NFL players approved a new Collective Bargaining Agreement on Sunday, and NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith was extremely happy with the result.
“Obviously happy that the deal passed because I do think it is a very strong, very solid, very progressive deal for the players,” Smith said on Tiki & Tierney. “I’m really happy about the democratic process and proud of our guys that they took it seriously and stayed actively engaged in it.”
The players increased their revenue share from 47 percent to 48 percent, increased minimum salaries, and allocated $2 billion for pensions for current and former players, among other changes.
“When we have a chance to vastly improve the HRAs, vastly improve and keep our pensions, to make sure guys have a better chance of getting workers compensation, which gives them lifetime injury care – those are the things we were charged to do,” Smith said. “There are some things that you don’t like about every deal. You never get to run the table and get everything you want, and there were some tough choices that we had to make in this deal. But when you can reach back and literally [in] one day significantly affect the lives of over 10,000 players with pension increases, I’m not sure there’s another union in the country that can say that they have been able to go back in time and significantly increase the pensions of workers who retired 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago.”
While the players did agree to a 17th regular-season game, they reduced the number of preseason games from four to three and will be required to practice less – both in the offseason and during the season.
“We had people talking about whether or not we should go to a 14-game season,” Smith said. “You could always make the argument that a 14-game season is safer than a 16-game season in the same way that some people and players could argue a 17th game might not be incrementally that much more harmful if we increase roster sizes, we reduce the load during [the] offseason and make other changes in the overall workout life of a player. I do think that players were thoughtful about the 17th game.”
While the final vote was close – 1,019 to 959 – roughly 500 players didn’t vote at all.
“I'm not going to make excuses for them,” Smith said. “At the same time, nearly 70 percent of our membership did vote and that’s significantly higher than the number who vote for President . . . or their local congressmen or Senators. While I would always want a world where 100 percent of our members participated, I have to look at the good news and say that a significant – if not impressive majority – of players did vote. I would have loved for there to be 100 percent participation.”