Is there any hope?

Sorry folks, lockout is going to the most often heard word on sports’ talk radio and television for the next few months.  Maybe like my prediction of Chris Peterson going to LSU, I’ll be wrong, but unfortunately I don’t think that I am.

So let’s assume that in the next day, a new Collective Bargaining Agreement is not reached.  Let’s first tackle the question that’s at the forefront of everyone’s minds…I don’t know how I got this good looking.  Now let’s talk about that second question on your mind…when will we have professional football again?  Let’s get one thing straight, the owners are in no hurry to agree to a deal that gives the players anything close to the deal that the owners just opted out of.

The NFL has been, and will continue to be, a deadline league.  The first deadline is now upon us, and will come to pass at 11:59 pm Thursday night.  If a new deal isn’t agreed to (or the deadline isn’t extended by two weeks (which would only give fans a false hope)) in the next day, we will experience at least months of a dreaded lockout.

I say this because the second deadline would be sometime in early to mid August, when if a deal is not reached the full NFL season won’t be able to be played.  If a deal is reached by that date in August, teams will be able to hold an abbreviated training camp (hopefully Albert Haynesworth will be able to pass his running test more quickly or he’ll miss the entire camp), followed by a couple preseason games, and then we’ll see the entire 16 or 18 game season (whatever number is collectively bargained) starting in September.

Unfortunately, if August comes and goes without an agreement, we’ll have two to three more months of winter (sorry, it will seem like the movie Groundhog Day)…I mean lockout.  In October or November we’ll then hit the third deadline, which nobody wants to even think about…the date that the entire NFL season is cancelled, because not enough time will be left to play out even an abbreviated season.

Do I hope an agreement can be reached soon?  Absolutely, but the real question is will an agreement be reached soon?  Sorry, I think we’ve got many more months of winter ahead of us.

(It seems that the players’ best weapon at their disposal is to decertify as a union, and we’ll hear much more about that after 11:59 pm passes tomorrow.  ESPN’s legal analyst, Lester Munson, gives an excellent breakdown of the issues at play here:  http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=munson/110302 .  While no guarantees of labor peace are given, there is hope.)