DeMaurice Smith Responds To Pash Accusations

Yesterday, in our interview with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and lead negotiator Jeff Pash, Pash accused the players union of only wanting to discuss money and refusing to engage on a host of other issues facing the NFL. Today, former NFLPA head (and current basically) DeMaurice Smith, joined SBNation NFL bloggers to respond.

Jeff only has a casual relationship with the truth. Jeff knows that the NFL's deal was an all-or-nothing deal. They did not present an a la carte menu to the players of the NFL. They didn't sit down with us and say, 'Why don't you select the things you like, reject the things you don't, and let's move forward.' Jeff knows that their deal was inextricably tied to every point on the deal. Put it this way: if a deal that's being put to you is mutually contingent on all 16 parts, do you have the option of saying 'I like and we accept issues 8-16, but we don't like issues 1-7,' do you have a deal at that point? I'm very careful about language: do you have a deal if you don't like half the points that have been presented to you? You don't. It's not even probably, you don't. The first point of the NFL deal would have been us to accept their economic proposal at the same time we would have to accept everything else. Does that make sense?

Of course, our take on the accusations was basically, "no kidding." The money is the root of the deal and if you don't have a deal on that then you really don't have a deal on anything. I think that's more or less what Smith is getting at here.

This is just a snippet of what he said this morning. He got very in depth picking apart the owners offer and I'll present that case a little later this afternoon.