NFL & NFLPA to Meet in Session for New CBA

Here’s a quote for you from Jason La Canfora of NFL.com regarding tomorrows meeting, which will be the latest effort toward the ever-looming Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) as well as proposed changes to the season format as we know it.

The NFL and NFLPA will meet Wednesday morning in New York in their latest session toward getting a new collective bargaining agreement, according to source with knowledge of the situation.

The sides remain far apart on most major issues, and few league insiders are expecting significant progress until 2011, after the upcoming season. The thrust of Wednesday’s meeting is expected to focus on the “enhanced season,” with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners heavily in favor of truncating the preseason by two games and adding two regular-season games.

It’s a notion some players and NFLPA officials have taken issue with and one that likely would require changes to teams’ roster size, as well as general player compensation, obviously. The league seems committed to having this as part of any labor agreement moving forward.

(For those of you who don’t have a clue what “truncating” means, I won’t make you go find a dictionary. It means to shorten by cutting off a part, or to cut short. If you guys have seen some of the, for lack of a better term, dumb-ass comments by some of the people on that site, I can only imagine La Canfora using that word to get some of them to open a book once in a while. Good luck…)

This could mean a lot of changes to the way teams plan out their seasons. I’m just glad that both the owners and the commissioner agree on something at the moment. This could be a big step in getting that new CBA finalized and avoiding that lockout we have all been dreading. Maybe if we get this done sooner, rather than later, then more players will get those long term contracts that they so greatly covet.

Like it or not, that’s what’s keeping Vincent Jackson and Marcus McNeill from coming back to work with the team. They don’t want to put their bodies on the line without a contract, and the owners don’t want to hand out big guaranteed money if there is going to be a lockout next season. You can’t argue with the logic that you shouldn’t be talking about contracts if there is a chance that NONE of these teams will even be on the field next year.

We all have to collectively push for this agreement to go through in a timely manner because, let’s face it, we can barely stand the off season as it is. Now, imagine if it was extended indefinitely. Also, feel free to hit up the comment box and discuss the possible “truncated” (shortened) pre-season and the extended regular season that would become of it. Let’s hope for a good meeting tomorrow and good football this year and every single year after.