At the beginning of the league meetings on Sunday, league sources stated that NFL owners are “alarmed” by the status of negotiations with the NFL Referees Association and have given staff members permission to start recruiting and onboarding replacement referees in the upcoming weeks.
Owners are anticipated to adopt a comprehensive set of replay improvements this week to enable replacement officials in preseason and regular-season games. The NFL started creating a list of college-level officials to recruit earlier this month. According to a league source, the new substitute officials’ training will start on May 1.
An ESPN insider claims that after that:
“The opportunity to reach an agreement with our current union becomes a bigger challenge, just from simple economics.”
This essentially gives the parties a month to fill in the many gaps in their ideas, from economics to the job’s seasonal structure, according to league sources.
NFLRA executive director Scott Green criticized league sources in a statement to several media sites for disseminating “false and misleading information.”
On May 31, the NFL and NFLRA’s collective bargaining agreement expires. Each club received a memo from the league last week that forbade public comment on the matter. However, insiders presented a bleak picture of the possibility of an agreement before new officials are hired as owners, league officials, and team employees convened this weekend at the Arizona Biltmore resort.
