Now that the Super Bowl is done, the NFL’s real battle can take center stage.

The league’s collective bargaining agreement still has two years to run, but Gene Upshaw, the Executive Director of the NFL Players Association, is already threatening to decertify his union if league owners and NFL players fail to come up with a new agreement (CBA) by March 9. Why? If there is no union, labor laws would not apply, meaning NFL owners could not impose a new set of rules on the players, could not institute a lock out, and, most important, could not prevent games from being played.

The current contract expires after the 2007 season, but it calls for an uncapped year in 2007. Without a new CBA, negotiations on individual contracts in the free-agent period that begins March 3 will be much more difficult for teams and players.

“The price of poker will go up,” Upshaw told the Associated Press at the union’s Super Bowl news conference. “We can not stay in the place where we are now.”

Upshaw’s remarks, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. He very much wants to extend the present CBA and take about 64% of the NFL’s defined gross revenue for players’ salaries. In the old world order of the NFL, he and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue would have wrapped up an extension by now. But both are caught in a changing NFL universe. There are five owners who don’t want to agree to an increased sharing of local revenues with the other 27 teams, and Tagliabue, who has delayed his retirement in part to get the labor problems settled, has to be concerned that he won’t be successful.

Upshaw and Tagliabue carved out the current CBA in 1993 under pressure from U.S. District Court Judge David Doty, who was presiding over the free agency litigation in the Marvin Powell vs. NFL IV trial. The agreement ended decades of court battles between the two sides – and therein lies the problem.

Many of today’s NFL owners came into the game after the 1993 agreement was signed and have no real understanding of the 1974 strike, the various suits the players filed against the owners in subsequent years, the 1982 strike, or the disastrous 1987 strike.

The union decertified – which involves disbanding and going to antitrust court to ask for a set of rules under which the NFL would operate – to end the 1987 strike and played without a contract until 1992, when the court ruled in its favor – leading to the current deal. That deal included free agency for the first time, as well as the salary cap, which took effect in 1993.

But since 1993, Tagliabue’s “inner circle,” which included then-Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney, San Francisco’s Carmen Policy, and the Giants’ Wellington Mara has dissolved. There has been an enormous turnover in owners since Judge Doty forced the owners and the union to come up with an agreement.

The odds are pretty good that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, along with his partners – Washington’s Daniel Snyder, Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Lurie, and Houston’s Robert Mc Nair – really don’t know much about the decades of litigation. Those four owners, all of whom joined the NFL after 1993, have decided to go against the NFL’s “LeagueThink” policy because they don’t want to share every local revenue stream with their fellow owners. Joining them is Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who was in the league in 1993,but has always felt his duty is to sell the Cowboys’ logo first and the NFL’s logo second.

Money, of course, is the primary reason that Kraft, Snyder, Lurie, and Mc Nair remain unwilling to share with the other kids at the playground. Kraft paid a reported $175 million for the Patriots in 1994, which at the time was the highest price for any franchise. Kraft then borrowed money to build a new stadium, and while he did sell naming rights and keeps all the revenue streams from the new football facility, he still needs to pay bills.

In 1998, Snyder and his group spent over $800 million to buy the Redskins and Jack Kent Cooke Stadium. They then sold the naming rights to the place and expanded the facility to more than 91,000 seats, but again, bills are due and Snyder is using local revenues to pay down the debt.

Jeffrey Lurie bought the Eagles for a reported $185 million in 1994. Lurie has also put $300 million into the team’s new stadium in south Philadelphia. That is an enormous debt to pay off, hence Lurie’s need to keep local revenues. Kraft, Jones, and Lurie are using NFL G-3 money, loans from other clubs to use to pay off the debts on their stadiums.

Those three owners are against increased local revenue sharing yet are taking loans from other NFL owners.

NFL teams share in the $24 billion TV deal reached last year with CBS, NBC, FOX, ESPN and DirecTV along with corporate sponsorship. But there seems never to be enough money for the owners. Franchise costs have skyrocketed since the 1993 labor accord. Still, Forbes magazine claims that both the Cowboys and Redskins – two of the league’s signature major-market franchises – are worth more than a billion dollars.

Upshaw’s players have also prospered since the 1993 labor agreement.

Of course, star players could command far more money if there was no salary cap, and Upshaw has said that if the owners can’t get their house in order very soon, a capless 2007 could lead to the end of the salary cap altogether.

Of course, NHL players said the same thing during their negotiations in the 2004-05 NHL owners lockout, and eventually gave into NHL owners salary cap demands. Some of the high-revenue owners, like Dallas’s Jones, have suggested they could live with a different system. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we didn’t have a salary cap,” Jones said last fall.

But most owners will do all they can to maintain the salary cap, which is why Upshaw wants a CBA extension now. Upshaw and his association and Tagliabue and his owners have enjoyed a decent relationship since 1993, which bodes well for talks between the two sides. Unfortunately for Upshaw and the players, the owners need to settle their differences before any headway can be made.

“They are going to have to decide how to spend their money if they’re going to reach agreement among themselves,” he told the AP.

At some point, possibly at the spring owners meetings beginning March 25, someone will have to remind the owners that there are billions of dollars on the line and that a modified revenue sharing plan is better than losing salary cap protection. With the possible exception of Jones, they’re likely to listen, and Upshaw knows it. At the Super Bowl conference, he quoted Denver owner Pat Bowlen as saying: “If we can’t reach agreement, we should all be shot.”

Information from the Associated Press was used in this article.