NFL, players finish 3 days of talks

Associated Press

From mediated talks to arguments before an appeals court, the NFL’s labor dispute has reached another critical stage.

The league and its players completed three straight days of not-so-secret negotiations Thursday, and now head for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis for a hearing that could prove pivotal in the nearly three-month lockout.

The three-judge panel will ultimately decide whether the lockout should continue, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and union chief DeMaurice Smith, among others, are expected to be inside the courtroom today.

Training camps normally would open in about seven weeks, but this is no normal year.

Ben Leber, one of 10 plaintiffs on the still-pending antitrust lawsuit against the league, said the players haven’t discussed a specific drop-dead date for reaching an agreement to ensure the on-time start of training camps. But he said it’s necessary to have a date to reach a deal.

“Both sides have a day, whether they want to make it public or not,” Leber said. “The biggest challenge is going to lie with whose day is going to come up first. Once it got to this point, I think it was just a good guess based on most corporate labor disputes that nothing was going to get done until the 11th hour. Now it depends on which 11th hour gets here first.”

Goodell and owners Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft and John Mara were among those joined in a Chicago suburb by Smith and a group of players, including NFLPA president Kevin Mawae, before U.S. Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan. Both sides issued statements saying they would honor a court-ordered confidentiality agreement. Boylan then canceled mediation sessions scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday in Minneapolis.

A person with knowledge of the talks said that the term “settlement negotiations” doesn’t necessarily mean an agreement is near. Canceling next week’s sessions was simply a way to keep the process as private as possible.

More likely than another round of mediated talks with Boylan would be a similar secret meeting without him — between the league and players, who have been locked out since March 12.