Eagles' Banner says owners' offer was fair

Earlier this week, NFL Players Association president Kevin Mawae said any suggestions that he and his union walked away from the negotiating table last week was "a complete fabrication and lie."

Yet, that's exactly what they did Friday, less than 2 hours after receiving a compromise proposal from the league in which the owners offered to split the difference on the $660 million-a-year gulf between the two sides.

Shortly after 4 p.m., union officials got up, left the federal mediator's office, walked the 2 blocks to their Washington headquarters and filed the papers to decertify so the players could file an antitrust suit against the league.

No counteroffer. No request for another extension so they could review the owners' proposal. Nothing. Just, we're outta here.

"We really thought, on the economics, [if] we split it right down the middle, that was fair," Eagles president Joe Banner, who was part of the league's negotiating team in Washington last week, told the Daily News yesterday.

"On the rookie pool, we left it the way we thought it should be. But on every other intangible issue - offseason workouts, health benefits, retirement benefits - we accepted their position. So we thought we would be damn close to a deal. But to not even give us a counterproposal? That was really stunning. It's hard to understand why the offer wasn't good enough to give us a counterproposal."

Neither Mawae, nor NFLPA assistant executive director George Atallah, nor Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who is one of the named plaintiffs in the suit the players filed against the league after they decertified, really gave a good reason for their decision to cease negotiations and rush to decertification when they spoke with reporters earlier this week on a conference call.

Brees said, "It was all a front, it was a show. There was no real intent to get a deal done."

But the owners' Friday proposal suggests otherwise. It was a significant compromise. It wasn't a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Why walk?

"They wanted us to meet them halfway," Mawae said. "When you start off asking for $1.66 billion, then you come down to whatever the numbers ended up being, that's not negotiating. We got to the point where [we said], we're just not going to do that anymore."

The fact that Mawae didn't even seem to know what the numbers were is a little disconcerting.

Under the old collective bargaining agreement that the owners approved in 2006 and then opted out of in 2008, the owners received $1 billion a year in cost credits for stadium construction, maintenance, et al, which basically made for a 50-50 split of all the league's revenue.

But the owners quickly acknowledged they signed a bad deal and had been asking for another $1 billion a year off the top in cost credits.

For 2 years, the union told the owners that if they expected the players to agree to any financial concessions, they were going to have to open their books and prove to the players that their profit margin was shrinking.

Early last week, the owners agreed to give the union league profitability numbers for the last 5 years. More significantly, they also agreed to turn over to the NFLPA's accountants 5 years worth of audited operating statements for each of the 32 teams.

"A couple of major things have changed in the last 5 years," Banner said. "First, the '06 agreement changed the player costs. Secondly, over the last 5 to 7 years, the economics of building stadiums has shifted from being overwhelmingly public sector to overwhelmingly private sector. The cost of the operations of those stadiums has shifted from being primarily public sector to being primarily private sector.

"The information we were offering them would give them the picture they need of where we're at today and where it looks like we'll be if we go forward this way."

Banner said the audited operating statements were more than enough information for the union to be able to "tell how healthy is this business, how is it trending, and are there some structural challenges that need to be addressed."

The union never bothered to look at the audited statements, telling the owners that it wanted to see 10 years worth of detailed club-by-club financial data. That's 5 years before the previous collective bargaining agreement was even signed.

"I'm not sure what the disadvantage would have been in them taking those [financial statements] and showing them to their accountants," Banner said. "They could've discredited it later or done whatever they wanted. But why wouldn't you take it? They didn't really have an answer for that, which is one of the reasons you're hearing owners say, 'Well, they don't really want to make a deal.'

"I feel there's a deal to be made here, I really do. But we've got to get everybody there [at the negotiating table] and committed to that."