On October 15, 1987, the NFL Players Association called off its strike after 24 days. The walkout ended without a new contract and without the free agency the players had struck for, and it did not even end the replacement games: the owners ruled that returning players had missed their deadline, so one more weekend of games was played without them.
It remains the last time a labor fight cost the NFL regular-season games, and the last time a team took the field with strikebreakers.
How the strike started
The league’s labor agreement expired on August 31, 1987, and talks between union chief Gene Upshaw and Jack Donlan, the owners’ lead negotiator, stalled over free agency. Players at the time could change teams only under a compensation system that made signing another club’s player so costly that almost no one moved. The strike began just after midnight on September 22, minutes after the Jets and Patriots finished a Monday night game, five years after a 57-day walkout had cut the 1982 season to nine games.
This time the owners had a plan. On September 10 they had voted to field replacement teams if the players walked out. The league canceled the Week 3 games on September 27 and 28, then resumed on October 4 with rosters of replacement players, many of them preseason cuts or veterans of the folded USFL and the Montreal Alouettes, who had shut down that summer.
| Date (1987) | What happened |
|---|---|
| Aug. 31 | Labor agreement expires |
| Sept. 10 | Owners vote to use replacement teams in a strike |
| Sept. 22 | Strike begins after Jets-Patriots on Monday night |
| Sept. 27-28 | Week 3 games canceled; season cut from 16 games to 15 |
| Oct. 4-5 | Replacement games begin (Week 4) |
| Oct. 14 | More than 100 strikers cross in one day; owners’ deadline passes at 1 p.m. ET |
| Oct. 15 | Union ends the strike without a contract |
| Oct. 18-19 | Third and final weekend of replacement games (Week 6) |
| Oct. 25 | Regular players return in Week 7 |
Why the strike collapsed
The replacement games kept the owners’ television money coming in. Ratings fell by about a third in the first replacement weekend and attendance by more than two-thirds, but the networks kept paying, and the striking players had missed four paychecks by mid-October.
Support inside the union began to break. Some of the league’s biggest names crossed the picket line during the strike, among them Joe Montana, Steve Largent, Randy White, Howie Long, Doug Flutie and Mark Gastineau. On October 12 the union proposed sending the unresolved issues to mediation and arbitration, and the owners turned it down a day later. On October 14, more than 100 players reported to their teams in a single day, bringing the total to about 260, or roughly one in six union members.
On the morning of October 15, Upshaw tried to secure two last concessions: pay for players who reported that day, and a short extension of the old contract while talks went on. The owners refused both. Whole teams, among them the Colts, Redskins, Eagles, Jets and Seahawks, reported to work anyway, and the union ended the strike.
One more weekend of replacements
The owners had set a 1 p.m. ET deadline on Wednesday, October 14, for strikers to report and still play and be paid that week. The union’s decision came a day later, so returning players were sent home again for Week 6, and replacement players finished the job on October 18 and 19.
The last replacement game was played on Monday night, October 19, at Texas Stadium. Washington, which had no player cross the line during the strike, won 13-7 at Dallas against a Cowboys team that had several veterans who did. Washington’s replacements went 3-0, and the club went on to win Super Bowl XXII. The defending champion Giants went 0-3 in replacement games and missed the playoffs at 6-9.
The games counted in the standings, but many fans stayed away. The lone replacement game in Philadelphia drew 4,074 people.
What the players got
Not much, at first. The union went back without a labor agreement and took the fight to court instead, filing an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in Minneapolis that challenged the draft and the league’s limits on player movement. “We tried bargaining, now we’ll let the courts decide,” Upshaw said.
That route took years. In 1992, a federal jury in Minneapolis sided with running back Freeman McNeil and other players who had challenged the league’s restricted Plan B free agency system. The 1993 labor agreement that followed brought real free agency for veterans, paired with the salary cap that still shapes every roster today.
The NFL has had labor fights since, including the 2011 lockout, but none has cost a regular-season game. The current agreement, signed in 2020, runs through the 2030 season.
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