The NFL wanted to get the new Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NFLPA taken care of prior to the start of the 2019 season, because they didn’t want it to become a distraction from their plans to commemorate and celebrate the league’s 100th anniversary.
That soft deadline came and went. The next one set up was the Super Bowl. While there is still time for that, it doesn’t appear likely that the negotiations toward a deal are at the stage where it could reach completion in time for two weeks from now.
The final ‘soft’ deadline being set is for the start of the new league year, and that’s significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which the number of ramifications that it has in terms of the salary cap and the tools that teams will have available to them in the final seasons of a CBA agreement.