NFL owners may opt out of labor deal

NFL owners could opt out of their agreement with the players union next week, leaving open the possibility of a 2010 season without a salary cap.

The labor agreement is on the agenda for the league meetings in Atlanta on Tuesday.

"If they don't do it next week then it will be soon after that," Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, said Friday. "They want to opt out and we don't."

In the agreement signed in March 2006, both sides were given the right to get out of the deal by Nov. 8, 2008. League officials noted that doesn't mean a decision could not be made earlier.

That contract was due to expire at the end of the 2013 season. If the owners nullify it, a move that has seemed inevitable for a while, it would end after the 2011 season with 2010 being uncapped.

Several owners have complained that the current deal, which gives 60 percent of the revenues to the players, has been too one-sided. It was done at the last moment and was the last major act of former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who managed to put together a coalition of high-revenue, middle-revenue and low-revenue teams to ratify the contract.

Only two low-revenue teams, Cincinnati and Buffalo, voted against it.

Since then, however, high-revenue owners, such as New England's Robert Kraft, have also supported negotiating for a new deal. And if a vote is taken, 24 of the 32 teams would have to vote to extend it, something that is highly unlikely to happen.

The end of the agreement does not necessarily mean there will be a work stoppage, although Upshaw has predicted the owners could lock out the players in 2011. But the early opt out also could lead to earlier talks on a new deal.

And despite predictions that owners with more cash would corner the market on star players in an uncapped year, there are safeguards against that, notably a provision in the contract that extends the period needed from free agency from four years to six if that happens.

Belichick responds: New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick lashed out at the team's former video assistant Friday, saying in a televised interview that Matt Walsh was a low-level staffer who was fired for "poor job performance"

"There's not a lot of credibility," Belichick said in an interview broadcast on "CBS Evening News."

Belichick acknowledged that he violated NFL rules prohibiting filming opponents signals but insisted there was no intent to hide what he was doing.

"You look at the tape. You see him filming the game," the coach told CBS. "You tell me how discrete it is."

Belichick has said he didn't even know Walsh, who was fired for poor performance and for making a tape recording of a meeting with player personnel director Scott Pioli.

"For him to talk about game-planning and strategy and play-calling and how he advised coordinators, it's embarrassing; it's absurd," Belichick said. "He didn't have any knowledge of football. He was our third video assistant."