So many football luminaries and media descended on Wednesday's hearing about the labor dispute that has hijacked the coming NFL season that the session had to be moved to a bigger room in St. Paul's federal courthouse.
The stakes were enormous. After all, the NFL is a gigantic business, garnering $9 billion a year in revenue, the attention of hundreds of millions of fans and apparel sales that have put Brett Favre jerseys on the backs of kids in China.
Most of the arguments advanced by attorneys representing the owners and players Wednesday were familiar, and U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson advised it would likely be about two weeks before she issued a ruling on the players request to end a lockout imposed by the owners last month. Also coming soon should be a decision by U.S. District Judge David Doty in Minneapolis on whether the owners can use $4 billion in television revenues to fund the lockout.
Nelson's ruling not only could decide the fate of the 2011 season, but also the financial and competitive fortunes of the league for years to come. No wonder all eyes in professional football were focused on the downtown St. Paul courtroom as the attorneys pleaded their cases.
James Quinn, representing the players, said the lockout is causing irreparable harm to the more than 1,000 players. "These players have no jobs, they have nowhere to go," he said.
But David Boies, an attorney for the NFL, argued that Nelson should not have jurisdiction in the case. "These kinds of matters ought to be settled at the collective bargaining table and not in a federal court," he said outside the courthouse after Wednesday's hearing.
Inside the courthouse, a dozen current, former and future players listened to the arguments; all had been ferried to the courthouse in a chartered luxury coach. Ben Leber, Carl Eller, Brian Robison, Vincent Jackson, Charlie Batch and Tony Richardson were some of the players past and present.
Lawyers, agents, league officials, ESPN reporters and other media not only filled the Edward Devitt courtroom, but spilled into a jury assembly room where they watched proceedings on closed circuit TV. After the hearing, nearly seven hours after it began, television cameras and reporters from local and national news media surrounded attorneys for the players, then the league, to get their interpretation of what had happened inside.