Will Bitter Feelings Loom Post NFL Lockout?

With the 2011 NFL season just about ready to kick off, fans and players are excited that football won’t be placed at the wayside thanks to the NFL lockout.  For many, the NFL lockout lasted too long, and there were some feelings hurt as a result of it.  The players are sure to feel slighted by the owners, even though they ended up getting a lot of what they wanted in the new deal  The owners may still be wary of the players, especially after what happened with the player’s union decertifying to play “hardball.”

The new collective bargaining agreement is a 10-year agreement, so the two sides will have to live with what they have agreed upon for a long time.  The length of the agreement will allow there to be labor peace for a long time in the league and for fans that is exactly what they want.  No one wants to go through what we went through the last few months with the lockout, and both sides made sure that it would be a long time before this happened again.

But now that all of the dust is settled, it’s time for what typically happens after these things to start: for the hard feelings to begin and be aired out in public.  Both sides seemed very happy and satisfied when the agreement was complete, but you can expect any hard feelings that were generated by the negotiations to be rekindled as time goes on and the media starts to dig in about what feelings were felt during and after the negotiations.

And they will make them public.

This could complicate the relationships that players have with their clubs.

We have already seen the kind of damage that players talking about the leadership of the NFL can have.  We still wait to see just what will happen with Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison.  Just before the lockout came to an end, Harrison had some harsh words for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as well as a couple of his teammates.  Granted, this wasn’t directed at the NFL lockout, but it shows us just what kinds of things players are willing to say about others.

So, when will the hard feelings start?  Have they already started?  Do the players feel slighted by what the owners gained?  Do the owners feel that the players got too much in the new deal?

If there are hard feelings, then you can expect them to leak out sometime in the near future—perhaps just after the season starts.  And what will these hard feelings do to the player or players involved?  What will these feelings do to management?  It could easily create a sense of distrust among both the players and the owners, and things could be said (similar to what Harrison said) that both sides eventually regret.

So, we can expect to hear something out of all of this soon, and it will be interesting to hear the comments made by both sides of the debate.  You can expect both sides to say that the other side got the better end of the deal.  Just how they say it will be the interesting part.

Stay tuned because things are surely about to get much more interesting in the NFL.