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Despite reports that the Vikings have found a trade partner for quarterback Daunte Culpepper, we're told that the team has multiple options.

A deal, as reported elsewhere and as we've confirmed, will be struck within the next 24 hours, and the transaction will be consummated after 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, because trades can't be made until the next league year starts.

As to his health, we're told that he actually is on track to play in 2006, and that he'll be ready for training camp.

Said one league source: "G.M.’s should be standing in line to get this guy and the smart ones are."

Stay tuned. Our guess (and it's only a guess) is that it'll be the Rams, and we predict that current starter Marc Bulger will be part of the package that gets sent to the Vikings.

Chris Mortensen of ESPN reports that Commissioner Paul Tagliabue is thinking about invoking a clause in his contract that permits him to step down as the NFL poobah and assume a consulting role for the remainder of his tenure.

Tagliabue is signed through May 2008. He could decide within 60 days to make the move, Mortensen reports.

Though there's no information as to Tagliabue's specific motivation, our guess is that it's combination of the fact that he's now firmly into his lame duck phase -- and the possibility that he's disenchanted with his 32 bosses in light of the lengths to which he had to go to persuade them to work out their differences regarding revenue sharing.

Sure, they came around in the end. But the process was surely exhausting for Tagliabue, and it could be that he's had enough.

Mortensen says that the leading candidate to replace Tagliabue is NFL Chief Operating Officer Roger Goodell. Other names we've heard in the past are NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw and Falcons G.M. Rich McKay.

Secretary of State Condolleezza Rice previously has made known her interest in the job, but the first rule of politics is to never speak publicly about one's aspirations.

Then again, how else does a black woman otherwise get the attention of the league's owners -- without, of course, having her boob flop out during halftime of the Super Bowl?

A league source tells us that the new CBA alters the rule regarding post-June 1 cuts in a manner that helps veteran players.

Under the new CBA, cuts made after June 1 will still result in the cap hit being spread over two seasons. However, each team will be permitted to release up to two players per year before June 1 and their release ultimately will be ultimately processed as a post-June 1 transaction.

This will allow some veteran players to hit the market in March, when far more money is available for free agents.

However, a team using this device still will carry the player's salary under its total cap number until June 1.

We suggested earlier today that the increase in minimum salaries means that the cap charge for signing a vested veteran to a one-year minimum-salary deal will be $500,000, given that the minimum for players in their fourth year has been bumped from $460,000 to $500,000. Ever since this device was adopted as part of the 2002 CBA extension, the cap hit for a vested veteran on a one-year deal always had been equal to the four-year minimum salary.

But we're now told that, in order to encourage more teams to sign veterans who otherwise might get nudged aside in lieu of younger players, the cap charge for signing a veteran to a minimum-salary deal will be only $425,000.

Also, the new CBA increases the maximum signing bonus for such players from $25,000 to $40,000.

Under the new CBA, the transition tag will have little or no value for the teams that use it. Why? Because the new CBA contains a provision making the transition tender fully guaranteed, if the player accepts it.

In the past, only the franchise tender became guaranteed if accepted. The transition tender could be revoked at any time, and the player had no guarantees at all while under the transition tag -- unless he had been the team's franchise player in the previous season.

Under the new deal, it makes no sense to use the transition tag and not the franchise tag, since for most positions the difference between the two numbers isn't very significant. For franchise players, the tender is based on the average salary of the five highest paid players at the position. For transition players, the tender is based on the average of the top ten.

Because teams using the transition tag acquire only a right of first refusal and no right to compensation if they choose not to match, look for fewer and fewer transition tags to be used in the future.

Writes Glazer: "Culpepper has infuriated people inside the Vikings organization by making his gripes public and refusing to mesh with new coach Brad Childress."

The tipping point for the team was Culpepper's e-mail from Wednesday. If they can't trade him before a $6 million roster bonus comes due later this month, the team plans to ask him to defer the bonus so that efforts to strike a deal can continue.

As we reported on Wednesday, cutting or trading Culpepper will create an additional $2.3 million in net cap space, pushing the team's available cap room well over $30 million.

Culpepper was the team's first-round draft pick 1999, selected with a choice obtained from the Redskins as part of the Brad Johnson trade. As a rookie, Culpepper was No. 3 on the chart behind Randall Cunningham and Jeff George, and Culpepper took over the starting job in 2000 after Dan Marino rebuffed coach Dennis Green's overtures.

As a first-year starter, Culpepper surprisingly led the team to the NFC title game, where they lost to the Giants, 41-0.

The wheels came off of the franchise after that, with the retirement of running back Robert Smith and the death of right tackle Korey Stringer. The Vikings returned to the postseason four long years later, after Culpepper authored a campaign for which, but for Peyton Manning's unprecedented exploits, Culpepper would have won the MVP award.

A year ago, the Vikings opted to trade receiver Randy Moss so that Culpepper efforts to lead the team would no longer be diluted. It initially seemed like a good move. But then at some point in the past twelve months Culpepper decided to become a bigger turd than Moss ever was.

Now, Culpepper recovers from a serious knee injury with no agent and no team. He has a grossly overestimated assessment of his own value, and there's no way that anyone is going to give him a significant payday until he can show that he is of sound body.

There's a new CBA and free agency launches on Saturday at 12:01 a.m. The problem, however, is that agents have received no information from the union as to any new or revised rules that affect individual player contract negotiations.

The full CBA won't be ready any time soon. As NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told us on Thursday, "It will take months for the lawyers to write it all up."

Aiello said that, in the interim, the 32 clubs will be informed of all specific rules relevant to the process of signing players.

Meanwhile, the agents for the players are in the dark. And a big part of the problem is that much of the union's leadership is in Hawaii for an annual "meeting" with player reps.

Said another: "This is typical BS as to how the PA treats agents like stepchildren. Don't they realize we work for the players?"

We're also trying to get our mitts on the new rules that will apply pursuant to the new CBA, and it's amazing to us that the NFLPA didn't have a mass e-mail ready to go, in the event that its final proposal to ownership was accepted.

Per a league source, the new minimum for a first-year player is $275,000. For a second-year player, it's $350,000. For a third-year player, it's $425,000. For a fourth-year player, it's $500,000. For a player in years five through seven, it's $585,000. In years eight through ten, it's $710,000. In years eleven and beyond, it's $810,000.

This also means that the one-year veteran minimum deals for players with four or more years of service will cost $500,000 against the cap in 2006, assuming that the new CBA retains the device that calls for a separate fund to pay the player the difference between the four-year minimum and the minimum for six years and beyond.

There's talk in league circles that the $7.5 million per-team bump in the 2006 salary cap ultimately won't work to the benefit of all pending free agents. Instead, the guys expected to see the market for their services rise are the stars. And only the starts.

We hear that, over the past few days, agents have shut down talks regarding mid-level free agents in the hopes that a new CBA will translate to more jack for the average Joes. Per a league source, one front-office type has responded to this line of thinking as follows:

The source says that many teams believe that regular guys are not worth any more under the new CBA than they were before it, and any agents who think that they will "juice" teams for more money under the new deal are “delusional."

The danger is that agents representing middle-of-the-pack guys or former superstars on the wrong side of 30 might price their clients out of the market by asking for too much money.

So the newfound cap money will be spent. The problem is that the bulk of it will go to the guys who currently are at the top of the spot.

A league source tells us that some teams already are approaching agents regarding the possibility of re-doing contracts that were done over the past week or so in order to permit teams to get under the prior salary cap of $94.53 million.

Said the source in an e-mail message: "We have not been told directly by anyone that the deals done prior to the new CBA are null/void, but some of the teams sure are treating them like they have been voided."

The glitch in this regard is the rule that prohibits teams from entering into multiple new contracts with a player in the same year. Technically, a second contract is permitted only if the player is going to get the same or less money. In order to give the guy a raise, the team has to wait at least twelve months since the last renegotiation, according Article XXIV, Section 9(a) of the prior CBA.

So if it's merely a matter of converting to a signing bonus a salary and/or roster bonus that was the high side, another restructuring can be done. The value to the team through such a maneuver is that it reduces the player's cap number for 2006, spreading more money into future years.

For guys like Shaun Alexander, however, he can't get more money in light of the new CBA. Instead, he can get more of it now, with (for example) his 2006 salary of $1.612 million reduced to the league minimum, and the difference given to him right now.

Well, if we were crazy to mention the possibility of the NFL fracturing after the former CBA expired following the 2007 season, then Raiders owner Al Davis is crazy, too.

Okay, so some of your might think that Al isn't the best person for us to look to in order to confirm our own sanity. But the guy is still sharp, and he has a wealth of experience in ownership that few other NFL owners possess.

And Davis realized that if the owners couldn't get together now on a new deal with the union and, more importantly, a new plan for sharing unshared revenue, they might not ever be able to do so.

Davis said on Wednesday night that he envisioned the possibility of some teams eventually leaving the NFL and starting their own league that would compete with it.

"There would have been anarchy. I came [to the owners' meeting] because I wanted labor peace. They don't particularly love me, because I'm going to go my own way and do what I think is right. I've fought them. But I also love the league and what's best for football, for the players and the owners.

"This needed to get done."

Amen, Al.

The fundamental point was whether at least 24 of the 32 owners were willing and able to reach a compromise on the core question of how they're going to do business. If they couldn't have done it now, there's no reason to think that they could have done it later. And if they could never have done it, there's no point being in business together.

NEW DEAL GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS FOR T.O.

The recent three-way labor strife between the NFL, its owners, and the players' union nudged the status of receiver Terrell Owens from the front burner of media consciousness. Now that a deal is done, we see it as both a positive and a negative for T.O.

On the bright side, any team interested in his services will have $7.5 million in additional 2006 cap money to use in order to sign him.

On the other hand, the displacement of the onerous rules of the last capped year under the old agreement will make it easier for teams to use incentives and other creative devices to ensure that the maximum performance will be coaxed out of him in his first year with his new team.

Under the old system, all incentives would have hit the cap in 2006 at the moment they were earned, forcing a team to either hold back cap space or to be prepared to cut players once the incentives were reached. Now, any "not likely to be earned" incentives will get pushed into 2007, if achieved in 2006.

The end result likely will be less money in hand for Owens, but more money dangling in front of him, like a gleaming carrot on a string luring the jackass forward.

(In comparing Owens to a jackass, we mean no offense. To jackasses.)

This approach will give the team that signs him protection against a reprise of the extreme and deliberate turdishness that prompted his divorce from the Eagles. But, in our view, forcing Owens to earn his money might not be the best way to get him to perform. The better course is to ensure that Owens genuinely believes he's being fairly and adequately paid. If he's happy with his money, he'll play more like the guy who was a shot of cattle steroids for an otherwise mediocre Eagles passing game upon his arrival in 2004 -- and less like the guy who helped wreck the team's chances in 2005.

As to the Eagles, we predict that team president Joe Banner has at least toyed with the possibility of using that $7.5 million salary cap bump to pay the bonus money due to T.O. later this month in order to force Owens to honor his contract.

Coincidentally, the money owed to Owens within the first 15 days after the start of the 2006 league year is, you guessed it, $7.5 million.

In the end, however, there's no way they'll keep him. If the team learned anything in 2005, it's that sometimes principle must yield to other objectives, such as creating an environment that permits you to win more games than you lose.

DO TEAMS, AGENTS HAVE ENOUGH TIME?

One of the questions we're hearing from several of our sources is whether the short period of time between the agreement on a new CBA and the launch of free agency will give teams and agents enough time to study the new deal and hammer out individual contracts that balance each player's interests against the team's.

With free agency now expected to launch as 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, there ain't much sand in the egg timer.

We think teams and agents should already have in hand a copy of the new CBA. We predict that they don't. Whenever they get the thing, they should spend the bulk of the next two days reading and re-reading it in search of language that could be used to their benefit in hammering out contracts.

In our view, it would have made far more sense to push the launch of free agency back a week or so. But the reality is that plenty of players have been waiting for six days now to hit the market, and that the players (and most of the agents) are far more interested in getting deals done than in ensuring that the deals get done right.

Speaking of getting deals done in lieu of getting them done right, several readers have asked whether the CBA extension will permit guys like Seattle running back Shaun Alexander to adjust recently-signed contracts.

A deal is a deal. So unless the contract contains language either voiding it in the event of a new CBA or setting forth a different pay structure if the CBA is extended, Alexander and any other guy who has signed a contract in the past few days is in the same boat as the players who signed contracts in 2005 or earlier covering the 2006 season and beyond.

And since the salary cap didn't jump by an enormous amount, our guess is that less players already under contract will step forward and ask for more money in the short term. By the end of the 2006 season, however, NFL teams could see more agents raising the argument that their clients have "outperformed" their contracts, or that their deals need to be adjusted to reflect their value under the new CBA.

If that happens, teams should direct all complaints to the union. The NFLPA could have pushed for guaranteed contracts or other protections against a structure that allows players to be dumped for perceived underperformance, but that prevents them from getting more money if they overperform.

Instead, the union opted to focus on getting the biggest total slice of the pie for the purposes of funding the annual salary cap.

Minutes after the new CBA deal was done, the Pats released LB Willie McGinest; the Browns, Cowboys, and Chargers are expected to look into the possibility of signing him.

Vikings QB Daunte Culpepper says he recently received "an e-mail from management that confirmed for me that they did not see me as the player or person that I see myself." (Apparently, Culpepper bought his bathroom mirror from a local funhouse.)

Wisconsin RB Brian Calhoun improved on disappointing times from the combine with a 4.38 at his pro day workout.

Why did Bills owner Ralph Wilson join with the Bengals in voting against the new CBA? "I didn't understand it. It is a very complicated issue and I didn't believe we should be rushing to vote in 45 minutes. I'm not a dropout . . . or maybe I am. I didn't understand it." (Hey, Ralph -- nice job of dispelling the stereotype that all old people are senile.)

The revenue sharing plan that the owners approved is a hybrid of the two major proposals that were on the table on Wednesday afternoon.

The Redskins have advised C Cory Raymer, S Matt Bowen, CB Walt Harris, and DT Brandon Noble that they won't be back with the team.

With the last capped year thing out of the way, teams can convert roster bonuses into guaranteed money and prorate the cap hit; the 'Skins plan to do this with $13.5 million in roster bonus money that comes due this year.

One of the players who made out the most with the extension to the CBA is Bucs QB Chris Simms, who'll now be eligible for unrestricted free agency in 2007.

Florida DB Dee Webb posted a 4.38 at his pro day workout. (He apparently shaved 0.02 off of his combine time by taking the AK-47 rounds out of his pockets before running.)

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