New York ? A few hours after NFL owners voted to continue their standoff with the players union, the league extended its deadline for free agency by three days, putting off what threatened to become a mass purge of high-priced players from rosters.

League vice president Joe Browne announced the delay Thursday afternoon, seven hours before the midnight deadline.

The owners’ vote after a 57-minute meeting earlier in the day had seemed to end 13 years of labor peace between the league and its union.

Browne did not elaborate on the deadline delay, which gives the union 72 more hours to negotiate a contract extension to the labor agreement that could add about $10 million to the current salary cap of $94.5 million. Many teams spent the day scrambling to get under that figure, and a number of big-name players were expected to be cut.

Free agency will now start at 11:01 p.m. CST Sunday.

That move puts off free agency for a class led by two running backs: NFL MVP Shaun Alexander of Seattle and Edgerrin James of Indianapolis. If other players were to be cut because of the salary cap and hit the market, free agents would find fewer buyers and less money available.

The extension came seven hours after commissioner Paul Tagliabue had announced “the situation is as dire as dire can be.” There was a pall around the league as general managers struggled to find cap room and agents tried to figure out how to sell clients in a market with less money and a potential glut of players.

In fact, the owners’ meeting was so short that a lot of people who expected a 12-hour session arrived after most of the owners had departed the New York hotel where they met, braving a mix of ice and snow to try to get home quickly. It was thought at the time to be a strange rubber stamp by owners who had flown to New York from around the country.

The extension rekindled hope amid the rhetoric.

“I won’t come down,” Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Assn., said when hearing of the owners’ morning action. “The players know that. Only the owners can make a proposal.”

Upshaw and the union are asking for 60 percent of league revenue for players, four percentage points more than the owners are offering.

There are two years left on the labor agreement first signed in 1993 and extended continually before the deadline.

But unless there is an agreement, there will be no salary cap in 2007, which could create big-spending “haves” and low-revenue “have-nots,” a situation that has prevailed in other sports such as baseball. That also has traps for teams and players: a player would be eligible for free agency only after six years instead of the current four; there would be no salary minimum, and annual raises would be limited to 30 percent.

That is complicated by an internal dispute over revenue sharing between big- and small-money teams, a battle that has accelerated as outside revenue has increased from sources from stadium naming rights to local radio. That money is expected to be included in the new labor contract for the first time.