Mar 22, 2005 2 min read

KAPALUA, Hawaii (AP) – Talks to extend the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with players are “at a dead end,” commissioner Paul Tagliabue told team owners Monday. But in this case, the disagreement over how to earmark players’ money seems to be as much among the owners themselves as between the league and the NFL Players Association.

Tagliabue used the daunting term “dead end” in his state of the league speech to open the owners meetings, saying he might call a special meeting April 19 to resolve the impasse.

Tagliabue would not concede that internal squabbles have stalled talks. But it was evident from owners that the simmering contention between high-revenue and low-revenue teams has contributed as much to the impasse as a division between the union and the league.

“The union is asking for a lot of money,” said Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the have-not teams. “We can’t get to that because of where we are among ourselves.”

There appear to be two basic issues – one between the union and the league, the other among the owners themselves.

Players currently get 64 percent of the money that comes from television, ticket prices and other basic revenues. The union wants to keep that percentage, but with the pool expanded to include money from local revenues, such as the Dallas Cowboys’ marketing deal with Pepsi.

The league wants to cut that percentage to reflect debt service on new stadiums, which Tagliabue says is as much as 4 or 5 percent of a total revenue figure he estimated could go to $600 billion after the full new television deal is completed.

The squabble among the owners involves how much the high-revenue teams with new stadiums or other sources of money – Washington, Dallas, Houston, New England and Philadelphia among them – put into that pool.

“We have to be open-minded about that,” said Stephen Jones, Jerry Jones’ son and the chief operating officer of the Cowboys.