There are a lot of problems in this world, and if he can beat the NFL owners with almost no leverage, NFLPA President De Smith can pretty much solve all of them. That's the only logical conclusion after the stunt he pulled on Wednesday at a bargaining session with NFL owners.
DeMaurice Smith Should Just Run For President After The Lockout Ends
Not to overstate it (De Smith can cure AIDS!), but he made a move on Wednesday that was totally unexpected, caught the NFL owners completely off guard, and may have single-handedly changed the trajectory of the NFL Lockout. So, pretty impressive.
...slightly more than a year ago he received approval from the executive committee to secure insurance that would pay each player roughly $200,000 if there were no football in 2011.
Smith disclosed the fund to only a handful of people outside of the executive committee. However with negotiations seemingly at a standstill late Wednesday night, the decision was made to play one of their aces in the hole. So in the relative quiet of the sides' New York City bargaining room the next morning, Baltimore Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth informed the owners of the previously secret lockout fund.
Was that the shove in the back that moved the sides closer to a potential agreement? Only the owners know for sure, but a source close to one of them said the disclosure definitely got that side's attention.
Perfect, right? NFL players will need money if/when the owners try to bleed them dry during a lockout, so $200,000 goes a long way toward holding them over. In the end, seeking lockout insurance seems like a no-brainer. But that’s today. This took foresight, because it had to happen before the lockout even began--nobody would have given them lockout insurance during an actual lockout, after all. And making it an effective bargaining chip took incredible patience.
If only we could have been in the room... To see the owners’ faces when they found out that their best leverage had been a farce all along, and De Smith had been playing them all along. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the past two days have seen more lockout progress than the past six months? Or that the economic details of a new deal are pretty much done?
Of course not. De Smith had this set up from day one, and now that it’s only a matter of time before we get football back in our lives, it’s only a matter of time before De Smith moves on to fix the NBA Lockout, the budget crisis, the newspaper industry, Wall Street corruption, the Middle East... Let’s do it. Let’s do it all.
At this point, we can’t put anything past De Smith.
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