The NFL and its players' union acknowledged Thursday they have not held a large-group negotiating session since November -- and there are no formal meetings scheduled to work toward a new collective bargaining agreement. Thursday marked seven weeks until the current CBA is set to expire, and while the private talks are seemingly at a standstill, the public rhetoric is not. "The negotiations are not proceeding very vigorously. No one's booking dates right now," Bob Batterman, an outside lawyer for the league, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. "You need a serious negotiating partner to have a negotiation," added Batterman, a lawyer for the NHL when it lost its entire 2004-05 season to a lockout. "And what we've been getting back in terms of responses are not conducive to making a deal." Batterman said the union's "strategy is not to expedite this, but to slow it down, so that they can file an antitrust lawsuit." That echoed his comments to The Washington Post a day earlier, when Batterman said: "This is a union waiting for a lockout to occur." In response to that story, the union arranged a conference call for media on Thursday, and its general counsel, Richard Berthelsen, said: "Any suggestion that we want a lockout is coming from outer space." "I can tell you one thing, being involved as long as I have been: The word 'lockout' was never even in the NFL's vocabulary until Mr. Batterman came aboard, and after he came aboard, the continuing theme has been 'lockout' from the owners' side of the table," Berthelsen said. "The continuing theme from our side of the table is that the players want to play. Union spokesman George Atallah, meanwhile, referred to the NFL's "desperate attempt to point the finger back at us." The union long has said it believes the owners have been preparing for a lockout. "Players want to play. So we're not doing anything until we're locked out by the owners. Everything we would have to do would be because owners put us in a situation to have to react," Indianapolis Colts center Jeff Saturday, a member of the union's executive committee, said on the conference call. "We are waiting on the owners." Source: Associated Press
