and hold out, the game will be played without them I'm afraid. The fans will watch scrubs play football.