While its 88 degrees outside, cooler heads prevail inside as talks continued in New York City today with the second consecutive day of meetings between the legal teams representing the NFL players and owners. There are four days of meetings scheduled this week, with the lawyers being joined on Thursday and Friday by the players, the owners, NFLPA Executive Director Demaurice Smith, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, and US Magistrate Judge Arthur Boylan.
While there is no firm deadline by which a deal must be done, we are rapidly approaching a soft deadline to enable the teams to reach training camp on time and avoid the cancellation or delay of any preseason games. Training camps are scheduled to begin just three weeks from now, and the first preseason game is the Hall of Fame game between the Chicago Bears and St. Louis Rams on August 7th.
With free agency and rookie contracts still needing to be addressed, if a deal isn’t reached by late this week or early next week, the existing training camp and preseason schedules are in jeopardy, although it might not affect regular season games yet.
