New CBA Is Officially Done: Labor Peace For 10 Years

HGH testing appears to be coming to the NFL. The players are expected to vote on the new collective bargaining agreement on Thursday and included in that is HGH testing, according to multiple reports. As Judy Battista of the NY Times points out, HGH testing is a new thing in sports.

It needs to be implemented within 30 days, which is before the Sept. 8 regular season opener. Players had previously balked at this idea until a reliable test was created.

The NFL lockout is over but the new collective bargaining agreement is not quite done yet. The players are expected to vote to today to formally finalize the new CBA which will officially kick off the new league year. We’ve been working in this strange transition period in the last week where the league is kind of open, but not officially.

Once the players vote to approve, it’ll be done, and the league year will start. That means every team needs to be under the salary cap by Friday, according to a report from Pro Football Talk.

Last week when it was announced the NFL lockout was over, free agency could begin and training camps started up, most people thought the lockout was, you know, actually over.

Well, it is -- kind of. The settlement between the players and owners is done but the actual CBA isn’t quite completed as there were a few issues the two sides could only discuss once the players returned to union status, one of those being the system used to discipline players.

The NFL lockout has ended but there are still a few nagging issues to be meted out before the new collective bargaining agreement can be ratified, chief among them being Roger Goodell’s refusal to relinquish full control of the NFL’s personal conduct policy.

Per Pro Football Talk:

The NFL Players Association showed that it at least has some sense of reality, releasing a video of players on the bargaining committee basically thanking the fans for sticking through the lockout and expressing their excitement at getting back to business. It might not be the most original idea, but they certainly deserve credit for being self-aware enough to make the gesture.

How much rebuilding of the fans’ faith is required, though? As frustrating and maddening as the lockout was, some credit is deserved for both sides’ apparent realization that they needed to get a deal struck before any actual games were missed. The regular season isn’t scheduled to start until Sept. 8, meaning teams will have more than six weeks to get themselves together.

The NFL published a new calendar for the start of the 2011 season and it’s about what we thought it would be. The action starts on Tuesday and continues through the weekend when full free agency opens.

Here’s a glimpse of the schedule this week:

Now that the NFL and NFL Players Association have agreed to a collective bargaining agreement that could bring about 10 years of labor peace, here’s a timeline of how the league and players association arrived at this point.

May 20, 2008: National Football League owners vote unanimously to opt out of the 2006 collective bargaining agreement. The owners’ decision to opt out changed the expiration of the agreement from the last day of the 2012 league year to March 3, 2011.

After nearly five months, the NFL lockout is over. NFLPA spokesman George Atallah tweeted out two words that mean so much to football fans everywhere:

”It’s unanimous.”