The date that loomed large in the hearts of American sports fans came in like a lion and out like a lamb last Friday as the original midnight March 3 deadline for the expiration of the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and consequential lockout passed.

As the clock on negotiations ticked dangerously close to midnight, the national media assumed a lockout to be a forgone conclusion. To most it was not a question of whether the two irreconcilably distant sides, the NFL owners versus the players, would reach an agreement by the March 3 deadline, but how long the impending labor stoppage would last and whether the 2011 season would be in jeopardy.

Enter George H. Cohen, the Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services (FMCS). Appointed in 2009 by President Obama and unanimously approved by the US Senate, Mr. Cohen announced on Feb. 17 that representatives of both the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and league owners would meet for a series of mediations with him in Washington D.C. beginning Feb. 18. Talks resumed again last week at the doorstep of the initial deadline.

Cohen just last year helped negotiate the deal that kept Major League Soccer from disintegrating into labor strife.

“I don’t know that we would have gotten a deal done without his help and his very calming demeanor,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said in a conversation with Sport’s Illustrated’s Peter King about his experience with Cohen and the FMCS.

George Cohen works by breaking the two warring factions down into smaller discussion groups and occasionally bringing them back together in one room to deliberate. While a federal mediator has no authority to make a ruling one way or another, he may act as counselor and make recommendations from a position of objective authority. More than anything, Cohen under these circumstances encourages hospitality and constructive negotiations.

“A mediator can’t do the deal,” Garber said in his conversation with King. “But judging by our experience, he can get people to move off very solid ideological points to the center.”

Considering the two sides have been at complete odds for the better of two years, it is hard to not read the extension as a good sign that the players and the owners are as close as they have ever been throughout the entire negotiation process. For the first time since the owner opted out of the current CBA in 2008, fans have a reason to be cautiously optimistic. However, if a deal is not struck, this could make the consequences even worse.

The hopes of football fans remain under tightly locked doors with Cohen, a lawyer.
“He’ll cut through the defensiveness and surface rhetoric to get to the bottom line,” sports agent and attorney Leigh Steinberg said. “Skilled mediators have the ability to paint a picture and look into the future, to sketch like in A Christmas Carol the ghosts of conflicts–past, present and future.”

Football is such an engrained aspect of American culture that even the thought of a fall without the usual Sunday routine seems simply inconceivable. Where the NBA runs for 82 games in a season and MLB’s schedule is even longer at 162, there are only 16 precious games each year in the NFL, making every game an event. Schedules are planned around games, and become absorbed into our weekly routine.

According to the FMCS, 85 percent of all contract disputes mediated by the agency in recent years have ended with agreements. Considering how irreconcilable the two sides seemed at the beginning of March, fans can only hope their chances are good, and now as heads turn to the new deadline of March 10, all eyes will be on Cohen as the nation crosses its fingers and hopes that he can once again work some of his mediating magic.