This is getting more suspicious by the week, the NFL and NFLPA both know they fucked, now the other team owners are getting hot under the collar and are starting to crack. This is only going to get more interesting as we approach the NFL draft.


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Posted by Mike Florio on April 2, 2012, 7:48 PM EDT

Included in Daniel Kaplan’s item on the salary cap totals from Monday’s SportsBusiness Journal was an intriguing assertion from Texans owner Bob McNair.

As to the widely-reported notion that the 2012 salary cap was bumped to $120.6 million per team in exchange for the NFLPA’s agreement to permit a total of $46 million to be stripped from the Cowboys and Redskins in 2012 and 2013 cap space, McNair contends there was no “quid pro quo.” Instead, McNair claims that the union was guaranteed to receive $142.4 million per team in salary and benefits, and that the union adjusted 2012 benefits in order to nudge the per-team spending limit to $120.6 million.


If that’s true, then why did the NFLPA agree to the cap penalties? If the union got nothing in return for agreeing to permit $46 million to be taken from teams that tend to spend all of it and redistributed to teams that may not even spend all the space space they already have for 2012, then why did the union agree to it?


Surely, the union got something. Any suggestion otherwise by McNair or anyone else connected to the league creates the impression that the NFLPA did something that undermines the interests of its constituents, with no benefit in return.