Philadelphia ? What would happen if football became baseball? If you took a match to the NFL salary cap and allowed teams to spend as much – or as little – as they wanted on their player payroll?

Would Jerry Jones become George Steinbrenner? Would Jeff Lurie morph into David Montgomery? Would small-market teams such as Jacksonville, New Orleans and Kansas City become little more than cannon fodder for the big-spending franchises? Would the league’s “on any given Sunday” motto give way to “never in a million years?”

We might soon find out. After 12 years of warm and fuzzy labor peace, the league and the NFL Players Assn. are at an impasse in their negotiations on a new collective-bargaining agreement. While the current CBA doesn’t expire until after the 2007 season, the final year of the deal will be uncapped if the two sides can’t get an extension done by the end of the 2006 calendar year.

Technically, that still gives them 12 months to work things out. But the union has indicated that if there isn’t a deal in place by March, its inclination will be to walk away from the bargaining table and let the clock run out on the cap.

“I’ve been to 32 teams, and all the players understand where we are. They’re saying, ‘Bring on the uncapped year,'” NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw told the Washington Post last month.

Upshaw long has warned that once the uncapped year kicks in, there is little chance of the union’s agreeing to resurrect it.

“We’ll never get the cap back once it goes away,” he says.

Considering the level of prosperity that both the league and its players have achieved under the current capped system, it’s difficult to believe either side is all that eager to find out what life might be like without a cap.

“Nobody wants to kill this golden goose,” agent Leigh Steinberg says.

Says Chiefs president Carl Peterson: “We have such a good system that has worked well for both sides. Certainly it’s not perfect. Both sides would like to tweak some things. But hopefully, cooler heads will prevail. There’s so much on the table for both sides that it would be folly to throw that away.”

Even with a cap, many teams feel the NFL already is becoming a league of haves and have-nots, with a handful of teams, including the Eagles, able to squeeze tens of millions of dollars more a year in unshared revenue from their stadiums than other teams. If the cap goes bye-bye, teams such as Peterson’s Chiefs, who play in an older stadium in a smaller market, would be at a decided disadvantage against the league’s high-revenue clubs.

“The whole premise of the National Football League has been sharing revenues so that small markets like the Green Bays and the Kansas Citys and the Jacksonvilles can be competitive with the New Yorks and the Chicagos and San Franciscos,” Peterson says.

“I only need to look across our parking lot to our local baseball team (the Royals) to see what can happen (to a small-market team in an uncapped system). They obviously have a tough situation, because their $45 million payroll is supposed to compete with the $200 million payrolls of the Yankees and the Red Sox. That’s very, very hard to do.”