Gene Upshaw Passes Away

[MickeyDavis]

RIP Gene.

There have been grumblings within the union about ousting him. Lately there has been talk of veteran players teaming with owners to install a rookie salary scale to reduce the big money rookie contracts of recent years.

It will be interesting to see who is the replacement.

[TheGhostDog]

A sad day, and worst of all for NFL fans we lost one of the more reasonable voices in the upcoming CBA talks, which were already looking to get pretty ugly.

[ReasonablySober]

A sad day, and worst of all for NFL fans we lost one of the more reasonable voices in the upcoming CBA talks, which were already looking to get pretty ugly.

From my understanding of the situation, Upshaw was one of the more dissenting voices in the room.

Nevertheless, a sad day for NFL fans. RIP.

[da5thelement]

It will be interesting to see who is the replacement.

I have heard Troy Vincent, but that was before Gene died.

[TheGhostDog]

A sad day, and worst of all for NFL fans we lost one of the more reasonable voices in the upcoming CBA talks, which were already looking to get pretty ugly.

From my understanding of the situation, Upshaw was one of the more dissenting voices in the room.

There are many heated issues in CBA talks - guaranteed salaries, player salaries as a percentage of league revenues, rookie contracts, player pensions - that Upshaw had to deal with in his role at the Players Association, but as a Packer fan the only one that I'd lose sleep over is the continued health of the NFL's joint salary cap/revenue sharing program that enables smaller market teams to thrive, unlike their counterparts in, say, major league baseball. On this issue, my understanding was that Upshaw was indeed a voice of reason, talking down extreme voices from both owner and labor sides that would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

From an ESPN article on Upshaw:
Upshaw did not blink. In fact, by nearly all accounts, on March he won a watershed labor victory for his players, for himself and, more important, for the NFL. At Upshaw's insistence, high-revenue teams such as the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys now will help subsidize teams such as the Arizona Cardinals and Minnesota Vikings at the lower end of the spectrum as part of the six-year collective bargaining agreement extension. After more than 300 hours of intense, head-to-head negotiations, America's sports fans have another six seasons of uninterrupted football service.

Because of one man.

...
The deal breaker had been revenue sharing among the league's 32 teams. For several years, Upshaw had been advocating that the teams that made more money help subsidize the teams that made less. The gap between such teams, in the case of No. 1 versus No. 32, amounted to more than $100 million.

The existing CBA called for the players to receive a percentage of the defined gross revenue, about 90 percent of all revenue, which excluded such things as concessions, parking, stadium clubs and luxury boxes. Upshaw, who had been told by the Raiders' Davis that the Denver Broncos' new stadium put him at a $40 million competitive disadvantage, pushed for a slightly lower percentage of all team revenues.

"I saw what was happening in baseball and hockey, and I could see our sport going in the same direction," Upshaw said. "The gulf between the high-revenue and low-revenue clubs was beginning to be so wide that with another negotiation, it might have been too late.

"I have always said, 'The only time this agreement will ever fall apart is if either side gets greedy.' And they were starting to get greedy."

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2387218

[MickeyDavis]

Andrew Brandt's take:

http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/200 ... -presence/

Gene Upshaw: A Lasting Presence

Stunning news this morning that Gene Upshaw, the head of the NFL Players Association has died at the age of 63. There were no reports of his illness – which has now been reported as pancreatic cancer – and thus the stop-in-your-tracks nature of the story.

Gene has been a voice and presence for NFL players for decades. He was a seminal presence in the labor history of the NFL. He has been criticized for his cozy relationship with former Commissioner Tagliabue and the fact that NFL players do not have guaranteed contracts. That said, free agency in the NFL would not exist but for Gene Upshaw. More importantly, the present collective bargaining agreement that we are living under today has been the source of constant complaint and dissatisfaction by the owners, a testament to the job Gene did.

This deal, negotiated by Upshaw and his staff in March of 2006, is the best deal NFL players have ever had. They receive 59.5% of Total Football Revenues (TFR), not the Designated Gross Revenues (DGR) that were calculated under the previous agreement. DGR primarily included broadcast and ticket revenue; TFR includes all football revenues. This change of acronyms has brought NFL players tremendous wealth compared to where they once were.

The last time I saw Gene in Green Bay he sat in my office at Lambeau Field and noticed all the activity in the Atrium below us – stadium tours, Pro Shop business, Hall of Fame tours, restaurants, and so on – and shook his head. These were revenues that the players should be getting, he said with some purpose. He also used our public financial records – the only team required to show its assets and liabilities is the smallest market in football by a long shot – to the union’s benefit. I explained that the Packers are a unique team with an exceptional fan base, but he used what he needed to use.

The ink was barely dry on the March 2006 deal when owners were already complaining about it. The voices in the wilderness that dissented from the vote – Ralph Wilson of the Bills and Mike Brown of the Bengals – started to make sense to the other owners.

On that deal, Gene appeared to do a masterful job of having a deadline that moved a couple of times and then became hard as he boarded a flight to Hawaii for the NFLPA meetings. With the ongoing revenue-sharing issue taking much of the attention of the owners at that meeting in Dallas, the deal with the NFLPA slid through without the necessary attention it needed. When I asked our president, Bob Harlan, about the meeting, he said the player side of things was barely discussed. Masterful, I thought, on the part of Upshaw.

NFL players do not receive the salaries or the guarantees of MLB or the NBA. That is undisputed. They also risk more bodily harm. However, there are far, far more of them than in those other two sports and they play a fraction of the games. There are arguments back and forth on this, but NFL players are paid as well as they have ever been due to Gene.

There will be plenty of intrigue about who will lead the union in this important time. Even with the knowledge of his grave disease, Gene had stoically promised that he would be that person. That bravado and presence, as everything about Gene, will be missed. Rest in peace, my friend.

[MickeyDavis]

Ed Garvey (former NFLPA president) said he was playing golf with Upshaw on Saturday. Upshaw had to drop out because of back pain. He went to the doctor and was diagnosed with cancer on Sunday. And three days later he died. Wow.

[LUKE23]

Yeah, I was just talking with my wife about this (she's a nurse), and she was shocked to hear how soon he died after being diagnosed, until she found out it was pancreatic cancer, which is supposedly one of the most deadly there is.

Sad day though. The guy had a ton of vision/leadership as both a player and union member. Hopefully the things he was trying to accomplish in the NFLPA do get passed.