With the NFL and NFLPA set to begin mediated negotiations on a new CBA anew on Monday, I thought I'd touch on a snippet of reporting regarding revenue sharing from Yahoo!'s Mike Silver. In an article profiling Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith published on Friday, Silver reports that the league's revenue sharing model is "likely" to be tweaked.
"The new deal, incidentally, will likely appease big-market owners like (Jerry) Jones and (Robert) Kraft by eliminating some of the revenue-sharing provisions they found so odious," writes Silver.
This does not mean that revenue sharing is going away; far from it. The proposed tweak is almost certainly referring to the supplemental revenue sharing model that the league adopted in the 2006 CBA; SRS created a pool of about $220 million that was shared between the league's lower-revenue clubs, including the Buffalo Bills. SRS was introduced into the last CBA to offset a significant rise in the league's salary cap at that point in time; the NFL attempted to invalidate SRS for the 2010 uncapped year, but a court ruling kept that money pool in place last season.
Silver also reports that the two sides are still about $750 million apart in negotiating how the league's $9 billion in annual revenue will be split up; owners wanted to take $2 billion off the top and then split the remaining $7 billion between the league and its players. The elimination of SRS could very well factor into this part of the negotiation.