Court Mulls N.F.L. Bid for a Full Stay

N.F.L. owners and players remained in a holding pattern Monday, as a federal appeals court considered the league’s request for a full stay of the injunction that lifted the seven-week-old lockout last week. The lockout went back in place Friday night, when the appeals court granted the league a temporary stay, buying the three-judge panel more time to consider arguments by both sides.

The decision of the Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis, expected early this week, will largely determine what the off-season looks like. If the court grants the delay, the N.F.L. will remain shut down — no player signings, no trades, no minicamps — until the same appeals court decides the league’s appeal of the injunction, a process that could stretch well into June and possibly into July.

If no stay is granted, the N.F.L. will be forced to open its doors to players and likely to finally open free agency, a move it successfully resisted last week, to the dismay of players. When the stay is decided, the appeals court is also likely to announce the date of the hearing for the appeal.

Whichever side loses on the stay request before the three-judge panel will have the option of appealing it to the full appeals court of 11 active judges. That could slow the process further. The chief judge of the Eighth Circuit, William Jay Riley, would determine how quickly the full panel would consider it.

On Monday, the N.F.L. filed its reply in support of the motion to stay pending appeal and for an expedited appeal. The league again argued that the Norris-La Guardia Act prohibited federal courts from issuing injunctions in cases that spring from labor disputes, that the decertification of the players’ association should not be valid, and that the National Labor Relations Board should first have jurisdiction to decide that question. United States District Judge Susan Richard Nelson rejected those arguments in her ruling last week.

The N.F.L. also argued that it would suffer irreparable harm if a stay was not granted because its labor-law rights would be undercut and by “irreversibly scrambling the eggs of player-club transactions.” The N.F.L. was referring to the troubles it expects if it is forced to begin free agency, only to then potentially have to stop it again if it wins the appeal later this summer.

The N.F.L. also raised the question of whether Nelson should have held an evidentiary hearing on, among other issues, whether the decertification was a sham, as owners contend.

In its reply, the N.F.L. also used public comments and actions by players against them. It said that the plaintiffs Vincent Jackson and Logan Mankins had not worked out in previous years with their teams or that they had held out for protracted periods. The league said this undercut the players’ argument that they were being irreparably harmed by an off-season lockout.

The league also cited public comments by Ray Lewis and Wes Welker, who seemed to support an off-season of no work, and of other players who, the league contended, made comments that suggest the players’ association is still acting like a union even after decertification.

In a letter to the court Monday, the players argued against the league’s contention that the players’ request for the preliminary injunction was supported only by “conclusory opinions.” And it reiterated the contention that the league cannot establish that it is being irreparably harmed by an injunction.


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