Dean Blandino

Thanks for having me.

Always good to catch up and talk a little rules and conspiracy and everything else that people want to chat about.

Sure.

So the NFL, it's called the NFLRA, the NFL Referees Association.

Just like the players have the Players Association, the officials have their own association.

They negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the league.

That bargaining agreement expires on May 31st coming up.

And so they're in the process of negotiating.

And look, it comes down to, just like any other negotiation, a lot of it's around money, how much these officials are paid, the game fees, the access to the game officials, other things like marketing fees, their retirement.

All of those things are part of this.

We all...

You know, if you're around and you remember the replacement refs from 2012 and how that went, I don't think anybody wants to see that.

So hopefully they can get a deal done.

We still got some time.

You know, obviously we're not going to be playing games for a couple of months.

So right now they're negotiating.

I think the last thing I read was a couple of the owners got involved and they made some progress.

So I hope that they can get a deal done before we start playing games.

I think from the referee's perspective, they look at the NFL and they say, look, the NFL is the most popular.

It's the most valuable.