You’d have to say that Len Pasquarelli really isn’t a fan of the current leader of the players’ negotiation efforts:
As the NFL and the group formerly known as the union continue to point fingers, it appears one man was focused on celebrity status more than negotiating. DeMaurice Smith’s predecessor knew how to cut a deal, something Smith could have learned from.
Paraphrasing the old joke about how one might characterize a thousand attorneys buried at the bottom of the ocean floor: What do you call a fast-talkin’ lawyer with a decertified union, no pulpit from which to preach to a congregation and technically no association to executively direct?
A good start.
At the risk of alienating the rank-and-file — and less important, since I wasn’t on the Twitter or fax accounts of assistant executive director/minister of propaganda George Attallah, the NFLPA brass — the Friday afternoon decertification maneuver by the players’ association was the move DeMaurice Smith has had in mind for a long time. And now the fait has met the accompli, and it’s time for the NFLPA to turn to someone who knows how to cut a deal.
We’re not smart enough, or well enough versed in labor law, to have prepared any suggestions. But there has got to be, somewhere, anywhere, a viable alternative to Smith, essentially Elmer Gantry in a business suit and goofy hat. Smith exponentially raised the ante with his incendiary rhetoric, demonizing the league and its owners and their financial statements, declaring the negotiations a war.
Well, on Friday afternoon, he may have won a battle. But in egotistically rejecting a treaty that would have ended the war for another half-dozen years or so, and made his constituents a lot of money, he may have led his mesmerized charges to the brink of football hell.
