Tom Brady is a named plaintiff in the players' lawsuit
(
Keith Allison)
News that the NFL was about to reach a deal to end its four-month lockout spread quickly yesterday, but it appears to have been, as Jake McIntyre
tweeted, a "straight-up ratfuck" by the owners.
The NFL's owners announce they're voting on a deal. They vote 31-0, with one abstention, in favor, and the ball is in the players' court (apologies for the cross-sport metaphor). But! It turns out the players hadn't actually seen this deal, let alone come close to agreeing on it in principle:
Some players were more pointed in their critique of how things transpired Thursday. New Orleans running back Heath Evans tweeted: "The owners tried 2 slip many things n2 the CBA 'they' voted on that were NEVER agreed 2!"
Evans was not alone in taking to Twitter and elsewhere to express his objections, and after a two-hour conference call, the players' representatives decided not to vote on the owners' proposal:
"It takes two sides to reach an agreement," the Bills' George Wilson told ESPN, "and when they try to shove an agreement down our throats, that's a sign of disrespect. ... There is no timetable set. For most of the time that we were on the conference call, we didn't even have the proposal yet."
One of the major issues around the so-called "deal" is that owners are pushing for the players union to reform more quickly than the players feel is appropriate or perhaps legal:
The NFLPA later sent a second e-mail to player reps and took issue with the league setting a rough Tuesday night deadline for the NFLPA to re-form as a union.
"In addition to depriving the players of the time needed to consider forming a union and making needed changes to the old agreement, this proposed procedure would in my view also violate federal labor laws," read the e-mail, written by NFLPA general counsel Richard Berthelsen.
The players feel it's important for them to take the process of reconstituting a union as seriously as they took the dissolution of the union for the purposes of filing an antitrust suit against the league.