NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith have been meeting on and off over the past year to bang out a new collective bargaining agreement so that there can be football played in 2011.
The problem is that both sides seem to be playing to the media in order to win the PR battle we've seen brewing over the last year. It seems, on the surface, that very little actual negotiating is getting done.
The Commissioner visited the Redskins on Thursday to discuss the labor situation and DeAngelo Hall walked away less than impressed.
"He's walking around kissing babies, you know, shaking hands, and he just wants to say that the owners are over here, the players are over here and I'm in the middle, I'm for the game," top cornerback DeAngelo Hall said. "But to ask him a question about anything, he couldn't answer. He couldn't answer this, go check with this, go ask these people, I don't really know. It was a waste of time."
Redskins linebacker London Fletcher expressed similar concerns about Goodell's evasiveness on certain topics and his unwillingness to answer all of their questions.
A cynic might wonder if Smith, whose office is less than an hour from where Goodell met the Redskins, might have said something to the players to stir the pot.
Either way, there's a lot of talk and very little action from both sides on this one.