Stephen A. Smith: Now is the time for NFL players to assert their rights

If you are an owner in the National Football League and spiritually inclined to live life in pursuit of heaven, chances are you're simply wasting your time. Mainly because you're already living in bliss.

You own a team in a league garnering in excess of $20 billion in television deals. You're a partner in a business that generates $8.5 billion annually, according to the players' union. A nation will patronize your product, no matter what. Your game is essentially America's pastime, even while you dishonor the spirit of contracts you've collectively bargained. While you're marketing the NFL brand like there's no tomorrow, you're relegating players to puppet status and doing so unapologetically.

All the while, the fans applaud, of course.

They do need their football, after all.

Just ask the Eagles' owner, Jeffrey Lurie. He'll tell you. And if he's not willing to, there's always a Jeremiah Trotter, Jon Runyan, or Brian Westbrook to verify what life is really like for NFL players, year after year.

The guaranteed contract is really only a partial guarantee. Players rarely get to restructure their deals, but teams get to do so all the time.

And in the event restructuring is not a desired option for players, they can always choose to be waived and released, mired in the wilderness wondering where they'll land - if anywhere - while their former coaches provide faint praise.

"I'll put it to you this way, I was kind of surprised by what happened to me," Westbrook told me Thursday. "I knew there was a possibility I may not be coming back. But, in my heart, I honestly thought [the Eagles] were going to come to me and ask me to restructure my deal, to pay me less. I was kind of shocked they just let me go."

Westbrook was a fool - his words, not mine. But if there's consolation, it should come in the company of numerous baffled players whose ignorance seems to live in perpetuity.

While it's easy to label owners as greedy, it's just as easy to blame the players for providing an opening for their employers' gluttonous ways.

It was the players, after all, who allowed the owners and the league to collectively bargain their way out of a deal two years before it expired. The players' union, under the late Gene Upshaw, was indeed what ultimately placed Mr. Disciplinarian, commissioner Roger Goodell, in position to be the league's modern-day RoboCop.

Dances are not allowed in the end zones. Helmets are not allowed to be removed. They're told what footwear to wear and what they can print on it.

If they're confused as to whether Goodell is the commissioner or the U.S. attorney general, who can blame them?

Now, with Goodell and DeMaurice Smith, Upshaw's successor as executive director of the NFL Players' Association, having met on Thursday for two hours to discuss a new agreement, all we're hearing is that talks are ongoing. But what kind of talks can they be?

"It could be significant," one notable NFL agent told me. "But that's only if the players collectively have the guts to stand up and fight for stuff that's flagrantly wrong. And there's always a question as to whether or not they're legitimately capable of doing that. Considering what's at stake, they'd be stupid not to be."

Just the other day I was reading a Q&A fact sheet on the complex topic of the NFL's collective bargaining agreement and I came across something even more alarming concerning the 2010 season and how it could be a year without a salary cap:

The union agreed that in the final league year (next season), the 32 teams would be relieved of their obligation to fund numerous benefit programs.

Translation: Gone - 401(k) plans, player annuity, severance pay, performance-based pay.

League-wide contributions to such programs were in excess of $10 million per club last season. Now the NFL is about to wave bye-bye to all of that.

Still, the owners are the ones who asked out of this deal, not the players.

Does anyone see something wrong with this picture?

Chances are, the public doesn't. Either because it doesn't understand or because it doesn't care to or both. The thing is, it's incumbent upon the players to make the public understand, for once.

When owners are lamenting surrendering 59.5 percent of revenue for player salaries, the players must emphasize the difference between defined (allocated) revenue - where their share comes from - and total revenue. The players have got to tell the public an uncapped season means owners can give them pennies if they want.

Smith is supposed to be the real deal - the man with connections in the nation's capital, capable of fending off an onslaught from 32 owners. But the odds don't look good right now.

Can't you tell, every time you see Lurie smiling?