On Tuesday, a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought forth by a group of retired players concerning the benefits they received from the National Football League's new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The lawsuit, which had the name of former Minnesota Vikings' great Carl Eller on it as the lead plaintiff, stated that the National Football League and the NFLPA had no right to negotiate benefits for retired players, due to the fact that the NFLPA wasn't really a union last off-season.
According to the story from Yahoo! Sports,
Nelson wrote that she accepted the factual allegations by the Eller class as true but disagreed that the current players acted illegally. She ruled that since the active players were negotiating their own contract with the league, they had no obligation to take ''a smaller share of the pie for themselves'' in order to give the retirees a bigger slice.
The former players claimed the current players owed them a ''fiduciary duty,'' but Nelson denied the legal existence of such a relationship.
''And there can be no dispute that a better package of benefits was in fact obtained for the retired players in the 2011 CBA as compared to those in the former CBA. No jury could reasonably find that the active players did not do better by the retired players in the 2011 CBA,'' Nelson wrote.
Basically, retired players are entitled to the retirement benefits they negotiated when they were players, and anything beyond that should basically be considered a gift from the NFL and the NFLPA.
Michael Hausfield, the lead lawyer for the retired players, says that he does plan to appeal the lawsuit to the next higher level.